Torfinn Nome - Life as a …

Walking home today, oblivious to the rest of the world (or pretending to be) , hidden in my sphere of in-ear plugs and music, my playlist finally reached the Passengers track “Your Blue Room”. It’s been a while since last time. But it happens everytime, strong as no other tune: I’m back in 1995. In Fredrikstad. I sit in a dark room. Extremely dirty and dusty. With buzzing computers all around me. Blinking lights from numerous modems and hard drives the only source of light. Glenn in front of his monster monitor and monster computer, named Mother (as the starship). Joakim and Daniel programming. HP complaining about living outside the city, in Rolvsøy, with poor bus connections, far away from this room with it’s dedicated Internet connection. And me cursing the hellish sendmail.cf syntax. Us trying to run an ISP. In a time when only a few had even heard the word Internet. With the Passengers album running on repeat…

You have probably heard the phrase functional food. In Norway, the government have quite strict rules of what modifications are allowed to food and beverage. I don’t know the details, but so far I’ve only seen orange juice with artificially added calcium, milk with vitamin D, yoghurt with the probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG (LGG), etc.

One of my colleagues in the protein engineering lab, our resident super star (as in music), Lasse Fredriksen, is taking this a step further. His master thesis will aim towards finding a way to use one of these lactobacillus bacteria as vaccine carriers to our intestines, where our immune system will create antibodies, hopefully giving us immune resistance to the specified disease. And all you ladies out there, the vaccine he will try to incorporate is against the HPV type 16! (Associcated with cervical cancer.) Interesting stuff. I’m sure the future will bring loads of these specialised functional modifications. Maybe even directly linked against your own, personal, genome.

Oh, and btw, check out his band: Sanguine

That is, lack of successfull transformation. I got my colonies on the LB agar, and was happy, everything going on as planned. But, darn, something wasn’t right. Using restriction enzymes to cut the new plasmids, checking if my genes actually had been incorporated, showed … nothing. I’ve spent the last days trying to find out what went wrong. My PCR products seems all right. The plasmid we’re using for transformation has a “suicide” gene which gets transcribed if there is no successful gene incorporation, inhibiting growth. But, I got my colonies, the bacteria did grow. I even tried several different restriction enzymes, and restriction buffers, just to be sure. But, nothing, nada, my gene is not there. Weirdness. I will probably end up doing the transformation from scratch. Albeit I really want to know what went wrong…

I’ve learned a lot these first weeks. And the feeling of being totally lost is gradually fading. Still, talking about green fingers, my head definitely feels green sometimes… Anway. I got the primers. I did PCR. I did gel electrophoresis, isolating the genes I multiplied. Today I started the transformation progress, using the Zero Blunt TOPO technology. Tomorrow I will know if my first GMO (Gene Modified Organism) experiment was successfull or not. And later this week I will know if I actually managed to insert the correct sequence into the E. coli or not. Looking forward to checking out the agar plates tomorrow! My other life: Weekend; at our cabin in Valdres. The weather was absolutely perfect. Blue sky, no wind, -5 celcius. I spent the days enjoying cross country skiing, reading a norwegian classic horror book (”Døde menn går i land”), and listening to the Olympics on the radio.