My abstract for the summer, with the help of my grad student advisor who made it sound a little better. We went for the passive voice instead of the first person; in IIT they said its ok in scientific papers.
Under starvation conditions, the single-cell organism Dictyostelium discoideum performs an interesting life cycle in which independent cells aggregate to eventually form a spore that ensures the group’s survival. Cells secrete the chemoattractant cAMP, which directs cell motion toward the aggregate. Analysis of the motion and shape deformations of these cells during migration can be used to better understand cell movement in many cell systems, such as embryogenesis and cancer. This work will involve using custom MATLAB code to analyze image sequences of individual Dictyostelium cells unable to move toward a chemoattractant due to physical obstruction. Such analysis will reveal details of how a cell attaches to a surface and how this attachment is coupled to motion. In addition, time-lapse videos of the Dictyostelium life cycle on different surfaces will be taken, and these group motion data will be analyzed in the context of how surface properties affect group motion.
And now you know.
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In scientific papers, passive voice is not OK, it's essential. No one really cares who's doing the work, as long as it's getting done.
ReplyDeleteActually sounds very cutting edge. I think high-def imaging like this is an easy and useful emerging tool for biophysics. I suggest you learn to code the analytical MATLAB algorithms yourself - this kind of complex motion-tracking is a useful skill and only becoming more so.
ReplyDeleteThis is amazing, I can't believe you get to do this as an undergrad. It may influence your behavior with refrigerators. Not sure.
ReplyDeleteare you allowed to out this? just wondering.
ReplyDeletehaven't been sworn to secrecy yet...
ReplyDeleteThat does sound very cool, and SS is right...knowing and understanding the code you write is worth surprisingly more than the black box approach. Especially when you need to pop open the box and tweak something.
ReplyDeleteMy only disappointment is that you're not working on deinococcus radiodurans. They have interesting cell-cell adhesion properties, AND they're resistant to cold, dehydration, vacuum, acid AND radiation. Maybe next summer... ;-)
Hey mitch!
ReplyDeleteI didn't mean to give the impression that I have no idea how the code works. I do tweak it/ write small side programs when necessary. But the different mathematical algorithms that do the shape analysis and correlations are probably good to learn also.
I'm not entirely sure how resistant dicty cells are to environmental stuff; I think the lab is still unsure if they move differently on the glass in the lab compared to its natural dirt environment. But deinococcus sounds cool.
I just like the colors on this blog so much better.
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