Yeah, it seems to be a down day. Why? Not enough sleep, too much trouble in the world. Osama Bin Laden is dead and people are celebrating. Because it's justice? I don't know. I don't see a lot of justice in the world. Christ said forgive, but we don't. We'd rather get in the last word, the last slap, the last shot. I'm not much different. I try to be fair to those around me, but if my kids are nasty to me, I tend to be nasty right back. Not always, no not always.
So, that's how my day started. Shooting, killing and celebrating on the news. I just wanted to know if it was really going to rain for two days, because I never got around to mowing the lawn on Saturday. Thought I'd do it today. Well, it's not raining much, but a shower at 9 am will keep the grass too wet to mow for quite a while. No problem, there are lots of other jobs to do.
I did some jobs and was just sitting down to eat my lunch and decided to do a little Ess1 search, to have something to read while I ate. Ess1 is the name of the protein and gene I used to work on in Steve's lab in Albany. I really loved the work and the lab. I like to check in now and then and see what the scientific world has discovered about it, because it still interests me. Well, I discovered just a few papers. Nobody has figured out the thing that really interests me. It would take a while to explain what that is. Well, the short version is that Ess1 (the protein) binds to the end of RNA Polymerase II, which is a really huge protein that takes DNA and uses its pattern to make RNA. RNA is then used as a pattern to make protein by another big protein. Anyway, Ess1 binds to the end of RNA polymerase II at what is called the CTD tail. It's made up of repeating patterns of amino acids. They're the building blocks of proteins. When it binds, it changes the shape (conformation) of the tail and allows phosphates to be removed from certain amino acids. That, in turn, allows certain small RNAs to be completed and leave the machinery. I want to know why the elimination of Ess1 causes the cells to be unable to complete cell division and why that dephosphorylation only effects termination of those certain RNAs and not all RNAs.
Anyway, nobody who reads this cares about any of that. It's just that reading about Ess1 and glancing at the papers that have been published, I noticed that the first Ess1 paper that I published with Steve (in 2000) has been referenced in 109 research papers and the last Ess1 paper that I published (in 2004) is referenced in 21 papers, including two really great journals. It makes me almost cry. It makes me miss research. It makes me think I'm a big ungrateful whiner.
Oh, well, I guess it's time to stop moping and do something important, like fold laundry. At least the house is quiet and nobody's trying to kill me (as far as I know).
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