User:Brian P. Josey/Notebook/2010/02/03

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Today's Stuff
Yeah, I couldn't think of a more creative title.

Cone Magnets
Andy found some nice conical magnets that might help us out. They are over at the | Super Magnet Man and are simply called cone magnets. They are made out of neodymium, and are polarized to have the south pole at the tip of the cone. The sizes range from 1/2 in base and height, to 2 in base and height. I don't know how large our yolk is, so the smaller one might be too large.

CINT Proposal
I read through the CINT proposal, and it seams like a generally good idea. I liked the idea of having different potential configurations of the magnets, and the resulting distribution of the magnetic particles in the cell. Would the yoke we have create a central line in the cell between the two magnets? I had originally imagined all of the ferritin going to one side of the cell, congregating in one spot, like in "a" in the picture, but the different set-ups all make sense, and I like the idea of having options. If the idea works, I would like to try all of the experiments listed. Of course, after going through all the foot work, finding support, and learning how to do everything. But they should be interesting experiments.

Also, I wanted to read through the cited Won paper, | A magnetic nanoprobe technology for detecting molecular interactions in live cells but it was retracted by Science last April. If I have some free time, I'll thumb through it, just to get ideas, but I won't take it too seriously.

Ferritin Paper
I read a paper on the structure of ferritin in healthy, and unhealthy individuals. It is titled Electron nanodiffraction and high-resolution electron microscopy studies of the structure and composition of physiological and pathological ferritin by C. Quintana et al. Here is the | PubMed page.

The paper was primarily motivated by an earlier suggestion that ferritin cores were structured differently in pathalogical, from patients suffering diseases, and physiological, from normal and healthy cells, samples. The authors also wanted to apply electron nanodiffraction, | high-resolution transmission electron microscopy and | electron energy loss spectroscopy to the proteins. Most of their results are related to the degenerative diseases | PSP and Alzheimer's disease. While that is not really relevant, to what I'm doing, they did find some interesting results concerning the structure of the iron core in ferritin.

I have more to say about this, but I need to go. I will finish my writeup on this paper when I finish my homework.


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