the egg (sorry, no chicken)

I showed this image to my roommate, and this is what he had to say about it:


"It's like a hostage situation at a bank!" ~Mikey

Damn, that egg's effed.

Apart from that, school is kicking my butt. We have 6 exams in the next two weeks. *flail*

It's coo' tho. Whatev.

Apart from THAT...um, I sort of sat in at a seminar during one of my studying "breaks." *oops* It was a lecture on miRNA's by a professor from Stanford Medical School (Dr. Chen). I was fascinated by what he presented about how miRNA's are pretty much more important than a lot of other factors such as gene expression in regulating protein expression. I dunno how much you understand about all of this, but essentially miRNA's are capable of blocking the translation of proteins with the help of a RISC complex, pretty much RIGHT AS a protein could potentially be synthesized. It seems to me, and to Dr. Chen, and other prominent scientists *haha* that if gene expression of a protein is constant resulting in a constant/stable level of mRNA production, inhibition of translation by miRNA's has much greater potential of controlling the final protein output than anything else. In fact, increased miRNA levels have been shown to significantly block important phosphatases involved in the control of T cell receptor signaling in response to an antigen. Thereby, blockage of protein phosphorylation in the signaling cascade leads to gene expression for T cell proliferation and differentiation....to such an extent that numerous tumors have been shown to be induced in the presence of increased miRNA levels! *holy effs!* There was a lot more to be said about miRNA's, much of what I'm too lazy to decipher from the 5 pages of notes I took. But here's an animation I found that might be helpful to visualize what miRNA's do.

Anywho, I think I'm going to make attending such random seminar's "my thing." It utterly ROCKED my world! :D

QOD: "Just as we passed that other lamp I was going to tell you a further thing, Jack, but now I am parenthetically continuing with a new thought and by the time we reach the next I'll return to the original subject, agreed?" I certainly agreed - Kerouac, On the Road