Both of us at CauseScience have been extremely busy lately… so busy that we haven’t had time for our CauseScience Friday posts! So today, we’ll give a little taste of what we’ve been up to lately:

FIRST – TAKE THIS SURVEY and help us do SCIENCE!!! 

Crestwind24– I have previously posted about imaging of a really cool neuron in male C. elegans, as well as ablating it (killing it) and seeing what happened to the behavior of the worms. Now that I have a better idea of what that neuron does, I can test its function on behavior more finely. Today I am doing an experiment using a drug that causes accumulation of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the synapse, aldicarb. Using this drug, I can test the neurons function in a behavior that requires acetylcholine signaling! I am testing aldicarb on normal worms, as well as on worms that I ablated the neuron. To do this, I put the drug on the plates that the worms crawl around on, then time how long it takes for the worms to perform the behavior I am testing!!

pgurel– As you may recall, I’ve been doing Cryo-EM to look at the structure of actin filaments. After collecting several images of my sample, to obtain a structure, a LOT of processing and refinement of the images must be done. This takes several days to do, but in the end, you (hopefully) get a nice 3D reconstruction of your sample, in my case, actin. Basically, I’ve been sitting in front of my computer for several days, and apart from my screen looking like a war zone, you can see my 3D reconstruction on the right side in purple!

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