After a lot of back and forth a project that I participated in when I first began graduate school was published online today at Nature Methods. I had worked in a worm lab for 2 and half years before coming here and right off the bat I was back in another. This time I wasn't working with an interesting worm behavior, but rather with worm development in the Waterston lab. It was a real change and I never fully understood it, but I was able to generate terabytes worth of image data that everyone seemed to be happy with. This was a great project for me for a couple of reasons.
1 - The movies of worm development that we made are really remarkable. Essentially the Waterston lab has developed a method for fluorescently labeling the nuclei of every cell in a developing worm embryo. Then using a very expensive and fancy microscope with lasers they are able to film the developing worms starting at just the 2-4 cell stage all the way to about 300 cells. You can take a look at the movies here and then clicking on the "lineaging" link on the left. I made these movies everyday for a couple of months. Specifically I made movies testing a second fluorescence. So the nuclei are labeled green, but they introduced a second "red" fluorescence (red just happens to be my favorite color) to specific gene promoters. This means that when the cell begins to express that specific gene red signal is given off. This allows you to trace specific gene expression throughout development (some of the specific results from my movies are in figure 3 I think). It is really pretty amazing and cool to watch.
2 - Its in a Nature journal which I am told is nice.
2 - Its in a Nature journal which I am told is nice.
3 - Working in this lab gave me a chance to work with Bob Waterston (and other great students and postdocs). Here is Bob:
Bob is not only the head of my department (and quite honestly I can't imagine a better man for the job or anyone doing a much better job), but he also happens to be an incredible scientist who has played a major role in advancing genetics and especially genomics. Bob was a leader in the Human Genome Sequencing Project (and other sequencing projects) and his expertise has been invaluable to science I think both in terms of his intellectual abilities and his leadership skills. And now I am on a published paper with him. Sorry Bob. There's no erasing that now (I think). I am told that this makes my Erdös number remarkable small, maybe even smaller than my mathematician brother. Take that Jefe!
Not only is Bob a very accomplished scientist, but he can also be rendered flawlessly as a Simpsons character.
Seriously I challenge you to find someone who you can make as a Simpson character and have it not only look like a perfect characicature of the person, but also look like they fit into the Simpsons so perfectly. So you can see why I am so excited to be on a paper with this man.
In reality this is a nice bonus. I was in the right place at the right time. Nothing more than that. My expertise or abilities added very little to this project, but nevertheless it is nice to have snuck onto it. Thank you Waterston lab! This is definitely my favorite way to publish papers; with almost everyone else doing more of the work.
2 comments:
Congrats on getting published. The videos are way cool. I recommend watching then to Pink Floyd (Waiting For the Worms anyone?). Who needs Acid? I’m jealous that you have a finite Erdos number. No one expects to get one in my field though I have been working on some law and economics papers with an economist here so you never know. I wonder why Lawyers don’t have an Oliver Wendell Holmes number of a Learned Hand number, or even an Anton Scalia number. I guess we just care about the money. By the way I have a Learned Hand number of three, I was the research assistant to the research assistant of his research assistant.
Nice recommendation on the Pink Floyd. I'm totally bragging up my Erdos number as much as I can now. I had to Google Learned Hand to figure out who he was, but thats pretty good too.
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