Well, goal failed. I went home and watched Parks and Rec rather than run a 10k. To my slight credit, over the course of yesterday I grew progressively sicker with what seems like the common cold that by the time I arrived at home, I could barely breathe through all the phlegm and snot. I think the illness was precipitated by my chronic insomnia, and a more acute bout of unrest due to data analysis of experiment mentioned yesterday.

I don't really have the time or proper mood to be insightful at the moment, I just felt that a lull in my schedule allowed me to force myself to write again. Ding, email.

TTACTGAGCTAGAAACATA

Information requires context to make sense. This is the entire body of an email I've been waiting on, which provides me a discrete and important piece of information I've needed in order to proceed with one of my tasks today. Now, how you might read this information depends on a few factors: 1. Level of education in biology, particularly metazoan molecular genetics. B. How much attention you're paying. And Finally. How much effort you would be willing to invest in order to discover the meaning of this information.

I would make it through probably 1.5 of those factors if I were reading this. So, if you had high school biology, or maybe even middle school, you would recognize the letters this information is composed of to be those representing the 4 DNA nucleotides, implying that this is likely a short DNA sequence. Now if you were paying attention, you would notice this sequence is 19 bases long. If you had upper level undergraduate or graduate level knowledge of molecular biology, you would likely recognize that that is the proper length to be the target sequence for a small interfering RNA molecule, or siRNA as they are referred to. It could also potentially be a target sequence for a microRNA, but it would be hard to differentiate the two based just on seeing that 19 base sequence. Mind you, this will be the target sequence, not the sequence of the RNA molecule because of the presence of the T, rather than U. Now, if you had way too much time on your hands(which this posting implies incorrectly that I do), you could punch in that sequence into the NCBI Blast algorithm and discover that it corresponded to a sequence contained within the 3' untranslated region of SMARCA5, a SWI/SNF type chromatin remodeling factor in humans. Now, if you had Sherlock Holmes level skills of deduction, you would no doubt come to the conclusion that the only reason I would want this information was in order to design a new siRNA to target this gene, because the one I had been using had been resulting in too much off target activity, causing a phenotype in cells that was not reversible by a stable cell line that expresses SMARCA5 minus its 3' UTR, and needed a second oligo to confirm the phenotype I am studying.

Nerd.

Well, this post was pointless, maybe I'll actually write something I care about later.

Mood: Avoidant/Nerdy

Music: Born this Way (lord friggin help me, I never used to listen to Top 40)

Reading: Rap80-directed tuning of BRCA1 homologous recombination function at ionizing radiation-induced nuclear foci

Goal: Survive the day/play squuaaash...?