Now it's got some concerted action, that's more like it. Again, much better viewed on Safari. Also, sorry iPhone/iPad users...
His tag to NTA - more than just a pretty purification strategy
This is a work-in-progress, and part of a new project I have to help re-design the website of a biotech company in Massachuesetts. The image is based on a gold nanoparticle-based assay. More soon!
Nurse Flower ponders her coffee
Nurse Flower is bored but curious as she stirs. This is the result of a sort of mad-libs for art exercise, done with pen and ink with an ink wash finish. Hope you enjoy it.
Three ring circus
This reaction scheme taken from a step in diterpene biosynthesis shows no fewer than three cyclizations occuring in a single enzyme active site, with a net gain of two new rings. (Animations here are best viewed with Safari, not so much with Firefox) This is a project that just came to me last week, and I was excited to get to it, though it's still a work-in-progress. I don't like having five bonds to carbon, even for less than a second, and the geometry of the final product looks a little uncomfortable, but I was eager to post this. There is something so inexplicably satisfying to me about making animations. I completely understand how, before we used computers to do this, animators could bring themselves to painstakingly draw the same illustration over and over and over again with only the slightest modification from one to the next. Because Flash does the heavy lifting for me, I can only imagine the feeling they had when they finally put them all together and flipped through the pages.
Use your words
I now have three consecutive days worth of evidence to suggest that working part-time from home may be seriously damaging my verbal and cognitive skills. I suspected that this might happen, I just didn't expect it to so soon.
Exhibit A. This happened yesterday:
Exhibit B: On Monday, a completely inappropriate response to a statement, like when a TSA agent tells you to have a nice flight and you say, "You too!"
Often times when this happens I like to think that maybe these sorts of gaffes go unnoticed. It wasn't such a big deal, right? Until I have one in front of the husband. Exhibit C (Sunday):
This was followed by a brief pause, and then, maniacal laughter and, ultimately, ridicule. "Tome? haha. Did you say tome instead of time?! hahaha!", etc. In all fairness, I would have done exactly the same. It's nice to have the reality check sometimes.
IgA-gobbling cell
When I was a postdoc, I found this phenomenon in which a self-assembled multivalent complex designed in our lab was selectively taken up by acute lymphoblastic leukemia B cells over normal B cells in a mixture of white blood cells. I wasn't able to explain why this was, and my main hypothesis was wrong, so I didn't ever try to publish it. Instead, I'll just make an animation of it. This is sort of a flash sketch, just to get me thinking about how I might be able to depict endocytosis with 2D animation.When I was a postdoc, I found this phenomenon in which a self-assembled multivalent complex designed in our lab was selectively taken up by acute lymphoblastic leukemia B cells over normal B cells in a mixture of white blood cells. I wasn't able to explain why this was, and my main hypothesis was wrong, so I didn't ever try to publish it. Instead, I'll just make an animation of it. This is sort of a flash sketch, just to get me thinking about how I might be able to depict endocytosis with 2D animation.
A master of molecular disguises
Here is a rough sketch for a chemistry poem illustration. I love this poetry book illustration project. This 007-inspired poem has Bond bonding all over the place to turn himself into TNT, nitric acid (to neutralize his basic enemy), nitrous oxide (laughing gas), cyanide, NO, and more. I should check my Lewis structures but this was just to get down some ideas. Recently I was working on a similar sketch in this series on a cross-country flight, and a flight attendant said, "Aren't YOU a good artist!", as though I were 5. Was she making fun of me? I'll never know. I just looked down and blushed, burrowed my toe into the floor and hid behind the nearest skirt I could find. Okay, I didn't do any of those things, but that was how it felt.
Dreams and Nightmares
Here's a project I did for my Photoshop class, which is part of the Digital Design Certificate program I'm enrolled in. Out of a few options, I chose the dreams and nightmares theme, and incorporated a few of my recurring nightmares using most of the Photoshop tools I've learned to date in the class. The pattern-making tool is one of my newest favorites. My feet are supposed to be huge and heavy, making it impossible to run away from whatever is chasing me. It may just look like I'm sporting bell bottom pajamas though.
And no more shall we part
This is an oil painting of my grandmother that I did during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, from a black and white photo taken when she had been about the same age. I painted it two years after she passed away, following a struggle with Parkinson's disease, and gave it to my grandfather hesitantly, not knowing whether he would want a painful reminder of a much happier time of his life.
My grandfather had retired from his career as an engineer to care for her, and found himself, at 72, wondering what he would do with himself now that she was gone. His biggest fear was to be idle, so he followed a calling, the seed of which had been planted decades earlier, and became a Catholic priest. Since then, he has served his community tirelessy and grieved for his wife daily. This painting hung above his fireplace. Every time I saw him, he told me that he talked to her every day, while assuring me, lest I be concerned, that she had not started talking back yet.
Yesterday, on what would have been his 88th birthday, we gathered the family together for his funeral, a service attended by two bishops and enough priests to keep everyone on their very best behavior. I borrowed the title of this post from a Nick Cave song, because I think what comforts the family most right now is the thought that he is finally reunited with his beloved wife.
Thin Layer Chromatography
This week my part-time teaching job has felt a bit like a full-time teaching job. No complaints about that at all, it just means that the only thing I've really sketched this week is ideas for ways to explain the concept of thin layer chromatography to my organic chemistry students. No perspective, no shading, just trying to use simple images to make a complicated subject easier to wrap their minds around. Good thing my students are bright.
