Viewing science with a critical eye
Part of my project this summer involves testing claims put forth by other scientists in another part of the country. I read their papers, and saw how they tackled their problem. Their results made sense to me from what I’ve learned previously (as in the last week) about Spastin (a microtubule severing protein). Funny thing about the paper was that the authors refuted the results of my P.I. In a normal situation, I would have accepted their conclusions. They’re scientists, they know what they’re doing. Well, my P.I. told me I needed to look at it more critically. Their method is not entirely fail-proof. They employed RNAi technology to knock down Spastin ubiquitously in the fruit-fly body. But, as of now, scientists do not know if spastin is a cytoplasmic or nuclear protein. Also, RNAi acts to shut down certain genes. But gene expression may not correlate very well with protein expression, as we found out from Frederik Nihout’s talk. We do not also know if spastin remains in the body for long periods of time. For instance, if spastin was already present in cells, then turning out the gene won’t exactly shut off spastin the protein. That was an important lesson to learn—to approach results with a critical eye (note: not overcritical; there are a lot of things we still do not know).
Anyways, I love the name “Sequencher.” I picture a big machine gulping down nucleotides. Our cold gene sequencer didn’t turn out too great. There are one too many mutations in our construct. Another try it is.