Torfinn Nome - Life as a …

My thesis is scheduled to begin in August, but I’m already planning on starting slowly this winter. This autumn I’ve been studying mathematical statistics, molecular biology, protein chemistry, and molecular genome analysis. I’m slightly ahead of my original plan, meaning I will only apply to one course this spring (chromatography), and one intensive course next August (immunology). I need to figure out what techniques I really want to learn, and have already started reading relevant papers, including the ph.d. thesis of my supervisor Gustav Vaaje-Kolstad. His work includes a paper characterising the protein CBP21 from Serratia marcescens, a protein “opening” the structure of the tightly packed chitin, assisting the chitinase degradation. The paper was made Paper of The Week in the Journal of Biological Chemistry: “Chitinase’s Little Helper“. My plan is to work on other related proteins, see if I can find more proteins involved in similar activities. So there will be a lot of protein chemistry activity, hopefully involving scanning electron microscopy, x-ray, nmr, etc. I will also focus on the bioinformatics tools available, as I know that will come in handy.

The last few weeks have been rather busy. I finished all my exams (and they went better than I would have believed only a few weeks ago, thanks, Maje!), and now I’m back at my parents in the town of Fredrikstad.

My grand mother (Mormor) passed away last week. The funeral will be next Thursday, with plenty of family members staying over. I’m looking forward to seeing them all, even tho I certainly wish it would have been in a happier setting. But in times like this it will be nice to be together. This Christmas will definitely be different.

UMB (my uni) has frequently been quoted in the news lately, mostly because of a new initative named “Biomotive“. My group is activly involed in this consortium. One of the things being studied is how to more effectivly degrade cellulosis for producing ethanol for use as biofuel.

Other news:
I manage to import my old blog entries. Hurray, they were not lost after all. But I didn’t bother to make them all public, as I never intended my blog to ever be public. I just needed a place to write my rants.

So. After a couple of years without a public blog, I’m back. My main focus these days is my life as as a student. So expect rants and joys from my life trying to finish my MSc in Biotechnology.