My first blog

I've never blogged before, but this is an interesting way to start. I am trying to finish of the experiments I need to publish a paper on our work to discover new autophagy inhibitors (autophagy is a process by which cells recycle damaged components). We think that these inhibitors may help treat cancer. But I have been trying to get the final experiments done for this paper for the past month, and I've been having technical problems in the lab with my western blots (a method to measure proteins). Its been really frustrating! I am off to the lab to see if I have solved my problems. Wish me luck.

---

Well the good news it worked! Its hard to explain to readers who have never worked in a lab how frustrating it can sometimes be. I needed just one or two more results to convince myself my results were correct. But those last results were tough to get! Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. First the western blot apparatus developed a leak - that was fixed with glue and Gorilla sticky tape (that's life in an under-funded lab). Then the protein transfer during blotting wasn't great, fixed that, then the background on the images increased (turned out the antibody was dead (well it is at least 6 years old, did I mention we are underfunded?). Then the milk we used to block something called non-specific binding went off. And then two of the gels I was using had cracks in them, which I didn't spot until it was running. Now I appreciate that if you don't do a lot of western blotting these details won't make much sense, but you will hopefully get the picture, things were not working! And like most scientists I know, when things aren't working, I got depressed. I am not religous, but I was beginning to wonder if there really is a God, and for some reason best known to him/her/whatever this deity identifies as, he/she was out to stop me getting my paper published! But I fixed the problem, and I can now send the paper back to the journal to see if the reviewers are happy with what I have done. The paper is about our attempts to develop autophagy inhibitors to treat cancer. I will write another blog about that soon. So whats the message from this story? If you think science is a logical bland process, dream on, its an emotional rollercoaster!