start again??

So as I explained last week there was a slight change of plans. The non functioning tropomyosin caused a few alterations and I was suddenly a detective on a different case. A case I thought I was going to follow up this week. However, due to science being more expensive and taking more time than I might have I was led on to another trail these week.

As the tropomyosin mutations didn't work my supervisor was kind enough to supply me with some troponin mutations. Troponin is also part of the thin filament so the effects of the mutations would be possible to investigate the same way as the tropomyosin mutations would have been originally. Hence this is what I did. And this time I was provided with results that one could understand. However, this has now provided me with a lot of data for my report. The report I will write next week as it is my LAST one :(

We need PROOF!

So dear readers as I’ve mentioned the aim for my 7 weeks here in the lab was to investigate the effects of tropomyosin mutations causing skeletal muscle myopathise. This being done with the aid of ATPase assays. As you might have understood by my earlier blogs, ATPase assays is something I’ve done a lot and without blowing my own horn I would say it’s kind of my specialty now. So imagine my surprise when doing them this week with the mutated tropomyosin and getting weird results indeed. Only doubting my skills slightly I re-did the assay until I was in fear of running out of my precious mutant and still I had no understandable data. Now naturally this is science, things don’t always turn out the way you hoped. But fear not, you always have to joy of investigating WHY it didn’t turn out as expected.

My supervisor was sure the mutant had not been transcribed properly, but one cannot be sure without proof. So proof I got. Well tried to get. Many things were investigated and finally a co-sedimentation showed us the light, the mutant wasn’t binding to actin. Obviously my supervisor had his ideas about why the mutant wasn’t binding to actin. However, proof is still needed for these ideas too, so it’s pretty obvious what I’ll be doing next week isn’t it.