Pretty Pictures

Just returned home from a Fulbright-sponsored "Wine & Cheese" (two of the most classic foods for France, and sadly for those who are taking them, two of the foods most classically associated with hypertension crisis due to taking a class of medication called monoamine oxidase inhibitors, a type of antidepressant) reception.

Since I can't think of anything exciting to blog about tonight, how about some pretty pictures from the lab? Here's a peek at what I've been up to: the picture is a sheet of kidney cells which can be grown in "in vitro"--that is, in a tissue culture dish. I've used two different immunofluorescent stains in order to visualize them: the green one stains actin, which makes up the cell's inner skeleton--you can see the green defining the borders between cells in the photo. The second orange stain is against alpha-tubulin, an important component of microtubules, which helps build a structure in the cell called the "basal body"--you can see it as a single orange spot in the center of many of the cells. The basal body helps anchor an organelle called the "primary cilium", a long extension of the cell which juts into the lumen of the tubule (where the urine flows) and which we think is where a lot of the action takes place when the kidney develops.

French words for the day: "la pate". A very versatile word, it can refer to either pasta, or the crust of a pie, or batter used to make, for instance, crepes.