and 99% cocao solid experiment with Mel Grant.

For the most part I am  continuing to practice my aseptic technique, culturing the muscle cell line PD50A and splitting the cultures into smaller groups when they begin to carpet the flask. Allot of plastic is used in tissue culture, numerous pipettes are used once to minimise risk of contamination form bacteria or yeast. I made some false economies in trying to use less and one of my flasks displayed contamination, lots of dead cells, contracted into spheres and floating in the media rather than adhereing to the bottom and extending.

Here’s an image of a myoblast grabbed online, so not precisely the same but very similar.

I use Janet Smith’s tissue culture room. It has no natural light source and is quiet and conducive to quiet contemplative work - and to looking. A black photograph studio curtain blocks the doors glass panel and black out blind blocks the window. The curtain reminds me that St. Veronica is the patron saint of photography, she who held her veil out to clean Christ’s bloodied face and obtained a print of his face.

Of course science is full of readings of impressions, representations, ocular gazes and mediatations to render that which tips over the edge of sight, visible. In the lab I am surrounded by numerous processes are engaged with  measure, assess, ascertain the movement of discrete molecules.

An ongoing and very welcome aspect are the informal and ongoing conversations in and around the lab, usually in the tea room, with bioscience researchers. Converstation themes move between debating whether my activities really are art? Do science and art practices fundamentally diverge? Linear and lateral working processes, the rationality and the happy accident. And various highly valuable input, for example discussion of 3D and 4D imaging techniques for pretty much anything including cells cultures. In terms of the serndipitous and unexpected insight, today Victor Mikhailov gave the example of the discovery of the C60 molecule structure when the investigators were addressing solving an entirely other problem. We were discussing the painstaking and often repetitive nature of our respective processes, in his case analysing protein structures using mass spectometry techniques.I mentioned Marta de Menezes and her Proteic Potrait, inwhich she used her Portugese name as a sequence for building a protein. See http://www.martademenezes.com/

Scattershot reading actions from:

Ann Veronica, H.G. Wells.

Don Quixote, Kathy Acker.

Spider silk fibres in artificial nerve constructs promote peripheral nerve regeneration , C. Allmeling*, A. Jokuszies*, K. Reimers*, S. Kall*, C. Y. Choi*, G. Brandes†, C. Kasper‡, T. Scheper‡, M. Guggenheim§ and P. M. Vogt*

The new research at the school of Biosciences commenced this week with very gradual effort on my part to reacquaint myself with the lab. Janet (Dr. Smith, my collaborator) left me some cells to practice basic tissue culture on. They are are cell line called PD50A cells. They are muscle cells “mdx-derived skeletal muscle cell line labeled with a retrovirus conferring beta-galactosidase activity and G418 resistance (PD50A)” cited from here. Curiously, PD50A is also the number of a plasma TV model.

I’ve just taken a good long look at them and sub cultured them.

Looking at cells is part of my learning. Cell culture is similar to gardening in that it is proactive and responsive. Initiating situations and then responding to them as they develop - cultivation. I’m curious about the cells morphology and how this might suggest when to feed them (change their nutriant media) and when to sub culture them. Sub culturing is dividing a population of cells into smaller amounts.  Normally it is done when cells are confluent, or “carpeting” the bottom of the tissue culture flask.  My cells are slow growers, they’d made a 60% effort, so I split them anyway, into different population densities to see what they’ll do.

1:10, 3:10, 5:10

(Perhaps I should of gone for a Fibonacci sequence.)

This kind of information is possibly useful to me even at the crude level I am  working at, as I get to manouver around the lab, refresh my aseptic technique and to ponder. Also I hope I acquire some working and thinking knowlege towards what kinds of cell populations might like to grow on spider silk structures. What kind of environments and conditions might encourage such a situation?

Interestingly and wonderfully, a group in Hanouver have made studies towards using spider silk for nerve regeneration purposes. See the abstract here.

Looking down the microscope also reminds me that I want to use drawing as a method of thinking. Janet and I discussed constructing a camera lucida as a way to both study cells and to generate drawing practices. There is a particular kind of thinking that occurs withing the space of drawing when drawing is being made as an investigatory, research practice.