Is anyone on Veeky Forums going to a uni doing some groundbreaking research?

MMR RIP

Visits are limited to those that discover parts of our masterplan. Sorry.

>we'll be adding more stuff. Like bits of dead babies
gee, thanks a lot. Don't forget to add in some weird proteins that might fuck up my immune responses completely.

Ram

Your vaccine gave me Asperger's

Nope, MMR is actually pretty good in terms of efficacy.

I like to add semen into my petri dishes to see how different immune cells respond to it

Settle your affairs. Expect a visit from our reptilian overlords.

YES

I'm studying the properties of the Higgs boson with the ATLAS experiment.

I'm studying CRISPR and bacterial peptidoglycan's self-shape generation

young people always feel theres a need to hurry up when theres really not. 2 years isnt a big difference.

I lost 10 years because life happened

you deal with it and man up, end of story

Next semester I might be doing research on the impact of the 2008 recession on child welfare in the US

Not groundbreaking but w/e, I'm a lowly undergrad

Was studying small RNA regulation networks in bacteria for my M.Sc., currently considering several ideas for my PhD research

Self-shape?
???????
What does crispr have to do with that?

Post ur model plz.
Just e coli or what?

Yup, but we developed an experimental-computational method that can be applied to many other bacteria easily, and are currently applying it to several other species.
I am not going to post it because it's published in a pretty good journal and I'd rather not say who I am.

;_; mmk maybe I will encounter it in my studies. Im currently stuck working on gene editing tools for the dosh. Good to see fellow computational biologist here. Did u study bioengineering in undergrad?

If you'll work on small regulatory RNAs you hopefully will, since a lot of people are already looking to collaborate/use our methodology.
I'm actually in an MD/PhD program, so I did my pre-clinical studies as undergrad (my country uses the 6-year Med-school model) and finished most of the M.Sc. in parallel, then took a 3-4 year break from Med-school to finish the M.Sc. and work on PhD.
I think there are actually a few computational biologists on Veeky Forums since bioinformatics threads usually get some replies.

Quick question from someone interested in developmental biology and morphogenesis.
How close are we to programming shape into multicellular DNA? Are we even aware of the most major control mechanisms or are we still stumbling upon new things?

tfw too beta to ask to do research
tfw in a tiny department that shits out maybe one paper a year.

Not a big expert on cellular shape or on Eukaryotes, so I'll just write what I've come to learn in my field.
In bacteria (which is what I work on) shitloads of KOs lead to single cell level shape-related phenotypes that we can't always explain (you can scan through the Keio collection to see some examples). Additionally multicellular cooperation and gradients forming macro-phenotypes are not well studied at all, we are just getting the tools needed to study things like that in depth now (tools like single-cell sequencing). I assume this is all far more complicated in Eukaryotes, but probably more studied, at least at the multicellular level (in contrast to the shape of a single cell). I know embryologists have put out a sizable body of work exploring the molecular mechanisms behind the shape of limbs for instance. No idea how much of the variation it explains and at what resolution.
Regarding control mechanisms and generally "how much of the cell we understand", I'll write my opinion in the next post.

I believe that there is still a lot to discover. Currently we can explain very little of the variation in gene expression for instance, and nearly nothing of its dynamics (which are super-important to model anything). Attempts to model E. coli cells have been fairly unsuccessful and abandoned as far as I know. Though it seems smaller genomes are being modeled thanks to advanced in synthetic microbiology (which is a super exciting field to be in right now).
I don't know if there are huge vital mechanisms we haven't discovered yet. But I am certain that we have a lot more to explore about the mechanisms we already know. Out technique for instance increased the known sRNA regulatory network in E. coli by an order of magnitude, and there are still sRNA interactions we don't know about. And for each interaction like that you have to understand the dynamics, the competition, the conditions in which it occurs, the localization, etc. to understand its true impact on expression. And this is just one aspect of cellular regulation, we can't even explain most of the relation between mRNA abundance and protein levels (Paul Gardner's recent work on aversion just showed another vital mechanism we had no idea about). Considering the fact that you get another new interesting regulatory mechanism every other month in Cell, there are bound to be many more minor mechanisms that have a large impact together.
But I think the biggest question is what you want to use the modelling for. Our models are obviously far from good enough to test simulated antibiotics on, but in a few years they may be good enough to help us learn about how changes like temperature will impact the cell. Hopefully at some point we can directly predict genotype->phenotype relations, but I'm afraid that's many years in the future.

I still don't know if what I did for my master's was relevant or not. The professor acted like it was, but nothing came out of it and all we got were side results from what we wanted to do.

>MD/PhD
mem

Thanks for answering. It sounds like there are still many interesting things to be discovered.

If I even attain financial security I'm diving into cell and developmental biology.

Really?> Where at? I'm doing something similar, but on what is really more of a brainlet level atm

Plant hormone signaling. There's a surprising amount of shit about it we have no idea how it does what it do