Where's Meldo?

I may not be wearing red and white stripes but I look dorky in my own way.
http://www.uchsc.edu/immuno/

Low Blood Sugar

I played soccer today with Bryan, Shawn, and Jenny and the rest of my team: Celluloid Apocalypse. My thoughts on our team name are quite profound. It sucks. My suggestion was "I love lamp," which I thought was catchy and humerous. I can't even take credit for this overruled suggestion being that it was the name of a previous indoor team I used to play on. I guess I could have suggested Gubernaculum, another previous bui team name, but the non-med-students crowd probably wouldn't have appreciated the humor of being represented by the ligament that pulls the testis down into the scrotum. Not that humor seemed to be an advantage considering the dark bent my fellow soccer players seem to prefer.

We went through Sports Monster and they set it up. One of my team mates is from Grand Haven and graduated in 2002. Such a small world. He scored our only goal.

I played very well but needed to take 3 puffs total from my stupid white inhaler. We still lost 1-2.

-the end.

Dr. Berta

Your Scholastic Strength Is Evaluating

You are great at looking at many details and putting them all together. You are talented at detecting subtle trends, accuracy, and managing change. You should major in: Statistics Speech Conflict studies Communication Finance Medicine

What Should You Major In?

Apparently I should publish an epidemiological study in JAMA about how what people say to eachother when fighting about money affects their relationship.

I am Berta.

You Are Bert

Extremely serious and a little eccentric, people find you loveable - even if you don't love them! You are usually feeling: Logical - you rarely let your emotions rule you You are famous for: Being smart, a total neat freak, and maybe just a little evil How you life your life: With passion, even if your odd passions (like bottle caps and pigeons) are baffling to others

The Sesame Street Personality Quiz

Vicious video game war

The other day I went up a flight of stairs to see what Bebo was up to directly above my head all day. Turns out he was playing Diamond Mine. I watched him play a game which he quickly proceeded to lose with only about 400 points at which point he informs me that he's gotten over three THOUSAND points and wasn't that impressive. So I asked if I could play and got 7500 points on my first try and went back downstairs to work. The next day I recieved an email entitled "ha ha!" with a pdf entitled "Take That!." Bebo had racked up a formidable 8545 points and was rubbing it in my face. Who does that!? Well the answer my dear family, is me. Unbeknownst to Bebo I had just completed one D.M. quick loss and one D.M. not so quick loss and had already snapped a pic of my score for future gloating purposes. Well the future was ahead of schedule and with my proof already downloaded I immediately replied to "ha ha!" with "Re:ha ha!" and attached a jpg of "in your face."

Vicious Cuteness Puppy War

So on Sunday Bebo and I actually went to the gym. After that I made him take me to the mall to look at these adorable puppies and then to the movies. We went to the gym again yesterday and I'm already 12x more in shape than I was. It isn't looking good for today though cause my friend Heidi is leaving for a year to South America and the girls are getting together for a going away dinner so no gym tonight unless somehow I pull it together late night. Here are those puppies I was talking about. None of them stood out enough for me to buy one but I though the tail biter and bitee were quite cute...

"I like rice when I'm really hungry and I want two-thousand of something."

Las Kalamayork Park, New MichiVado

Sept 16th I am supposed to be in Estes Park, CO, Las Vegas, NV, New York, NY, and Kalamazoo, MI. Unfortunately, I will only be able to occupy one location that weekend.

Perpetual Pipetting

Well, Mommy and Randy left and now my planned summer visitors list has been completed. I think I must be sad about it cause I've felt like crap all day and have a headache. Either that or I'm having a delayed hang-over/sugar crash from numerous wine and ice-cream drinks. I need to turn in a abstract for the Tumor Immunotherapy Conference by the end of the week so I'm trying to get some results so I look like I've actually acomplished something. Gonna be a late night...

Scientific MADLIBS

Randy has requested a scientific blog next so I’ll explain my BIG FAT experiment in 20 sentences.

--Names and places have been changed to protect the innocent.

1. I am conducting pre-clinical testing of vaccinations for the prevention of escape mutant induced MOMMY resistance. 2. There are three mutations I am going to vaccinate against, THEO, AIDAN, and JOEL point mutations. 3. The THEO mutation changes the P-loop domain of the MEGAN kinase on KARA so that MOMMY no longer binds. 4. The AIDAN mutation is the worstest mutation due to the fact that it not only confers resistance to MOMMY but also to all second and third generation small molecule KARA kinase inhibitors that have been developed to date. 5. The JOEL mutation changes the amino acid in the LEANNE domain necessary for self-inhibitory binding to the PONCHO therefore preventing the KARA protein from taking on the inactive state required for MOMMY binding. 6. The vaccine will eventually consist of about 400 amino acids of the JASON, LEANNE and PONCHO of KARA that has been mutated to encode the three MOMMY escape mutations mentioned above. 7. The human and mouse MEGAN orthologs of this region differ at two amino acids which must be mutated to conform to the mouse ortholog in order to prevent confounding immunization in mice against the human and thus foreign form of the protein. 8. I have succeeded in subcloning the JASON, LEANNE, PONCHO of KARA from the MSCV expression vector into the smaller pBlueScript vector for QuikChange mutagenesis. 9. Each of the five necessary mutations has been produced and sequential mutatgenesis is underway to create a construct containing all five mutations. 10. Once this has been accomplished the construct will be sent to CHRISTINA for production of the yeast-based vaccine, which has been dubbed RANDY for RANDY. 11. CHRISTINA calls their yeast-based vaccines BEBO. 12. Until this vaccine is made I am using peptide based vaccines to determine whether mice possess functional T cells specific for any of the three escape mutant epitopes we are interested in. 13. So far I have immunized 28 mice with either of two AIDAN nine amino acid peptides or a MELANIE junctional (JCN) control. 14. Several of the mice died after the booster injection of peptide for reasons that are under investigation. 15. Some of the remaining mice are currently being challenged with either target peptide or irrelevant peptide in vivo. 16. The results for these CTL assays will be available tomorrow afternoon. 17. T cells from the remainder of the mice will be assayed for epitope-specific cytolytic activity in vitro on Monday. 18. QuikChange mutatgenesis is also being conducted to produce expression vectors carrying the escape mutations so that leukemic cells carrying KARA MOMMY escape mutations can be used as target cells in CTL assays. 19. Kavita is my rotation student and has assisted with many of these experiments. 20. She also does not wish harm to the little mousies and would probably have used the sticky paper but wouldn’t have suffocated them cause she can barely touch one without jumping 12 feet so I have to catch them all for her and do anything that has to do with live little mousies. –The End

14er #3