Fossil find in Soho
Just came back from a weekend in New York, celebrating a handful of family milestones with my truly delightful in-laws and getting to see some great friends. While walking through Soho with husband, we came across The Evolution Store, which I hadn't heard of but was drawn to by the sign outside advertising the meeting of science and art within. It's a tiny space bursting at the seams with ancient fossils, human (and other) skulls, rare minerals, and taxodermied animals. In a puzzling juxtaposition, a taxodermied raccoon sits atop the glass counter holding a basket full of male raccoon genitalia bones. Anyway, we found this ammonite, a now extinct marine animal, particularly beautiful. I also chose it because I was facing a birthday, and it is hard to feel old in the presence of a 120 million year old fossil.
Everything is connected
These icons represent just a portion of what's going on in Mycoplasma genitalium, even though it's the smallest known free-living bacterium, and has one of the smallest genomes ever found. Understanding how all of these processes communicate between one another to keep the organism thriving is a huge feat, and I am excited to be peripherally involved (if only artistically) in the effort.
Now wait just a dipole moment.
Just getting psyched for the first day of organic chemistry lab, when the students will use a molecular modeling software program to learn about polarity of molecules in preparation for week 2 - thin layer chromatography!
Safety first (or, my new pencil holder)
This week I am gearing up to teach a couple of undergraduate chemistry labs, and have been hearing a lot about safety. This pencil holder, which I recently repurposed from a broken cassette tape deck adaptor, is a good reminder of what can happen to monsters who attack pencil-wielding prey if they do not first put on a pair of safety goggles. PPE is no joke people!
Creepy disembodied extremeties
I've had the very good fortune to get to know a talented and well known medical illustrator around here. I've talked to him about my plans and gotten some very good advice. From our first conversation he's been curious about my past and ongoing fine art training, reminding me that no matter how many cool tricks I can pull off in Illustrator, it is important to stay strong in the fundamentals. When I told him we had to draw our hand in class, he told me we should have been drawing our hands and feet about 20 times, using different types of pencils, methods of shading, and lengths of time. So, here are some of my attempts. The sketches took anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour. They were done with charcoal or pencils at 6 or softer. Some are blended, some are not. 8 down, 12 to go. Or is it 32 to go? The topmost sketch is the one I did today. The foot in the last panel is not bleeding, it's just a smudge.
Adolescent angst for B cells
In order for pre-B cells to fully mature, they need a functional B cell receptor. Now here's a discovery proving yet again that carbohydrates are worth paying attention to. Turns out, the pre-B cell receptor has a crucial asparagine-linked glycosylation site, and taking it away leaves these inexperienced cells trapped in limbo and unable to progress to maturity. Hmm... like grad school?
For the full story see Ubelhart et al. Nature Immunology 2010, 11(8), 759.
Getting a handle on the O-GlcNAc modification
Protein glycosylation is usually relegated to the cell surface and intracellular compartments. In a fascinating exception to this rule that was first observed in the 1980's, A GlcNAc monosaccharide can be added to serine and threonine residues of cytosolic proteins. Many labs are trying to understand the dynamic regulation of the addition and removal of this sugar that seemingly has a hand in every cellular process and disease state known to man. More and more examples are being found to suggest that this modification and phosphorylation regulate each other, as if they weren't already complicated enough on their own.
There are a handful of ways to detect O-GlcNAc, which have helped build the laundry list by telling us which proteins are modified. Now, in a recent Nature Chemical Biology paper from Linda Hsieh-Wilson's lab at CalTech, they show us a useful new method that reveals what proportion of any particular protein is modified (2%? 80%), and of those that are modified, exactly how many GlcNAc residues there are per protein. They do this by adding a great big heavy tag (polyethylene glycol) to the modification, which makes the protein sluggish on a polyacrylamide gel. Proteins that have been modified then resolve as separate slower-moving bands on the gel according to how many GlcNAc residues adorn them. I made the illustration above for a highlight of the paper that will appear in the Functional Glycomics Update, a collaboration between the Consortium for Functional Glycomics and the Nature Publishing Group. The image will be much smaller than you see here, which is why I took kind of a loose style for the protein, playing around with the paint brush tools in Illustrator. I haven't actually decided whether I like it or not, but this is where I am with it.
Look at me, playing the lute in a Caravaggio painting
This was my homework for my Photoshop class this week.
Scenes from Indianapolis airport
Just got back from a brief but fun trip to my hometown to visit family and friends. Airports are great places to sketch. People are preoccupied, but at the same time relatively still, since we spend most of the time there waiting. For a couple of these sketches I even had 5 minutes or more before the pose shifted or they left to board a flight. As far as I could tell, no one noticed me drawing them. (Beware of creepy airport sketchers!) Once I got caught doing this in a Starbucks. My subject started striking poses worthy of a Madonna video, totally embarrassing me.
Bar code series
Okay, the truth is I've just been tying up loose ends over the past couple of days and I don't have anything new and exciting to share. This was an assignment I did several months ago for an illustration course. We were given words or phrases and told to illustrate them while somehow incorporating a bar code. Here is what I came up with for anatomy, architecture, games, music, and red light district.