As the Wall Street reform bill moves through Congress, it seems a good excuse to post this drawing that I did as an assignment for my illustration class (with real pen and paper!). The task was to incorporate a fictional character (here, Alice in Wonderland's Red Queen) into a current event.
Lately I've been learning Flash as an alternative to my old standby of making animations in Keynote and exporting them as Quicktime videos. I had high hopes of creating a new Flash-based homepage for this website, but I think what I came up with in the first attempt is a bit too chaotic. You can see the animation here.
I am excited to be working on a manuscript in lab this week. More details to come, but here is a visual preview:
Today the latest Functional Glycomics updates came out in Nature and can be found here. One of the highlights featured an article from our lab about drug delivery to B cells by targeting glycan-coated liposomes to an endocytic glycan-binding protein on the B cell surface. The other three highlights were all about bacteria: B. fragilis triggers interesting chemistry and a negative feedback loop, a promising target for the treatment of tuberculosis was identified, and both a help and a hindrance to the bacterial agglutinating Surfactant Protein D were discovered. Three of the four images that I made for these highlights have also been added to the Illustrations page. The fourth, shown here, was more of a design project, showing that silencing of one enzyme in M. tuberculosis causes an accumulation of its substrate, maltose-1-phosphate, to levels that are toxic to the bacterium.
For the past couple of nights I've been working on projects for Virtual Nerd, a relatively new company that was started by graduate students at Washington University in St. Louis. The idea was to combine algebra and physics tutoring with graphic design to create interactive online video tutorials that help high school students through rough spots in these subjects. Chemistry is on the horizon too, which got me interested. See www.virtualnerd.com for more information and for links to all of the great press they are getting. For my part, I get to turn videos into graphical content and make fun drawings like these:
This afternoon I was organizing my Illustrator and Photoshop project files on the computer when I came across this image I made several months ago. I quickly filed it in my "What in the world were you thinking?" folder. But I think it's kind of funny in its embarrassing ridiculousness. So I thought I'd share.
I recently did some remodeling of the website and decided to add a blog to give it a little life. Given that this is a website about science illustration, I suppose an illustration would be a good place to start.
Here is one project I’m currently working on, in the evening hours and on weekends, when I’m not being chased from my desk by scary earthquakes. This illustration is to accompany a research highlight for a monthly update of the Consortium for Functional Glycomics, published by Nature, and is meant to describe the article “Carbohydrate Oxidation Acidifies Endosomes, Regulating Antigen Processing and TLR9 Signaling” by Colleen J. Lewis and Brian A. Cobb, Journal of Immunology, 2010, 184(7), 3789-3800.
