The Democratic Coallition
August 30th, 2008 ecoli
a science and medicine related weblog from scienceforums.net
Blame Canada
August 29th, 2008 ecoliThese anti-vaccination people are getting ridiculous.
Fnugg
August 27th, 2008 ecoliUnique style of Tube playing. I wonder if this works on the trumpet as well.
I’m a liar
August 8th, 2008 ecoliRemember how I said I’d be posting more because I was finished with my exam? Well that was a lie. I’m actually going on vacation for the next two weeks.
Next week I’m heading up to Rock Hill, New York, for the Eastern European Folklife’s Center Balkan Music and Dance Workshop.
The week after that I’m going up to Montreal’s Laurentian Mountains to participate in KlezKanada, a weeklong Jewish Music and Yiddish Culture workshop.
The next couple of weeks are going to be filled with a lot of eastern european music.
Capsaicin
August 8th, 2008 ecoliLast night I was cutting up some of my homegrown Serrano chilies. I made a pretty good salsa with them (thanks to iNow for the recipe). However, I wasn’t prepared for the extreme heat of the peppers. I bit into one and my mouth almost literally caught on fire. I ignored the pain though and finished the salsa. About an hour later my hand started to burn and no amount of soap and water would significantly reduce the pain. As of right now, I’m still feeling it.
Being the naturally curious person, I wanted to find out more about why my hand felt like it was being knawed on by a million angry Gremlins.
Enter Capsaicins, the active ingrediant of the spicy heat of chilis:
Its a hydrophobic compound (which would explain why the water didn’t help) colorless and odorless but certainly not tasteless. It’s also an irritant for all mammals. Capsaicin is the most abundant of the capsaicinoid molecules found in chili peppers. The structure was first defined in 1919 by E. K. Nelson.
The capsaicins are found most abundantly in the placental tissue of the fruit. That is mainly the inner membranes and the white tissue holding the seeds, known as the pith, but not actually in the seeds themselves and in small amounts in the outer skin. Birds, which lack capsaicin receptors eat chilies and distribute their seeds after they pass safely through their digestive tracts.
In diluted form, the capsaicins are great for food, but can cause burning sensations when exposed in high concentrations to mucus membranes and skin, as I have discovered. The Scoville scale is a relative measure of how hot a pepper is, on the basis of perception. To demonstrate the scale, a bell pepper would get a zero rating, jalapenos are 2500-8000 (I assume non-pickled). My serranos would be rated around 10000 to 23000 and habeneros are 100000 to 350000. The Dorset Naga (yes grown in Dorset, England) tops the scales at 876,000 to 970,000. Nothing beats pure capsaicin, however, which weighs in at a hefty 15000000 on the Scoville scale.
So why do these capsaicins hurt so much? Its because they interact with sensory neurons. Capsaicins bind to vanilloid receptor subtype 1, an ion channel receptor which can also, incidently be stimulated by heat and abrasions. When opened, the channels allow calcium cations to pass through, depolarizing the cell membrane potential. From here, the electrical signal propogates down the neuron and is percieved ultimately in the brain.
So the reason why chilies make you feel like your toungue or hands are on fire, is because that’s exactly how your brain intepretes the neuronal signals. Of course, you know that there’s no actual heat present but, in this case perception is reality. Its nice to know that, while it may feel like you tounge is going to fall off, the capsaicins probably won’t cause real physical damage. However, it is an irritant, so injesting a large amount can be reasonto call the poison control center.
On the plus side, capsaicinoids have been useful in medicine, from treating topical pain in neuropathy to treating cancers and diabetes. Capsaicins can be a part of a healthy diet, as shown in epidemiological studies. Regions, such as Thailand, which use a healthy amount of chilies in their cooking have lower incidence of GI cancers. Capsaicins have been shown to promote apoptosis in lung cancer cells. New research also suggests that capsaicins could help reduce drug dependency.
So chilies taste good and are good for you, as long as you don’t over-ingest.
I can’t wait to go home and try my hot salsa.
It’s a about time
August 8th, 2008 ecoliHere’s another update on my research. My boss decided that I should stop playing around with bacterial cloning and actually get to the meat of the experiment. I’m finally doing those overlay assays I’ve been talking about for the last year.
In a nutshell, it’s running proteins on a gel, overlaying other proteins on top of them, and seeing what sticks. It’ll show us what proteins in the CS1 pilus system bind together. The purpose it to determine the binding order and assembly mechanism. Wish me luck.
what the ‘Anthrax scare’ means for scientists
August 7th, 2008 ecoliThis story has been big in the news lately. As you probably have already heard, the person who sent anthrax spores (Bacillus anthracis) through the mail has commited suicide. The culprit is army scientist Bruce Ivins.
Ivins worked with Anthrax in order to develop a vaccine, so one might think this is hypocritical to his work. However, current investigations lead us to beleive that Ivins was psychologically disturbed. Prosecuters speculate that Ivins was hoping to incense the public awareness of anthrax and hopefully get more funding. I guess scientists will go a long way to get research grants these days, but this is a new low.
My concern is how this event will ultimately change things for microbiologists and infectious disease researchers (a community I consider myself a part of). My lab doesn’t have anthrax, but we do have plenty of other deadly infectious diseases like Francisella tulerensis (tularemia), Yersinia pestis (bubonic plauge) and Borellia (Lyme’s disease).
Will researchers now have to get psych evals before we’re allowed to work with pathogens? Are intitutions going to tighten security, make us take even more safety classes, hire guards to check bags and not let us work alone? I hate to be the one to point this out, but it wouldn’t be exactly difficult to take pathogens out of the lab and even undergrads are given keys to the labs.
I have to sacrifice ease of access for security, but maybe the risks aren’t worth it? It just takes one incident to ruin it for the rest of us.
Perhaps (and hopefully) I’m wrong, and this will blow over as a unique incident, but it wouldn’t surprise me if universities, national and armed forces labs will at least start to discuss greater security measures.
MCAT over
August 5th, 2008 ecoliNow that I got that bit of unpleasentness out of the way, I will hopefully have more time for my poorly underused blog.
The actual test wasn’t too bad, and I actually was able to have some fun with it. Especially on the verbal and writing sections. There was a passage on Libertarianism philosophy, centered around natural rights and property, so that was right up my alley.
I also got to write an entire essay extolling the virtues of free market captilism (so it was just like the stuff I write about on my own).
All in all it was a hell-ish experience. I had to take a 5 hour exam on 3 hours of sleep, but hopefully my score is good enough so I don’t have to repeat it.
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