Top 3 Awesome Inspirational Women in Science [Becky]

March 8^th was International Women’s Day, so I want to celebrate it (albeit somewhat belatedly!!) by writing about three of my favourite women scientists. Obviously there are so many more than just these three, and Em’s told the story of one of them here: Rosalind Franklin 

Dorothy Hodgkin – The U.K’s only woman to have won a Nobel Prize in Science

Dorothy Hodgkin – developed the vital X-ray crystallography technique

As a biochemist, I can’t help but admire the work of Dorothy Hodgkin, who is famous for her work on the technique of X-ray crystallography. This technique is used to solve the structures of molecules such as proteins. Understanding the structure of a protein is important not only for understanding its role in an organism, but also for designing drugs to treat diseases. She is of particular significance at the University of Bristol where I’m doing my PhD, as she held the position of Chancellor from 1970 to 1988, and took an active interest in student life and the research going on here.

Dorothy Crowfoot was born in 1910 in Cairo, where her father was working at the time. Her parents had friends in the Sudan, one of which was the Chemist Dr. A.F Joseph, who sparked Dorothy’s interest in Chemistry and crystals from a young age. When she was 18 she went to study Chemistry at Somerville College in Oxford (named after Mary Somerville, a great mathematician of the time), and then went on to study for a PhD in Cambridge where she first started working on the X-ray crystallography technique.

After her PhD, Dorothy went back to Oxford, where she was appointed as a research fellow and tutor. She held this position from 1936 to 1977, and in that time inspired many young minds in addition to carrying out her own groundbreaking research. One of her students was the young Margaret Thatcher!

One of her most important projects was figuring out the chemical structure of Penicillin in the 1940s.  At the time, world war was in progress and medical advancements were important. Knowing the structure of Penicillin has since allowed scientists to create a new arsenal of antibiotics based on its structure. In later years Dorothy turned her attention to Vitamin B₁₂, where she further developed the X-ray crystallography technique and inspired other researchers to do the same. This technique is still used today to solve the structures of proteins..  Dorothy is also well known for her work on the structure of insulin, a much larger molecule than anyone had ever attempted before.

Dorothy’s important work won her the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964. Her son Luke Hodgkin gives a nice account of her here, in addition to a good overview of the x-ray crystallography technique.

References:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1964/hodgkin-bio.html
http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/vitaminb12/hodgkin.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8668708.stm

Ada Lovelace – The First Programmer

Ada Lovelace – the fabulousness of her clothes is matched only by the fabulousness of the lady herself and her work on computer science

My partner is a computer scientist, and I am always amazed by the lines of code he churns out – as if he was born with the innate ability to do so – and even more amazed by what he can create with the algorithms that are the “recipes” of computer science. The person acknowledged as the creator of the first algorithm for a machine was Ada Lovelace.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, or now more commonly known as Ada Lovelace, was born in London in 1815 to Lord Byron, a poet, and Annabella, a mathematician who was dubbed the “Princess of Parallelograms” by her husband. Ada gained “Lovelace” from her husband William King, whom she married in 1835 and was later made Earl of Lovelace.

Ada showed interest in mathematics from a young age and her mother tutored her in the subject. Mary Somerville (remember her from earlier?) introduced Ada to Charles Babbage, a renowned mathematician and inventor.

At the time, calculators did not exist, and calculations were carried out by hand using printed mathematical tables. Charles invented a machine that could perform addition calculations, called the “Difference Engine”. In 1833, Charles had made a working portion of this machine, and put it on public display. When Annabella took a then teenage Ada to see it, Ada “young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention”.

Before Charles could finish building his Difference Engine however, he came up with a new “Analytical Engine”, which was designed to handle more complex calculations. Unfortunately this was never built due to lack of funds. Nevertheless,  Ada was fascinated by the designs – her reputation comes from a translation she published in 1843 of a paper written about the machine by Louis Menabrea, an Italian engineer, from French into English. Not only did she translate it, but she also added extensive notes of her own (the notes are reportedly three times as long as the actual translation!).

Babbage’s Difference Engine – one of the earliest computers that wasn’t a person

These notes included what is recognised as the first algorithm for use by a machine; hence Ada Lovelace is often referred to as “the first programmer”. She also speculated for the first time about the uses of these machines outside mathematics – the critical leap from calculation to computation – and outlined how the machine could be adapted to handle symbols and letters.

