Kelley Bromley

Well, I’ve made it home from the hospital - I still don’t feel 100%, so I’m trying to take it easy until my checkup on Monday. Mostly I just feel very tired and weak, heh, but I guess that’s what a bad infection and nothing but liquids for 5 days does to you, huh? Lionel says we can have sushi tonight, which is cool, but I still don’t have much of an appetite. Yesterday I was pretty hungry, but today not so much. Now a marshmallow peep… maybe I will find one of those :)

Anyway… I was supposed to present a poster with Bin at the Psychiatry Research Day tomorrow. I was hoping I could talk with him today for a little while to work out the poster, but I was just talking to him and he doesn’t think we have enough time now, and he wants to redo the analysis of our wildtype mouse data anyway. It kinda sucks because I wanted to get the poster on my CV… even though I really wasn’t really feeling up to doing it, I’m stubborn, so I was hoping there would be a way, but at the same time, hoping I didn’t have to. Usually at those things you have to stand up the whole time, but I was thinking I could haul a chair down and sit on that instead, heh. Anyway, I’ve emailed the organizer and Dr. Song to explain that we wouldn’t make it. Maybe next time.

In our lab we have water baths to warm stuff up or incubate tubes in. We also have one in our indirect heat climate-controlled incubator. Anyway, every now and then the water is replaced and we squirt this anti-microbial goop in so it doesn’t go all funky on us. Well, Shin, our trusty undergrad, cleaned out both water baths in the cell culture room and every time I open the cover or incubator door I just love the smell! I dunno if we got a different chemical to put in it or if he just put way too much in, but that stuff is like aromatherapy! I can’t even describe it… it’s sweet and kind of fruity, maybe like cherries, but not fresh cherries, more like cherries would smell if they were cooked in mom’s cherry cake and someone poured raspberry sauce all over the top of it while it was still warm so the cake would heat the raspberry sauce and make it smell stronger, and then that smell mixed with the smell of the hot cherry cake. It smells so good I just had to write about it, lol. I can see the perfume on the market now - “Eau de bain d’eau” LOL.

More specifically, a functional MRI. I signed up for a study way back in September/October and Chris finally called for a subject! I had to memorize a bunch of faces then identify them in the scanner, but I used their hair as a distinguishing feature - eg, bald, fro, etc. When I was in the scanner all I saw was their eyes nose and mouth! They cut off the hair! And they flashed the images for only milliseconds… it was so hard They can see which parts of my brain are working by measuring the blood flow in almost real-time (there is a lag of a few seconds).

In another part of the scan I had to say whether a face was repeated, but when they explained it I thought they would flash a picture, then another picture, then I would say if it was the same or not, but about 3 minutes into it I realized that each picture had to be compared to the one before it. They must have noticed that I was only responding to every second picture instead of every picture but they didn’t say anything *sigh*. Anyway, I redid that section after I pushed the bell for them to stop and confirmed the proper instructions =|

Overall I came out feeling pretty stupid, heh. I had to say if the people were the same identity but they would have different expressions and were flashed so quickly so it was hard to answer properly because these were strangers’ faces. In another you just had to say if they were the same expression, and while surprise and happiness are easily distinguishable from anger, disgust and anger look pretty darn similar when they’re flashed at you at millisecond intervals and you have to keep answering quickly to move to the next question! Ack!

Anyway, both Lionel and I survived, despite having to wear some questionable hospital PJs, and we’ll be paid $20. What I was looking forward to the most though was an image of our brains on CD! Unfortunately their CD burner wasn’t working so Chris is going to stop by with it later

I put some pictures from my Montreal trip for the Summer Program in Aging on my website. I have so much to write about the trip but so little time to do it… but at least the pictures are up! I highly recommend looking at the Notre Dame Bascillica pictures, and the pictures from Mount Royal are also tres cool! (Get it? “Tres” cool? ;) )

Well, today was rough. Tried to get up to go into work early, set the alarm for 7:15am, but just couldn’t get up… I was exhausted. Last night I spent 3.5 hours doing laundry and hanging it up and folding…. ugh! Six loads of laundry in the washer and 4 dryer loads! But now everything we own is clean and the towels are fluffy…. and I’ve finished the sixth book of the Wheel of Time :D

It wouldn’t have mattered had I gone in early anyway because I didn’t want to risk sing my EDTA to do sequencing again because my sequencing didn’t work last time, so I was going to borrow Weihui’s, but he doesn’t get in until 9am. I finished up the sequencing around 10:45am and head over to NAPS to run. I should have the results tomorrow… this is my last opportunity to try to get the promoter region sequence in time to submit an abstract to the SFN conference! Hopefully it works, I was very careful! In the Monday afternoon lab meeting I was told some ideas for primers, I designed them on Monday, they were done on Wednesday afternoon and I ran the sequencing PCR overnight, and then today I finished it up *crosses fingers*

It was a long day though… I didn’t sign up fast enough for the PCR machine, so I had to run my samples from 1:30 to 4pm, then start the gel extraction, which took me until 7pm. I’ve got the digest started, so tomorrow I can purify it and ligate, on Saturday I can transform the E. coli, screen the clones on Sunday, and on Monday I can have the miniprep done VERY EARLY, like be in the lab by 6am, heh… and I’ll have the data in time. What a rush!

