Nerd Pride Radio

This image shows the spermatheca (where the hermaphrodite worm stores its sperm, this structure engulfs and fertilizes the Oocyte before releasing it to the uterus) in the center. The blue is stained DNA (the small ones are sperm nuclei and the larger ones are regular cell nuclei), and the green is exc-6 a formin in the worm, formins make unbranched actin filaments (among other things)

Here's the link to the full text of the article if anyone cares to read it. (I did a lot of work on this one so I'm pretty proud, even though a lot of the work didn't make it into the paper because it disproved things we thought....oops)

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... CD8.f03t04

Essentially, a paper needs to tell a story. In this case, how exc-6 and fhod-1 (another formin) are acting in the animal to allow for proper fertilization and ovulation. A lot of the work I did showed what they weren't doing, and, worse some things we thought were cool until we quantified the results and saw they weren't real, which is disappointing. Lady Science can be a real bitch. (I did get some really pretty images though). We have word count limits and other labs dont care what we didnt see haha. That's why I'm third author even though I did way more work than Forrest on this. (Also, because Forrest is a grad student and I'm just a tech, so by definition it's way more important to his career than mine...so Anna decided that between my "failed" work that isn't actually in the text, and that I'd be third. I'm pretending to be pissed about it, which has been great fun for all three of us)

If someone reads it and is curious to see if we tried other stuff (like my work) they'd just email us and ask

The work I did will go in our annual report to the NIH saying how we spent our grant money, so it's not like it disappeared or didn't count or anything. The stuff I'm doing for the next paper will be a huge part of it, and I'm hella excited to do one of my favorite assays again so yeah.

YAY! It's like science!

Negative results only means it's less sexy to outside observers. Properly executed science is never failure.

Obviously you know that, but I don't want you to be the only one telling you how awesome and valuable you are.