That's just freaky

Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore: coming September one, not first; available September twenty-seven, not twenty-seventh

I never really have any reason to think about muscles, or any particular interest in fast twitch or slow twitch. I've never really thought about turning genes on and off to convert muscle types. Last night I read this story. This afternoon I was here, the Muscle Development Research Unit at the Children's Medical Research Institute, preparing a PCR (polymerase chain reaction, or amplifying a segment of DNA so there's enough copies to work with) for Steve, who had just finished telling Cuc (pronounced "cook") and me about the work he's being doing on a gene that deals with fast/slow twitch muscle.

Warning: you will most likely have no clue what I'm saying in this next paragraph. I'm happy to attmempt a simple explanation if you're interested, otherwise you'll just have to bear with me. There's a certain gene (dealing with muscles, obviously) in humans that has a duplication. The two copies are identical with the exception of a single base pair. The goal is to determine whether both copies are active, or if one is silent. The game plan: after some microbiological fancywork, sequence the mRNA made from the DNA containing the two genes. If only one peak appears in the position of the different base pairs, then only one copy is active because only one base pair is detected. If two peaks appear, both must be active. This is because the mRNA is only made for a protein that's going to be synthesised. And I'm going to be involved in some of the microbiological fancywork. Or at least reproducing some of it. Among a ton of potential other things. The next four weeks of pracs are going to be really cool. Although I may end up hating pipetting even more than I did at the end of biochem.