Unfortunately, Ada lived a short life and died in 1852 at the age of 36 from uterine cancer, and received very little recognition for her work during her lifetime, mostly due to the attitude of Victorian Britain towards women pursuing intellectual interests. Nowadays we celebrate Ada Lovelace Day every year, which this year will be held on the 15^th October. The day is dedicated to the achievements women have made in science, and raises the profile of women scientists as role models for girls and women wanting to study STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects.

References:

Zeros + Ones by Sadie Plant. Published by Fourth Estate; New Ed edition (1998)
“young as she was…” Sophia Freud, quoted in Ada, Countess of Lovelace by Doris Langley Moore, p.44
http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/adalovelace/
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/onlinestuff/stories/ada_lovelace.aspx
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/10/ada-lovelace-honoured-google-doodle

Barbara McClintock – Discoverer of Jumping Genes

During my undergraduate degree I did my final year literature project on “junk DNA” (or not-so-junk DNA, as it turns out – more on that in a later post), and came across the concept of “jumping genes”. These are pieces of DNA that can quite literally jump from one location in the genome to another, and are thought to make up 40% of the genome (Smit, 1999). Just to put this in context, less than 5% of our genome is what we consider “coding DNA”, which is the DNA that codes for proteins.

Barbara McClintock discovered these jumping genes (also called transposons or transposable elements) in the 1940s, and in 1965 was one of the first scientists to speculate that they regulate whether genes are switched on or off in the genome.

Barbara was born in 1902 in Connecticut, USA. She moved to New York in 1919 to study Botany at Cornell University, where she attended the only course in Genetics that was open to undergraduates. At that time, Genetics had not been widely accepted as a discipline, and only 21 years had passed since the re-discovery of Mendel’s principles of heredity. Barbara went on study graduate-level Genetics, and also a course in cell biology, which focused on the structure of chromosomes and how they behaved during cell division. Barbara enjoyed this immensely, and decided to dedicate the rest of her life to this field.

Barbara completed a PhD at Cornell, and post-doctoral research at the University of Missouri before moving to the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island in 1940, where she remained until she retired in 1967.

During her research career Barbara focused on the maize genome, and spent time characterising its genes through extensive breeding experiments. She was intrigued by a mosaic-style colour pattern in the maize, and discovered that this was due to two jumping genes called “Dissociator” and “Activator”. Depending on when and where these move, a different colour of maize kernel is produced. This movement is random, and so the jumping genes would only move in some cells and not others – producing the mosaic effect.

Amazing maize showing evidence of jumping genes expressing themselves in a few kernels of the corn! Source paper from Nature here

The concept of jumping genes was not widely accepted by the scientific community at the time – it was to be thirty-five years after her discovery that she received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983.

Barbara was also the first scientist to correctly speculate about epigenetics – changes in whether genes are turned on or off that are not due to the underlying DNA sequence itself. While observing cells dividing, she noticed that different sets of genes were turned on and off in each of the cells, despite them being genetically identical.

Read more about Barbara, including a lovely account of her as a person, on the Nobel Prize website.

References
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1983/
http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/barbara-mcclintock-and-the-discovery-of-jumping-34083
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1983/mcclintock-autobio.html

 

Welcome to Becky, a new Memetic Drift author

Hi all,

I’d like to introduce you to a new author on Memetic Drift: the lovely Becky Brooks, a fellow scientist and gamer.

Well, I say “fellow scientist”… she’s actually going to be a proper scientist because she’s midway through her PhD in wound healing at the University of Bristol. I’m sure she’ll be happy to tell you about it at some point.

She’s also just started using Twitter, so give her a follow: @Becky_Brooks6.

Her first post is out tomorrow and is about her top three awesome inspirational ladies in science… then I’ll be slightly lowering the tone again with more cool animals that look like Pokémon next week!

See you tomorrow =)

Em x

PS: I am also occasionally on Twitter: @emilycoyte

Real-life Species that Should be Pokémon – Part 2

Hey! In the last post I mentioned three critters which I’d have loved to see adapted into the Pokémon universe in the upcoming Pokémon X & Y games. However three really wasn’t enough so I’ve got another batch lined up and ready to go.

Leaf Insect

Latin name: Phasmatodea order (including stick-insects), Phyllidae family — Poké-name suggestion: Sudoleafo

I want one so badly! Look at the mimicry of the central midrib line and smaller leaf veins, and how the legs look like chewed up bits of leaf.

