Welcome to Our Blog
Thank you for visiting our website. We are a relatively small lab with big ideas. We are part of a much larger group of investigators known collectively as the LLUMC Molecular Radiation Biology Laboratories. It is our hope that this website will educate, communicate, and incite scientific debate. As the PI of our little group, I hope to post our data and discuss potential mechanisms, consequences, and countermeasures. With a bit of luck we'll all learn something. The links to the left include our merry band as well as collaborating investigators and laboratories. The links to the right include our archive and blogroll. The banner above will always bring you back to the main page page. Take a look around and please feel free to leave a comment on our blog (try to keep it civil and constructive) or shoot us an e-mail. - Michael " Ubertramp " Pecaut
Radiation Research Society Meeting
Posted by: Ubertramp on 2010.05.03
Categories & Tags: Gamma Radiation,Low Dose Radiation,Macrophage,Oxidative Burst,Radiation,Society Meeting
Comments: None
We recently submitted an abstract for the annual Radiation Research Society meeting. This year it is in Maui. I’m not sure if I’ll have the money to go or not but several of us at the lab are planning to attend. Worst case, I may send my poster with one of them. The work for this abstract was done almost exclusively by my tech, Erben Bayeta, and our summer student Cory Pan. Cory is planning on returning to our lab this summer to do some follow up studies. I’m sure we have more than enough to keep him busy. 
Celso Perez has joined us to start doing some work in his spare time (he’s actually our lab manager). He should have some data on a third cell line by the time the symposium comes around. I’ve attached some of the data we are presenting to this post. Read More..
Summer Student Research
Posted by: Ubertramp on 2009.08.14
Categories & Tags: Gamma Radiation,Macrophage,New Results,Oxidative Burst,Radiation
Comments: None
Cory Pan is a student from Chaparral High School who spent the summer working in our lab as part of the Apprentice Bridge to College (ABC) minority research program. We only had about seven weeks to train him and get through a series of experiments. Due to the limitations in time, we decided that he should do some in vitro work characterizing one of our macrophage cell lines after exposure to radiation. Although he wasn’t allowed to irradiate the cells themselves, he did all of the other cell culture work on his own (with Erben looking over his shoulder). By working his butt off, he managed to run the experiment at least eight separate times. In the end, five of the experiments were good enough to include in the final analysis. He ended up with some pretty interesting results. During his last week, he had to present a poster describing his work to the public. Read More..
Lab Update
Posted by: Ubertramp on 2009.07.06
Categories & Tags: Brookhaven National Laboratory,Gamma Radiation,Grant,Grant Proposal,Microgravity,New Publication
Comments: None
I seem to have a distinct lack of content, don’t I? Which is sad because quite a few things have been going on lately.
Most importantly, Farnaz graduated. Yeah, team! Her oral defense went well, despite her butterflies and the committee was impressed. She’s off studying for her MCAT over the summer, but she promises me that she’ll come back in the fall and convert two chapters of her dissertation into two manuscripts. She better because she put a ton of work into those studies and dataz must be published! Heh. She was also awarded a travel grant for the upcoming Radiation Research Meeting in Savannah, Georgia. In fact, they selected her abstract for an oral presentation so they must have thought she did something worth hearing. Read More..
Lab Update
Posted by: Ubertramp on 2009.04.12
Categories & Tags: Gamma Radiation,Grant,Low Dose Radiation,Microgravity,NASA,New Publication,Protons,Radiation,Space Shuttle,T cell
Comments: None
It’s been a couple of months since the last update, so it’s about time. We have some good news and some bad news. The bad news first. My NASA grant was turned down for funding. I haven’t seen the review yet, so I’m not sure why. Nor do I know who or what actually DID get funded. Guess we’ll have to see.
Ironically (or coincidentally, I haven’t decided which), we received the acceptance letter from JAP for our third immune publication from the last shuttle flight on the same day. The reviewers were pretty rough on us, though. It bounced back and forth three times before they finally accepted it. Farnaz was pretty excited as this was her first publication. Woot! Now all she has to do is finish her dissertation and graduate. Hahaha. It’s still an Epub ahead of print, so I don’t have a reprint. Give it a few weeks. Read More..
Radiation, Macrophages, and Oxidative Burst
Posted by: Ubertramp on 2008.07.04
Categories & Tags: Gamma Radiation,Macrophage,Mouse,New Results,Oxidative Burst,Radiation
Comments: None
We’ve been working with a couple of macrophage cell lines over the last few years and I thought I’d toss up some of our latest results. For those of you who don’t know, macrophages are involved in the initial response to bacterial infections (along with a bunch of other cells such as neutrophils). These particular experiments involve a macrophage cell line, J774, originally cultured from an inbred mouse strain, Balb/c.
The first thing you need to know is that J774s are a transformed cell line. Which basically means two things: 1) we can grow them in dish and 2) they ain’t normal.
