Perspective on glycan arrays

I put this figure together this week for a review being published from my lab about glycan arrays. They wanted to convey that a wide variety of glycans is spotted on the array, and also that each spot displays a multivalent presentation of these glycans. Multivalency is important to capture the glycan-binding proteins (right) and viruses (left) that are routinely screened by this method. This was also an attempt to conform to the style of the journal to which it's going. You know, so I'm like versatile and stuff. But mostly I enjoyed invoking the old 1-point perspective lines, which always reminds me of my 6th grade art class, where we drew our names in block letters and then used 1-point perspective to make them 3D. It blew my 11-year old mind.

Masked microbes

Some pathogenic bacteria have a clever strategy for evading our innate immune system - make themselves look like our red blood cells. Our immune system has been programmed to not attack our own cells, for obvious reasons. These wily bacteria come decorated with our blood group antigens (the carbohydrates that govern our blood type). The illustration below shows their attempted masquerade. But the Cummings group has found that we may be one step ahead. In Stowell SR, et al. “Innate immune lectins kill bacteria expressing blood group antigen.”  Nature Med. 2010 16, 295-301, they show that we express two isoforms of the glycan-binding protein known as galectin to kill the bacteria by recognizing the blood group antigen. Presumably, by selectively expressing them in the intestinal epithelium, they won't bother our red blood cells. 

Chemistry and Art meet at the historic Hollywood Bowl

When fuel and oxidizers meet elements like sodium, barium, copper and lithium, we get fireworks. Throw in a John Philip Sousa march by the LA philharmonic and you have one great spectacle.

Drug screening

My Mini-Muse

My best friend has a 3-year old daughter. I was in the hospital when she was born. I held her as she looked up at me with gooey little eyes. So overcome with adoration was I, that I decided to paint a portrait of her for each of her birthdays. I realize now that it may be somewhat ambitious, that she may not want a stack of portaits of herself. I don't even like seeing photos of myself from the "awkward stage" (roughly ages 7-23, in my case). But for now, while she is fast growing, unbearably cute, and wonderfully expressive, I am working on the third painting in the series. Here it is at an early stage.

Finding Amino

Here is a rough sketch of another chemistry poem illustration in the works. The poem is about a very distraught protein looking for its lost N-terminal glycine residue, named Amino.

Here is a logo and graphic that I put together for my friend Nicole's blog, The Concentric Circle, which launched this week. She is an extremely talented journalist who now spends her days editing other people's writing.  Like the professor who yearns to do experiments with his or her own hands again, Nicole felt an urge to get back to writing, and thank goodness for that. It is an absolute joy to read.

The Original Heidelberg Monster

I recently had the opportunity to visit a printing company in San Diego. I learned how terribly things can go wrong when preparing files for print and how the nice employees will feel about me when it happens. I imagined that they keep this old Heidelberg printing press (see photo) for the express purpose of feeding it designers who don't know the difference between CMYK and RGB, or don't manage their fonts properly. I had at least three panic attacks as it just so happened that one of my projects had just been sent to the printer and my client was awaiting the proof.  I saw my fate in the second photo below if the file wasn't prepared properly.

There once was an atom of tin . . .

I've recently embarked on a very exciting collaboration with a classmate from MIT - to illustrate her chemistry poetry.  Just to get the ball rolling, I took a stab at one of my favorites. Here is a draft. The poem is about a tin atom trying to get into Club Atomic. The snooty bouncer explains that elements are admitted by the gram, and letting him in would exceed the tin allowance. Tin explains that this gives an unfair advantage to the lighter elements, such as the helium atoms filing in, and he finally convinces the bouncer that elements should be admitted by moles, or number of atoms, not by weight. 

Update on 2010-06-26 21:16 by Mary

Back to the drawing board!

Flash for Splash?

I made this animation (click to enlarge) with plans to use it as my splash page, but am hesitant to leave any iPhone and iPad users to only encounter the rather unwelcoming "Get Adobe Flash Player" button as a first impression. What does the future hold for Flash??

Barney 1998-2010

After 18 months of living on love and subcutaneous fluid injections, my faithful companion of 12 years succumbed to chronic renal failure. He will be sorely missed.

800 mg of Clarity

Here's a logo I designed in a graphic design course I'm taking. It's for a fictional company that makes drugs to enhance mental clarity and focus. How nice! I'll stick to coffee though.

Like a Tokyo Wave Pool

This is a work-in-progress, which ultimately will be a poster for a biotech company. It doesn't look too crowded yet, but will be packed to the gills when it's done. Another interesting design problem. But it's a nice reminder that, as was pointed out in a seminar I saw yesterday, the components populating the inside of a cell are less like synchronized swimmers, and more like a Tokyo wave pool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inA-36YRV0Y

Non-Science Illustration Break

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.

Flash 101

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.

The argument for glycan-based targeting

I am excited to be working on a manuscript in lab this week.  More details to come, but here is a visual preview:

TB-causing bacteria poisons itself when robbed of key enzyme

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.

Virtual Nerd

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: 

Slow news day

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.

Strong enough for a product inhibition feedback, but pH-balanced for a protease activation

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.