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Working in the lab

20th Jan, 2030

I woke up today feeling invigorated. Maybe it has something to do with the excellent mattress I recently bought. Never thought it could make a big difference. Me and wife had a healthy discussion about work today at breakfast, we both work on similar things. Anyways, it had been a long time since we worked on any diseases, so we decided to design a drug for a disease. Seems like amoebiasis is back in a big way. Back when I was in school, I was suspected to have it so well, there is a personal connection. So, like good scientists, me and the wife started our computer, and pulled down all papers published between 2000 - 2030 on amoebiasis. Well, there is a lot going on, which we never come to know. Fortunately, we had a fairly generous grant from Bajaj Research Foundation couple of years ago, so we went ahead and bought ourselves a SynopsisMaker. Damn, my core nano 10 is so slow. Only 36 cores.... well, its time to upgrade. Anyways, I guess by tonight the synopsis will be done, and we will be able to read up a textbook size synopsis of the whole area. Things have improved so much since the publication industry standardized itself. We have bought a paper writing software too. You decide the journal and it will write the paper, once we give it a synopsis of the main results. All references and everything done for you. Aint life cool these days ?
Anyways, we decided to do something meaningful today. The plan is as follows. First and foremost, computer upgrade. The new core nano 8 is out, with 48 cores and all, and it uses much less power too. I am buying one of those babies. I can order it and get it delivered in three hours flat, which is what I really like. They will take care of discarding my old computer too. This time I guess I will install the new Fedora 63, its been sometime since I upgraded my OS. What with all this cloud computing, people like me with a personal computer are suffering. Anyways, the main point, the plan for ameobiasis. Good news for me, there has been a recent surge in ameobic dysentry in the country. The cases have shot upto 3000 per year, so its time to do something before some other company grabs this opportunity. So, we ordered a vial of E.hystolitica from the lcoal supplier (will have to order clinical samples once trials start). Will arrive tomorrow. Then we will download the proteome of the organism and ask our brand new CellAnalyzer for pathway targets. These days the WDRA rules have become tough, the drug should target at least 3 different sites for resistance to evolve slowly. What the heck, I will run it for five sites, lets see if I am lucky enough to get what I want.
The cell analyzer will do a criticality assessment and let me know, what proteins are best to target if I want to kill E.hystolitica and with additional computer time, will also tell me if I will kill human. Still not very accurate, but well, thats one area I am working on, soon we might have better results. So, once the targets are identified, we will feed it into the computer, and the vial will go into the BioCloner. Makes life easy for us, and keeps the culture growing (all computerized since papers became standardized). The BioCloner will take the output from the computer and disrupt the genes which it has selected and tell us what happens if the proteins are not active, in all combinations. So, we can select which combination is best. This will take a month. God... once we perfect the cell analyzer, we will be able to do it within a day or two. Anyway, I must not forget to send the analysis to Dr Swann, he is the leader of all of us working on the CellAnalyzer. Anyway, once we decide on the target, comes the most critical part, and also the most time consuming. All small molecule databases have to be searched and the best combination of functional groups have to be fitted on to the targets selected. Once targets are selcted, the backbone will be constructed to fix the functional groups in three dimensions. Then the actual testing on the E.hystolitica. Will take another couple of months I guess. What a wate of time. That reminds me, I have to order a human proteome chip. Will test on it to see if the drug we synthesized will bind to any of our drugs. We dont want that to happen do we ? Hopefully, the CellAnalyzer will give reliable results and we wont have such cross reactivity, otherwise back to the drawing board. Gosh, when will we learn to do things fast ? Anyways, if everything works fine, then in four months, we will have a drug ready for trials, and a paper ready to be submitted to Science. Wish me luck....

Comments

Aparna said…
hey! whats this software for paper writing? send me the link..does it work well?
February 21, 2010 at 3:09:00 AM GMT+5:30
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