I am so smart-- SMRT... I mean SMART

Lots of things happening this week. Splinter was perfecting her photography skills, I was perfecting my standing around looking pretty skills, and I got a GRANT!

So we will start off with the grant. I was able to get the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Bioscience Grant for laboratory-based biomedical research. This is really great because if I am planning to do Tissue Engineering for grad school and chuck the physics (well, just not major in physics), so it will be great to put on an application for a school that does a lot of medical research... like say... hmmm.... Johns Hopkins! I am really psyched about this grant, cause Rachael and I are used to being turned down on achievements like this so its fun to finally feel that accomplishment. The only downer is that other people are used to it so they just look at you funny when you are celebrating. So with this grant comes some extra responsiblity, but because I am taking an EBIO writing class I'll probably have my entire paper for this project done by the end of this semster, much earlier than when it is actually due. And since we are pretty much prepping for publication already, I don't think there will be much of a problem coming up with really cool things to write about.

Next! So about this publication thing. Right now we are in the process of verifying all of our data, which means Rachael is taking a lot of pictures of our cells on the big expensive confocal microscope, while I am off preparing samples for photography and other testing. Last week we prepared for immuno testing, which was when I ended up fixing up the Anseth deli slicer. Those will be ready for imaging monday, and hopefully we will get some good pictures out of that, it took enough time to get the stuff ready!

Friday, was very disappointing because the samples we were going to use for florecent tests didn't come out right, and we don't know why. We have some ideas, I personally think that I screwed the polymer up last week when I forgot to put it back in the fridge after I had used it, Rachael remains adimant that such a situation would not effect the polymerization. The next idea is that our fibrinogen is bad, which would suck! Lastly, our mixing method was off... who knows, it took for freaking ever so and I was all pissy when we were doing it, I don't look forward to doing it again.

So we are going full steam ahead with publication, and rightly so, because if we got what we THINK we got, a crap ton of neurites growing in microchannels we made! We are really excited because if this is true, we made a BIG leap in our research and thus making treatment of NDD's a nearer possibilty. YAY!

Andy