Sudowoodo is a rock-type Pokémon that pretending to be a grass-type and featured heavily in the Gold/Silver games (which incidentally I think are the best of them all). It made me accidentally learn about the prefix pseudo- and also how not to spell it. I don’t think rocks can pretend to be foliage in this universe, but the bugs certainly can, and staggeringly well.

The leaf insect is the more flamboyant cousin of the stick insect and many of them are parthenogenic, meaning females can produce offspring without a mate if none can be found. Some species push the parenting of their offspring onto other species while they get on with the tricky business of eating and looking like leaves. Extatosoma tiaratum tricks ants into guarding their eggs by coating them in sticky food treats. The eggs are carried into the ants’ nest, where the outer layer is chewed off and the rest is discarded.

Baby leaf insect pretending to be an ant. [E. tiaratum nymph]

Once hatched, the baby leaf insects even look and smell like ants so they don’t get swarmed and destroyed as they make their way out into the world.

Thorny Devil and Horned Lizard

Latin name: Phrynosoma (various) and Moloch horridus — Poké-name suggestion: Thorgon / Lizthor

Thorny devil is thorny. [Moloch horridus]

Rather than brainwashing ants as part of their breeding cycle, these spiky reptiles prefer to eat them by the thousands every day.

The thorny devil [from Australia] and horned lizard [from North America] are not as closely related as they look – their spiny defenses are good examples of convergent evolution. Their tough skin may keep the ants from biting and stinging, but it’s not always enough to stop for a hungry desert predator, so they each have evolved other strategies to stay alive.

The horned lizard’s trick is probably the better known because of its unusual and repulsive nature; it will actually squirt blood from their eyes in self defense! This technique has the great name “autohaemorrhaging”, and I’m sure you want to see a video, so here you go.

Horned lizard is horned (horn = keratin over bone) [Phrynosoma species]

The thorny devil is not aggressive and relies on deception. The rather prominent bump you can see on the top of its neck is actually a false head. If threatened, it can dip down its real head so the bump appears where the real head would normally be. Sounds unlikely but apparently the predator will really go for the fake head instead!

If these guys were to venture into the Poke-world, I’d choose them as either Fire / Ground or a Ground/Poison types, and if the bloody eye trick could be turned into a new Pokémon move, so much the better!

T4 Bacteriophage

Latin name: Virusesarentallowed latinnames — Poké-name suggestion: Porygon V (the V is for Virus)

This is an actual electron microscope image of a model of the T4 bacteriophage virus, made out of “diamond-like carbon”.

Being a vertebrate and a mammal, I have a huge bias towards the macroscopic scale. I know that most humans are the same, and viruses aren’t even really alive (the “species” in the title doesn’t strictly apply here) so I can’t completely blame Game Freak for excluding bacteria and viruses from the Pokémon collection thus far. But given that their repertoire has included magnets, a living nose (ohgodwhy) and ice-cream, it’s a little disappointing!

Meet T4, a virus which infects bacteria. The virus cannot replicate on its own, so it injects its genetic information directly into the victim bacterium and forces it to do all the hard work of copying new viruses. It doesn’t take long before the bacterium is so full of new viruses, it bursts open and new viruses begin the process all over again. This is called the lytic cycle.

But this isn’t always the case. Sometimes the phage takes a long-term stealth approach instead, fusing its DNA with that of the bacterium, where it will lie dormant for many generations. Each time the bacterium replicates, the viruses’ DNA is copied too and passes into each new cell. The bacteria are far from safe because the lytic cycle can start up again at any point.

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There’s plenty more awesome stuff in nature which wouldn’t look out of place in the Pokémon universe and I’ve had some good suggestions already for a potential part 3, but I’m certainly still open to ideas!

Em x

Animals that should be Pokémon – Part 1

I love nature and biology, but sometimes Pokémon just seems more appealing. Species are well defined and nobody doubts the reality of evolution, even if the definition of the word is drastically different to how we understand it. In the Pokéworld, one single creature can evolve into another species (sub-species?) just by fighting other beasties and growing stronger, rather than the slow changes of natural selection.

Most Pokémon are based on IRL creatures and plants. Some are famous and obvious, like Squirtle (turtle) and Caterpie (caterpillar). Some are pretty niche, like Alomamola, which is an adapted form of the massive and bonkers sunfish.

Sex up a sunfish and what have you got? [Mola mola vs Alomamola]

Anyway, with Pokemon X and Y coming out later this year, I’ve got a selection of real organisms that Game Freak would be foolish not to make into Pokémon, because they’re most of the way there already! I’ve made some fairly horrible attempt at assigning Poké-names, please feel free to offer alternatives!

