Which one of these is not like the others?

Not likely to be seen on Sesame Street, this illustration-in-progress describes a tortured enantiomer named Danny who thinks he's finally found his niche with the Asymmetric Dancing Team. As the poem "Enantiomer in the Mirror" by Mala Radhakrishnan explains:

"Danny was absolutely excited,

For never he’d similar molecules sighted.

So now he could not keep his eagerness in.

“I’m finally going to really fit in!”

But then, as the dancers composed a straight line,

The massive formation was no longer fine.

“Hey Danny, what’s wrong with your orientation?

This line must be perfect with no deviation!”

So Danny then flipped all around and turned,

But soon, he became extremely concerned.

Although he’d the very same groups attached,

The others’ appearance he just couldn’t match."

On Penguins and Thermodynamics

As predicted, here's another in the chemistry poetry book illustration series. In the thermodynamics chapter, one of the poems likens NO2 molecules to penguins. They huddle together for warmth, but then are pleasantly surprised to find that they react with each other to make N2O4. The exothermic reaction gives them their desired warmth after all. It sounds much better in Mala's words, you'll see.

Atomic Romances, Molecular Dances

It's crunch time for the chemistry poetry book, which now has a title (see above). The talented poet behind the book, Mala Radhakrishnan, and I are in the final push to get the book out, so probably most of my posts until December 1st will be poetry illustrations like this one. Here, Pb and PbO2 wait in a car battery for someone to start the car so that they can finally share some electrons. When PbO2 can no longer bear the agony, she devises a plan to create a short circuit. It ends poorly... I'll start posting some excerpts of the poems with the illustrations soon, but for now I have to get back to trying to make it look like Pb is pressing his face against the separator. It is not easy! I tried smooshing my face with my hand in front of the mirror but that was only marginally helpful. Back to the drawing board.

Contents under vapor pressure

I am so busy. I think the last time I was this busy was the week before I moved from Massachusetts to California (4.5 yrs ago), when I was correcting my thesis, submitting a manuscript, making an inventory of my lab stuff, getting rid of my furniture, writing a postdoc fellowship proposal, and saying goodbye to some very good friends. Except, now instead of a week it's a semester. Things will really lighten up in a few weeks actually, but for right now I am (happily I should say) swamped with delightfully challenging illustration projects and teaching responsibilities. Luckily, in the past few days, one of my art projects overlapped with the experiment planned for one of my undergrad labs. For at least these two tasks, I only had to think about one thing - states of matter. Even better, I could leave out solids! The illustration above is for my chemistry poetry book illustration project (described in many previous posts). It depicts a water molecule explaining to a lonely molecule of nitrogen what it would take to be able to be close with his other like-minded N2 buddies. Basically, he'd better bundle up. And down below, I had to explain to my students why I was making them turn a liquid into a gas and then back into a liquid, only to turn it into a gas again. My whole world changed today when I finally tracked down a stepstool, enabling me to access the top third of the dry erase board.

Stem cells stay put

This draft illustration depicts how surface proteins on stem cells can be used to both immobilize the cells on a functionalized polymer surface (literally making them stay put), and to send signals to the nucleus that keep the cells from differentiating (figuratively staying put). This is one of the projects I'm working on today, and right now it's the signals to the nucleus bit that I'm trying to incorporate. This is one of those that presents the challenge of showing two very different scales in one still image (angstroms to microns here). Here I'm using the old stand-by of the inset. Another way is to draw a magnifying glass over a region, but I'm usually also striving for simplicity. Maybe this is why I like animation so much, since panning in and out solves that problem easily. In fact, I'm working on an animation for this same client that does just that, and will post that soon!

Infrared Spectroscopy begs to be animated

I put together this little animation this morning for my general chemistry students, who collected spectra on the IR this afternoon.

Happy Halloween!

I am drunk on toasted pumpkin seeds.

Work-in-Progress

Here's another work-in-progress. It's sort of terrible right now but I have plans for much improvement. It has to do with a mechanism to thwart a common cancer-associated upregulation of survival/proliferation pathways in epithelial cells. Right now it looks like the treatment is Pepto-Bismol. I assure you it is not. The colors need some work.

Update on 2010-11-08 16:29 by Mary

Here's what I've done with it so far. Normally I would avoid such a heavy-handed use of red, a color normally chosen to highlight, but there are two other banner images in the series with which I am trying to keep things consistent. The first one, which I posted on Oct. 19th, involves a colorimetric assay in which the starting solution is red. Turns out for this one, I couldn't have planned it better if I tried. To make the proteins pop against a red background, I colored them green, apropos indeed as these are mucins, or the proteoglycans that make mucous slimy. Voila!

Anniversary trip to Portland

To celebrate our first anniversary, which was yesterday, the husband and I took a weekend trip up to Portland, OR. Neither of us had been, so we decided to just go explore. With a B&B gift card burning a hole in our pockets, we built a whole trip around it.  Like good little tourists, we hit the rose garden in Washington Park, the Saturday Market, VooDoo doughnuts (bacon-topped maple bars... pure, unbridled genius), Powell's bookstore (want to take up permanent residence inside of it), and the waterfalls of Columbia River Gorge. We also hit four different breweries and tasted a lot of craft beer (while meanwhile, back in San Diego, a black IPA bubbled away in our closet). Our favorite was Rogue Brewery, although the photo above is from Lucky Labrador Brewery. Another highlight for me was the gorgeous fall foliage. Compared to San Diego it was like being back east again, with rain and all. I loved it. Great city, great trip.

Update to three ring circus movie

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.