A plethora of milestones

Oscar is growing fast!  The past few weeks have been exciting, filled with teeth, crawling, and doctors appointments!   Evidence of his new crawling skills:



We are now on full alert when Oscar is un-caged.  He especially likes cat food and their water fountain. Every time he is set free he makes a b-line for a quick snack and refreshing splash.

The doctors visit was also a success.  He is healthy with no signs of pneumonia lingering.  He was happy to grab the doctors stethoscope.  He was measures and weighed as well.  His weight was right in the middle of the chart but boy is he tall.  This  is a copy of his growth curve:

The doctor was surprised at his agility and height but happy that he was bright and healthy.  Such a good baby.

gone fishin

Mendelian statistics

I now have a single-insert, homozygous, transgenic plant line! This is a big deal because I can let plants of this line self-fertilize and all the progeny will also be transgenic, forever and ever. These plants will let me graduate!

I know because I counted the number of plants in each generation that grew in the presence of an antibiotic. In the first generation, there was just one plant, the parent of all the following generations. The seeds that this plant produced were mixed: 70% grew, and 30% died on the antibiotic. This was good news, because it meant only a single antibiotic resistance gene was inserted into the genome. Sometimes, with the methods I used, the resistance gene can be inserted more than once, which makes tracking the genotype much more difficult. If that had happened, more like 90% of the plants would have grown, and 10% would have died.

So of the 70% of plants that were resistant in the second generation, I saved 15, and let them self-fertilize to produce the third generation. Each of the 15 plants produced 10-40 seeds, and I sowed all of the seeds on media containing the antibiotic: about 500 seeds in all.

I counted, for each second-generation plant, how many seeds were resistant or not. Six of the 15 had all resistant seeds: they were homozygous. Nine of the fifteen had mixed seeds, with 72% resistant:  they were heterozygous. Now I am growing up plants from the homozygous bunch to get lots of seeds to continue experimenting with.

It is interesting to see how the statistics play out in real-life. According to Mendelian rules of inheritance the resistance of heterozygous lines should always be 75%, and probably, if I had used more like 200 seeds, I would have seen that percentage. But with only 40 seeds to sow, these numbers look pretty good. If I want to be most rigorous, I will have to apply the Chi-squared test.

It is also interesting because I have followed this procedure not with just one plant line (meaning a first-generation plant) but 12: 6,000 seeds! And this is for just one transgene - I have 4 so far that I am making: 24,000 seeds! Each seed is placed by hand (my hand!) on the media. And this number of 24,000 is not quite sufficient to determine if the plant line is single-insert and homozygous just from counting the number of resistant plants. If I had plenty of seeds, I should look at 5 times as many: 120,000 seeds!

Mendel was a very patient man, and I am glad I have the Chi-squared test to rely on.

just stumbling along

it's still hot

but not quite so hot as before. The crystals hanging in the window in my room have started casting rainbows on the walls again. And I'm interested in oatmeal for breakfast. Soon Oscar will have to start wearing clothes when he's at home! To keep warm! Here's what he thinks about that:

Can babies have disgust?

yoga boy

Oscar had a nice way of eating Cheerios while we were in Maryland. He doesn't do it so much any more, though, especially now that he's got some sharp edges in his mouth! They are very sharp.

In which Oscar yells at his toy...

..Or possibly tries to sing along with it.

The future is here

This was a few days ago... everyday he improves upon his army crawl technique.  Soon there is no turning back and we need to baby proof....

Deep Creek Lake!

We went on family vacation last week to Deep Creek Lake wayyy out in western Maryland.  I was having too much fun so these are all the pictures I took. Oscar made a lot of progress in his floor exercises, especially in getting stuck under furniture, and renewed his acquaintance with cousin Henry. Eric read 8 books. I visited the lake as much as possible. A good time was had by all!

And now we're back, and it's just the three of us, and we have to buy our own beer and baby food. But boy were the cats happy to see us!

trapped lightning

Johnnie got me these for my birthday. They are acrylic disks in which an electrical discharge occurred, forming these nice fractal patterns. He's been hassling me to get some pictures up, so here they are. They are similar to air hockey pucks. I think I will hang them in the window!

as promised -

So way back in July Annie and her friend Laura drove through on their way from Chicago to LA. Laura took lots of photos of Oscar. Annie took a few, and I took none. Most of the documentation therefore now resides in LA. But Annie sent along the ones she took, and they are quite nice.

Oscar and Laura's dog, Gus. It is not so easy to get a dog and a baby to look at the camera at the same time...

We went to Horsetooth Reservoir for a little preview of the lake experience, and I only brought twice as much stuff as we needed. Oscar is sleeping in his car seat. The reservoir was wonderful - lots of water, not too cold, a tree with some shade and only a few other people. This is one of two swimming beaches. We went to the other one last summer and that isn't so much a beach as a red and rocky area. This one, though, has sand and everything. When Eric and I have weekends together again I hope we go back!

Here is a sweet video of fluorescent protein moving around inside a root hair (which is a single cell protruding off of a root) of one of my transgenic plants: http://makeagif.com/i/NZpGAo

And finally, Oscar's floor routine. Notice that he has done a 180 by the end. I have watched him go a full 360 chasing a toy around, which is something, but still quite different from forward motion. Soon, soon our lives will change forever, and the cats will learn a whole new terror.

Couch baby

I haven't forgotten, the video etc. is coming later today. Somebody wasn't taking his naps like normal yesterday, because he slept 14 hours the night before. I had put him to bed for his third nap and he decided that would just sleep on through.

This morning he ate Cheerios all by himself! I realize now that it's a complex set off skills for a baby, because of all the ways Oscar messes it up. He has to pick it up, and put it in his mouth, and let go (or let it dissolve into mush, either way takes concentration).

He also got himself stuck under the couch - classic baby!

A few thoughts

Oscar likes to pull the light chain after he's done eating. He may consider it his prize. He definitely appreciates being closer to the fan, which he only recently became aware of. I love that he sticks his tongue out when he's concentrating hard.

One day I'll learn to avoid taking back-lit photos. 

He's grabbing his feet and sucking on his toes a lot these days.

He really likes my Crocs! How could I resist that wicked, pleading face? I did, though, because I am in charge and the Crocs are covered in nasty lab cooties.

The fung has advanced. Now it looks like the puffball from Tintin. PS, I watched the Tintin movie the other night, and liked it.

Tomorrow there will be pictures up from when Annie was here, and a new movie of the little wiggle-butt.

These guys are awesome.

They also play pretty much exclusively in a pizza shop.

a video

In which Oscar attempts to pick up some cereal, and also to drink from his own cup. Background music courtesy of our delightful neighbors.



The neighbors are starting to fill me with rage, because they let their dogs outside at 6:30 every morning. It must be when their alarm goes off to get ready for work. This is not just one neighbor either, I think the whole neighborhood is synchronized. And the dogs all start to have a little morning barking chain, and they do it until they are brought back inside, which might be after the owners get home from work. It is especially bad on garbage day, because then the dogs also have to yell at the garbage trucks for intruding. I even discussed it with our next-door neighbor, who has the loudest dog, and she was very sympathetic but then hasn't changed anything. And I even called the HOA management people, who said they would send a letter to everyone. I never received the letter, but maybe that's because I made the call. On Tuesday there's a neighborhood party. At least then I'll meet these creendas.

Goodbye July! Happy August! It's actually getting dark before bedtime now (not Oscar's bedtime, that's still ridiculously early).