Blue Dragon / Sea Swallow / Blue Ocean Slug
Latin Name: Glaucus atlanticus  —  Poké-name suggestion: NudiBloo

Cute, but I find its lack of face disturbing…

I fell in love with this thing the second I saw it on the IFLS Facebook page. It’s just the right mix of adorable and slightly creepy – being a mollusc, it has a distinct lack of face.

Growing up to 3cm long, this fierce little nudibranch chooses to eat deadly Portuguese Man o’ War, which already makes it a lot braver than I am. It also loves to chow down on simple organisms called blue buttons and by-the-wind sailors.

The Blue Dragon floats upside-down just below the surface of the sea, and threats can come from above or below. The blue “top” you can see is actually its belly, which camouflages it against predators looking down into the dark water. The white “underside” makes it virtually invisible to undersea predators looking up against the light sky.

I think it would an adorable little faceless Water / Dragon type. … and then I found this:

…

Oh Internet, you never fail to take things to the next level. Next up… sexy blobfish?

Marsupial mole
Latin name: Notoryctidae typhlops / caurinus (depending on Southern or Northern species)   — Poké-name suggestion: Burriel

O hai!

While we’re on the subject of the things where the presence of eyes is ambiguous… meet the marsupial mole from Australia.

The only eyes the marsupial moles have are tiny non-functional lenses under the fur. Also hidden away are the ears, which are small holes buried beneath the coat.  The cone shaped head is well adapted for boring through soil.

Being marsupial, mothers pouches which keep the babies safe until they can fend for themselves. In the marsupial mole, these pouches are rear-facing so the babies don’t get faces full of soil every time she decides to go underground.

The name I’ve given is a combination of burrow (self-evident), burrito (it’s long round body shape) and L’Oreal (look at that luscious fur – this animal is worth it!). The claws make it look like an ugly cousin in Sandslash, so perhaps it could be an alternate evolution of Sandshrew?

King of Saxony Bird of Paradise
Latin name: Pteridophora alberti   — Poké-name suggestion: Plumbra

The King of Saxony Bird of Paradise, looking sweetly evil

This is the King of Saxony bird of paradise from New Guinea, named after Albert of Saxony. I was going to do some research on the man, but Wikpedia informs me that “his reign as king was largely uneventful”, which put me off a bit. Moving on…

As you might expect of a bird-of-paradise, the male has a very special courtship routine. He’ll choose a springy branch and make it bounce around (video) adorably while emitting a metallic chatter, erecting his black feathers into a little cape and showing off his 50cm-long saw-tooth plume.

Even if they are removed from the bird, these blue plumes are still desirable trinkets. The Archibold’s Bowerbird will put a lot of effort into acquiring them to make little courtship houses, only to be nicked by native people of Guinea who put them through their noses.

I thought Albert here would make a good Dark / Flying type – but even with horns and a cape, it seems a bit too cute to compete with Murkrow, especially with the yellow belly and beady little eyes.

I’m happy to take suggestions for animals that should be Pokémon – I’m already planning a Part 2 so get in touch =)

Em x

The Caterpillar Effect; the Biochemistry of Sight

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I catch myself staring at something and start to wonder how it’s possible I can glean so much information from what is essentially photons bouncing around the room.

A basic description of sight will tell you something like this: photons of light bounce off objects and travel into your eye through the pupil. Your lens directs the incoming photons onto the retina at the back of the eye, where special cells called rods and cones capture them and convert the light energy into nerve signals for your brain to interpret.

A very broad summary of how light enters our eye

Whether these rod and cone cells can detect a photon or not depends on its energy _{[note 1]}, and in the grand electromagnetic scheme of things, humans are pretty much blind. Most photons that enter our eyes go completely unnoticed – we can’t detect them unless they have a specific energy, which we call the “visible range”. There is nothing particularly special about this tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, other than the fact it helpfully (but not coincidentally) corresponds to photon energies most strongly emitted by our sun. If we were to meet aliens who came from a planet with a star like blue Bellatrix or red Antares, they would probably have very different experiences of the universe to us, because their visible range (assuming they had any sort of eyes at all) would be centred in quite a different part of the spectrum.

Three different cone types can detecting overlapping photon energies(wavelengths), giving us our “visible range” of light. See note 1 for a bit of info on wavelength / photon energies.

