Hijacking of the victim immune response by insect venom?

I just gave a small presentation on how alum and other particulate adjuvants work via the "danger" signal system that is the NLRP3 inflammasome, with summaries here. I won't bother summarising anything here about it because it has already been done rather well at the link I just provided. I also feel lazy. Anyway while preparing my presentation, I did a last minute check on Pubmed for any new developments and apparently hyaluronan (among everything as it seems) triggers the NLRP3 inflammasome to produce IL1β.¹ Hyaluronan is a component of the extracellular matrix and it is released at a site of injury. By happenstance, I found out while trolling Google that insect venom contains hyaluronidase which obviously breaks down hyaluronan but also promotes the production of IgE and IgG1.^2,3 I think it's pretty neat that hyaluronidase in insect venom is an adaptation to adjuvant the victim's allergic response to insect stings.

yay I learned something today

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1. Yamasaki K, Muto J, Taylor KR, Cogen AL, Audish D, Bertin J, Grant EP, Coyle AJ, Misaghi A, Hoffman HM, Gallo RL. NLRP3/cryopyrin is necessary for IL-1beta release in response to hyaluronan, an endogenous trigger of inflammation in response to injury. J Biol Chem. 2009 Mar 3 (epublication ahead...) doi:10.1074/jbc.M806084200
2. King TP. (haha sorry he must have gotten shit as a kid) Venom Allergenicity: Hyaluronan Fragments Promote Ige And Igg1 Response In Mice. J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2009 Feb; 123(2): S1, page S99 doi:10.1016/j.jaci.2008.12.355
3. King TP, Spangfort MD. Structure and biology of stinging insect venom allergens. Int Arch Allergy Immunol. 2000 Oct;123(2):99-106. doi: 10.1159/000024440

What organisms can vegans work with?

I've been thinking about this, and it would seem that the only organisms that vegans can work with in biology in terms of not using any animal products would be photosynthetic or saphrotrophic organisms, maybe. I guess vegans could work in paleontology, but I think dead organisms would be an obvious exception.

Let me back up. Obviously vegans should not work with animals because poking, prodding, and killing animals wouldn't fit with their aim of not harming animals. Even observers of animal behaviour would inevitably have to harm animals in some fashion, I think. They cannot work with cell culture because cell culture requires animal products like fetal bovine serum (fetal calf serum, what's the difference anyway?) and bovine serum albumin. They cannot work with yeast or bacteria because a lot of growth media requires protein sources like hydrolysed milk casein. Ditto with most other branches of life, because ultimately I'd think one would have to use animal products somewhere in there. Even plants might be tricky especially since molecular biology has its fingers in practically every field of experimental biology including botany-- for instance, cloning plant DNA would inevitably require bacteria. Unless a vegan were content to spend their scientific career describing plants or other organisms in the most superficial way without molecular biology, then I think there really is no career in experimental biology for vegans.

I would love it if a vegan could confirm this, or otherwise correct any misconception of mine about the vegan lifestyle. Anyway, that's my small thought of the day.

Literature grinding sucks

So I have to write a fake research proposal and so far I've learned that reading lots of articles in a short time span sucks. Also, I haven't written a thing and it's due in a day-- yay! The plus side to all this reading is that I've got several topics I've been incubating in my head but so far I haven't committed them to blog. One day. But seriously, I'm going to list a few topics so that it's out there and I'll feel committed to writing about them:

• Sea urchin immunity, what I know and why we should all be interested.
  
• NK cell memory and how I'm going to draw an analogy to sea urchins.
  
• Wax disgusting over how cute cells look with two-photon microscopy. So cute!
  
• My first transgenic GFP sea urchin larva, which still has to be born...
  
• Miscellany. heh.
  

Also, I got accepted into the department of immunology at UofT, which while unsurprising is still excellent news. Huzzah!

