We have a new preprint out – it is a cautionary tale about using GFP nanobodies in cells. This short post gives a bit of background to the work. Please read the paper if you are interested in using GFP nanobodies in cells, you can find it here. Paper in a nutshell: Caution is needed […]
Category: science
All That Noise: The vesicle packing problem
This week Erick Martins Ratamero and I put up a preprint on vesicle packing. This post is a bit of backstory but please take a look at the paper, it’s very short and simple. The paper started when I wanted to know how many receptors could fit in a clathrin-coated vesicle. Sounds like a simple […]
Small Talk: How big is your lab?
I really dislike being asked “how big is your lab?”. The question usually arises at scientific meetings when you are chatting to someone during a break. Small talk can lead to some banal questions being asked, and that’s fine, but when this question is asked seriously, the person asking really just wants to compare themselves […]
Super Automatic: computer-based tools for research
Since I have now written several posts on this. I thought I would summarise the computer-based tools that we are using in the lab to automate our work and organise ourselves. Electronic lab notebook – there are previous posts from me on picking an ELN platform and how to set up a WordPress ELN as well […]
Ferrous: new paper on FerriTagging proteins in cells
We have a new paper out. It’s not exactly news, because the paper has been up on bioRxiv since December 2016 and hasn’t changed too much. All of the work was done by Nick Clarke when he was a PhD student in the lab. This post is to explain our new paper to a general […]
Pentagrammarspin: why twelve pentagons?
This post has been in my drafts folder for a while. With the World Cup here, it’s time to post it! It’s a rule that a 3D assembly of hexagons must have at least twelve pentagons in order to be a closed polyhedral shape. This post takes a look at why this is true. First, […]
Do It Yourself: Lab Notebook Archiving Project
A while back, the lab moved to an electronic lab notebook (details here and here). One of the drivers for this move was the huge number of hard copy lab note books that had accumulated in the lab over >10 years. Switching to an ELN solved this problem for the future, but didn’t make the […]
Dividing Line: not so simple division in ctenophores
This wonderful movie has repeatedly popped up into my twitter feed. It was taken by Tessa Montague and is available here (tweet is here). The movie is striking because of the way that cytokinesis starts at one side and moves to the other. Most model systems for cell division have symmetrical division. Rob de Bruin […]
Frankly, Mr. Shankly
I read about Antonio Sánchez Chinchón’s clever approach to use the Travelling Salesperson algorithm to generate some math-art in R. The follow up was even nicer in my opinion, Pencil Scribbles. The subject was Boris Karloff as the monster in Frankenstein. I was interested in running the code (available here and here), so I thought I’d […]
Start Me Up: Endocytosis on demand
We have a new paper out. The title is New tools for ‘hot-wiring’ clathrin-mediated endocytosis with temporal and spatial precision. You can read it here. Cells have a plasma membrane which is the barrier between the cell’s interior and the outside world. In order to import material from outside, cells have a special process called […]