Within the visible range, we have the ability to detect colour. Photons with less energy translate into red and orange, and photons with more energy appear blue and violet. Humans have three types of cone cell which specialise in detecting different, but overlapping photon energies. These cone cells work best in brighter environments. When light levels drop, the rod cells take over. You only have one type of rod, so colour-vision all but disappears, but they have the benefit of being a lot more sensitive. But how can a cell detect individual photons?

Let’s get biochemical

The key protein in rod cells is rhodopsin, which sits inside the cell membrane surrounding the rod cells. Inside it is a smaller molecule called retinal, which is chemically similar to Vitamin A and visually similar to a tiny caterpillar attached by its tail to the inside of the rhodopsin protein… to me anyway.

The retinaterpillar shifts conformation when it receives a photon, making the rhodopsin protein shift around with it. Rhodopsin becomes the activated Metarhodopsin II. Source image of retainal here

Normally, the caterpillar is happily bent in the middle, but when a photon with just the right energy hits it, its back-end flips around so it fully stretches out. The head and neck of the caterpillar are actually trapped in place by the protein surrounding it, so it has to move its tail, and with it, some of the protein. The entire rhodopsin protein shifts and contorts, taking on a new shape. A different shape means a different function, and in this case, a different name: metarhodopsin II.

And now we initiate something like the butterfly effect (or in this case, the caterpillar effect), where one small shift brings about big changes within the cell and beyond. One protein molecule has detected a photon of light successfully, and somehow it’s got to spread the word throughout the whole cell. Here’s how it works:

The phototransduction pathway from photon to nerve impulse – pretty much every step involves amplification to get the message across efficiently

If you want a message to spread to as many people as possible, you have to amplify it, i.e. hire more messengers and send more copies. In cell biology it’s no different. One activated protein can switch on many others and the signal spreads. The final result is that the channels which usually let positively charged ions like calcium (Ca²⁺) and sodium (Na⁺) into the cell get blocked. This changes the electric charge between the inside and outside of the cell, and actually starts a nerve impulse destined for the brain.

From eye to brain

The retina at the back of the eye contains many layers of cells stacked on top of each other. These include the rods, cones and many types of nerve cell to carry the signals to the brain.

Given that the rods and the cones’ main job is to detect light, one might make the prudent prediction that these light-detection cells would be found at the front of the retina… y’know, where all the light is.

What we actually find is rod and cone cells stuck right at the back of the stack. So light has to travel past all the clutter of the nerve cells headed for the brain, and the blood vessels supplying them with oxygen. Once the nerve signal gets produced, it has to travel all the way to the front of the retina again, where the nerves all clump in one off-centre spot so they can get to the back of the eye again, and then on to the brain!

Light travels in from the right, past all the nerve cells and reaching the rods and cones. The signal is carried back through the nerves, and finally back again through the retina as the optic nerve. Base image here

If it sounds convoluted, that’s because it is! It’s unclear whether this strange set-up is a tolerable-but-unhelpful evolutionary quirk, or whether it does actually confer some benefit over the “logical” solution. The eye has evolved many times in the animal kingdom, so it’s possible to compare and contrast. We know octopi have eyes which are the “right way around”, and so do not have blind spots.

There are plenty more things where our vision would get a “could try harder” grade, and that’ll be the topic of my next sensory post.

Em x

Bonus links:
1) Click here for a video allowing you to prove to yourself that your eyes are built “backwards” by seeing the blood vessels in front of your rods and cones, as well as the blind spot.
2) Click here for a Vsauce video considering whether your interpretation of red is the same as mine. Spoiler: we’ll probably never know.
3) Click here if you want to read more about the biochemical pathway from metarhodopsin II to hyperpolarisation

Note 1: because of quantum awkwardness, light can be thought of as a particle or a wave, whichever is most helpful at the time. The energy of light as a photon is directly related to wavelength of light as a wave; the smaller the wavelength, the higher the energy (and vice-versa). I prefer to focus on photons because it makes more sense for the biochemistry.

Main research source: Biochemistry by Berg, Stryer and Tymoczko, 6^th edition, Chapter 32

Drifting Memetically?

Welcome to Memetic Drift!

Errmmm, first post. This is the part where new bloggers tend to go all dewey-eyed and tell potential readers all about their hopes and aspirations for their clean new blog which will change not only their own life, but the lives of everyone their writing touches. You can just go ahead and pretend I’ve done that. However I will say this:

I’m aiming for a  science-centric blog but fully intend to deviate into numerous areas of geekdom and whatever I’m finding interesting at the time. I do tend to suffer from popcorn brain so don’t expect too much central focus.

Happy reading!

Em