Tobias Baskin's sort-of real time science blog
Hi Lab Fab fans. UMass changed blogging platforms which forced me to take a few weeks off while they retooled. Things seem ok now (?). The following post was written for Jan 14th but still holds. By the way if you like Lab Fab, consider subscribing to never miss a post. Its free! Scroll down below the socks […]
Happy 2024! I hope your year is full of peace and projects. And of course, lots of blogs! Maybe some art too (Fig. 1). On my last post, I described how I plan to observe the orientation of cellulose in the root epidermis. To recap, I need to stain cellulose with a fluorescent dye and […]
Drink up! Whether you celebrate surrounded by dozens of your relatives or you let the day glide by quietly, I hope you are warm, fed, and happy. Alert readers will know that I missed posting last Sunday. I was traveling. Technically, I reached home late that afternoon but with respect to the travail part of travel, I […]
At least one rabbit anyway. About a month ago, I wrote about falling down a hole chasing not a rabbits but root hairs. In efforts to coax fast scarlet into staining roots uniformly, I incorporated the dye into the agar medium, inside of which the roots grow. Alas, giving the roots continuous exposure failed to […]
… bit me. Of course, they always do. Examining an assumption reveals either that it is ok, to a first approximation, or that it isn’t; in the first case, the conditions are accepted as a reasonable compromise and, in the second case, conditions are changed. Without any check, unfortunate conditions come along for the ride, […]
I want to make roots twist more vigorously; instead, I found a way to make twisting almost stop. As I have written about earlier (here and here), root twisting in my trials has been somewhat … flakey. I brought seed of six genotypes of lab weed (aka arabidopsis) that are recognized as twisting mutants. These […]
We live in polarized times: the word polarization is starting to stand in for all that ails us. But today I can write about polarization that is happy, or at least useful (Fig. 1). One day the week before last, I left the lab, walked along the towpath beside the canal until reaching a Sainsbury’s supermarket. I […]
This past week, I vanquished the dark zone but at a cost. Readers of a previous post will remember my main struggle with the project thus far is to get the cellulose-stain, fast scarlet, to stain roots reliably. To recapitulate: Dissolving the dye in water gives lousy staining; using a pH 6 or 7 buffer […]
Yes! I have allowed myself to get distracted. But don’t worry; the rabbit hole in question is scientific. The dye, fast scarlet, does curious things to my roots. A curiosity I have already written about is the dark zone; for some reason, the stain is excluded from a relevant part of the root. I have […]
Skewed roots! Development matters. The tests I ran for the time course of skewing (and described here) finished. I scanned the plates and had a look. Starting with the two lefty mutants (Fig. 1), the amount of skewing is not constant. For lefty1, the skew angle seems to get progressively more extreme (so the root forms […]