New year. blah

So I finished a crushing semester of molecular immunology, developmental immunology, practical immunology, with electives of functional genomics and bioinformatics. I'm still afraid to check my marks, which is childish, but I think rounding out a undergraduate education has that infantilising effect. Or, perhaps, I'm getting old.

Anyway, I resolve to actually write about neat stuff I've encountered or learned. I think I didn't use this blog too much before because, well, I knew shit. I probably still know shit, but nevertheless I feel like I should share some perhaps-not-shit. Whee!

Sea Urchin Ethics

So I'm playing with purple sea urchins this summer, which I'm pretty excited about although I probably won't go into sea urchin immunity right now. But sea urchins! Like many models of development like Drosophila or C. elegans, there are minimal ethics with regard to what one can do to them, unlike traditional immunology animal models like mice. At any rate, "ethics" are wooly in my opinion because the ultimate reason it seems for why chordates get special consideration is morphological similarity. Doubtlessly many people have had metaphysical discussions about "ethics" and their anthropocentric derivation, so I won't belabour the point. However, one of the ethical considerations when working with sea urchins is that one must promise not to eat them.

Yeah, I laughed too when I heard that, mainly because I was secretly thinking about it. In all likelihood, they'd be just as delicious as those found in culinary establishments because we get our sea urchins fresh from the Pacific (no one raises them because they're dead easy to harvest, with the added plus of removing kelp forest predation). However, the ones we get are pretty small (biggest are about two inches diameter not including the spikes), and when you take in account that only the gonads are edible, they're not much of a meal. Furthermore, the lab I'm working in works a lot with sea urchin larvae, the formation of which apparently depletes sea urchin gonads and results in their shrinking (sea urchins that spawn get to see the inside of a -20 degrees Celsius freezer unfortunately because no one knows how to make them spawn again and it's too easy to harvest fresh ones). And the best reason why I won't be eating sea urchins this summer is because they're actually pretty cute with their tube feet (one thing that I didn't know sea urchins had until recently).

Anyway, I have this neat blog post to thank for getting me interested in sea urchin immunity: http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2007/09/01/42/

ZOMG TTC STRIKE

While it doesn't affect me personally since I live on campus, a lot of students will be left in a lurch come Monday morning, with final exams and such. I've commuted during a TTC strike before, and the only viable way is taking a car by side streets, which isn't a viable option for many students.

:(

Test Run

As exams draw inexorably closer and the open question as to what I will do with my summer pushes me into finding worthless tasks to perform, I thought I might as well figure out how this blogging thing works. Embedding Youtube videos seems like an excellent way to figure out the space and aesthetics of this. So anyway, I've embedded an excellent judo match between Huizinga and Daffreville at the Super World Cup Paris-Bercy. Inexplicably, it has the acronym "TIVP", which has no relation to the English name or the French name (Tournoi de Paris Ile-de-France Paris-Bercy). Furthermore, my normally excellent Google scholarship has yielded no relevant answers to keywords like "TIVP", "judo", "acronyme", and "èspece de bêtise".

Damn frogs.

The stand-up is fairly good, but the amazing bit is Huizinga's turnover (4:29) that was fairly exotic and unexpected. One of the announcers initially speculated that Huizinga was going for ude-garami, or the kimura armlock as it is known to some, but the arm entanglement looked more like Huizinga was going for ashi-gatame (a sort of armlock performed with one's legs) or sankaku-jime (triangle strangle). Instead, Huizinga makes fools of everyone by working some mysterious magic that turns Daffreville over and gets him into a pin (gyaku-kesa-gatame) for the 25 seconds needed for the win. I like this match not only because it was a brilliant piece of groundwork, but also because I so rarely see pins win matches. I would chalk this up to Huizinga's experience, or what I term "old-man sneaky judo". As an interesting aside, Huizinga qualified for Beijing, for what will probably be his last Olympics at age 37.

Anyway, back to stuffing my head with more molecular biology. Sigh.

First Post!

:)