I had the last part of my Chemical Safety training today, which involved a practical session at the fire hall! First we got dressed up in lab coats, goggles, gas masks with cartridges (they’re a lot easier to breathe in than I thought! So much better than those flimsy carpenter ones!), rubber boots, and rubber gloves which were duct taped to out lab coats 8) Then we walked through this “entry area” which was a “quarantined” orange tarp on the ground. I was in a team of three and we went to the spill, one team mate removed the glass bottle which said it was hydrochloric acid, I surrounded the spill with kitty litter, our other team mate checked the spill with pH paper and it was actually basic. I got the SpillX-C, we all agreed that would neutralize it, a partner sprinkled it on, I mixed it up with a spatula to neutralize it, another team mate checked the pH again and we were good! Then we mixed the kitty little with the spill to absorb it all and put it in the garbage. Then we went through “decon” and got in this rubber tube and had our hands and feet scrubbed. We went to the end of the tarp and took our boots off so they stayed on the tarp, and we walked in our socks on the edge of the tarp. A volunteer than removed the tape from our lab coats and we inched the gloves of so we wouldn’t touch them and left them in the “contaminated” area, aka, the tarp. Overall it was pretty cool!

Then came the fun part - fighting fires :D They trained us on the different types of fire extinguishers, then took us out back where they had a drum full of water and they poured gas on top and lit it, and we had to put the fire out with an ABC chemical extinguisher, just like the one I have at home. I got it out! Wooo! We got to feel the powder that came out and it was more fine than flour. It coats the surface and smothers the flames. SOOO COOL!!! :D

Well, I just got an email saying the administrative body at UBC for interdisciplinary studies (of which neuroscience is one) is changing. See, right now we’re going by the Faculty of Grad Studies degree requirements, which I loved because last September they changed the course requirements for PhD from 18 credits to 12 credits. On Monday there will be a meeting on how the change will affect us…. I’ve RSVPed and I’m going to make the point that should course requirements be affected, I think they should only affect incoming students, and students already in the program should continue with their plans. More than likely this will be the case anyway, at least it was the same at MUN. Otherwise, I mean, you could start getting 4th year students having to take classes when they’re almost done! For example, in my undergrad degree, the requirements were tweaked every year but whatever was in place when I started is what governed my degree. I’m still a bit worried though. Right now the new interdisciplinary committee is “as of yet undetermined” and they’re taking student feedback - they’ll probably just stick with the same outline as the Faculty of Grad studies for the first little while anyway. More info on Monday!

Figured I’d post since I haven’t in awhile. Things have been going fairly slowly here for the past week - lab work has been slow because my primers weren’t ordered when Ke put the order in, so I ordered them on Monday and they should be here by tomorrow. In the meantime I’ve been working on the paper Xiulian and I are writing about BACE1 and BACE2. I think it’s going well. She originally did her part in endnote and word and I had a bit of difficulty converting her referencing system to mine so I could use Bibtex, but now that I have that all figured out things are going a little smoother. I just can’t stand the fact that it can take so long to do simple formatting things in bibtex/LaTex the first time you have to figure them out… I just hope people don’t think I’m slow because I’m so slow working on actual content, heh. The next time I have to use the endnote references from one of the lab poeple though it should be relatively easy to convert the file to bibtex, but for now I mostly just have the structure down and the flow of her writing changed, with some of my NRSC 500 CIHR grant intro mixed in. I think it’s going to be a long week… this week’s lab meeting was cancelled, which is good since I don’t have much data cause I didn’t get my primers, so this week I’ll hopefully get some data results and have the paper completed by Monday.

The Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (MSFHR) had a news conference today and invited all the winners of the 2006 competition to attend. They had a nice selection of fruits available to snack on in the waiting room while the speeches were played over the speakers, but mostly everyone just chatted while we waited for our big debut. I stuck around with Tiffany and Andrew from the Rankin lab. We tried a dragon fruit, which can be seen on the picture to the left. Tiffany and I tried it on the count of three, and it kind of tasted like a weakly flavoured kiwi, but was slimier, like a soft cantaloupe. I wouldn’t pay the $8 they want for them at Safeway, but at least we could try it for free :)

Our big debut came at the end of the speech, at which we entered the tiered classroom from above and from both sides, and we met an applause. That was about it. Then we left. Very odd indeed, but we did get free MSFHR travel mugs, LOL.

On the way to the bus with Andrew and Tiffany I found out that the BRC was training for a 10k run - I thought this was a great idea! While I won’t be fit enough to compete in the one in May, there is a 10k in July to raise funds for Prostate Cancer, so Lionel and I are going to start training for it :D

…I emerge unscathed! Exams are over, and freedom has come! Sort of, LOL. I have to start working on a review with Xiulian, and with the lab work that most likely means in the evenings, and I’m still not quite ready to do school-like work just yet. My exam finished on April 7th, and the CIHR was due April 3rd, which meant 2 weeks before that were pretty much constant work. Now just the thought of researching that heavily again is gut wrenching, heh. I think I had something like 115 references. Just looking at PubMed right now makes me shiver, lol. I’m going to go back and fill in some entries I’ve been meaning to write up, and hopefully I’ll keep things semi-updated from now on :)