Siliceous and Delicious

Found a website that lists excitation and emission wavelengths for a bunch of fluorescent dyes, to figure out what lasers I’ll need to test the dyes I started experimenting with yesterday on the CLSM. Evangelos has been evasive as seems to be the norm for CNS employees—whilst being very generous with assurances of his willingness to help and his certainty that we can make things work out on the Olympus CLSM as a back-up, he was decidedly stingy in releasing any information about when the Zeiss scope would be coming back online (“the Zeiss will be down for a while”).

Anyway. Best not to dwell on the barriers, but work on those paths that show some horizon. The relevant wavelengths:

• Fluorescein: 494, 518 nm
• Calcofluor: 440, 500-520
• Ruthenium red: couldn’t find any information on ruthenium red as a fluorescent dye. As far as I can tell, it’s used as a histological stain and as an inhibitor of Ca uptake and release in mitochondria. Not as a fluorescent dye. Did Jacques make a mistake here?

Spent the rest of the morning making slides of these—and then, in a fit of frustration over the mess and sheer dirt in the lab, cleared and scrubbed most of the counter space of the wet lab to make the space a little more conducive to doing research. It felt good to clean, and the place looks much better, so I was inspired to move ahead and try again to weigh my radiolarian samples from Dave. This, again, was not so successful. I had bought some glass petri dishes yesterday and washed them, but in drying them they had accumulated a large amount of lint from the paper towel I used—and under the picking scope it became clear just how big the lint fibers are compared to the radiolarians (they are orders of magnitude larger). I will have to thoroughly clean the microscope stage and petri dish and get it as dust- and lint-free as I can before I start my next weighing attempt. Another problem with the newer method I tried today (which involved stroking the brush on the dry petri dish to remove picked radiolarians from the brush to the destination petri dish) is that I never know exactly where I’ve already deposited radiolarians. Thus, I risk picking up previously deposited radiolarians when I’m trying to put down new ones. A possible solution (now that I’m going to be evaporating away the water before weighing) is to fill the destination petri dish with water and then swirl the brush in one end of that to release the radiolaria, but then tilt the dish slightly to encourage the rads to settle on the other end of the petri dish.

At 3 pm I was due to meet Evangelos to have him show me the Olympus CLSM, but when I walked over there I could not find him anywhere. I did bump into Tanja Bosak, though, who asked how things were going for me—I gave the honest answer, which always leaves me feeling about as low as I can get, and although she wished me well, this was about all I could take for the day, so I rustled up a group of fellow EPSers and made a beeline for the Berryline.

A good day for getting the lab cleaned. A good day for being sunny and warm.