Tobias Baskin's sort-of real time science blog
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 […]
A grindy week. Certainly an exaggeration to say there were a thousand natural shocks—even a dozen is not quantitative; but that’s what it felt like. There was actual Shakespeare tho: Last night, we saw the Birmingham Conservatoire’s production of Much Ado About Nothing; hilarious from curtain to curtain. And there was Liszt. OK, a diszt-claimer–I don’t […]
Today, Birmingham was definitely a bight zone. Tremendously sunny, not even a passing shower. I seized the day-bright and took my bike north along the canal towpath. I was not dissuaded even when the towpath became a narrow muddy rut. The sun kept shining. I passed under the mighty Galton bridge (Figure 1; hopefully no […]
Last Sunday, I wrote about The case of the vanishing twist. Unless the plates are all contaminated, I’ll get clues tomorrow when I compare mutants grown at 20 and 25ºC. In the same post in passing, I mentioned another mystery: Charlie Anderson and collaborators stain arabidopsis roots nicely with fast scarlet but me and mine […]