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Today’s song is brought to you by John Mayer: In Your Atmosphere

This person from ccf was at the library last week and listened to a few songs from this album and said:
“oh John, you can be the mayor of my music town..” ha ha ha..

Interestingly enough, the song that I was referring to at the beginning of our conversation on March 7, 08 was a song by Cake: Love You Madly.
The song is so retro-soundingly great. Check it out!

Edit: For any future linking of songs to itunes, use the following iTunes Link

Edit 2: This series of posts does not really mean song of the day, but more so for songs you love so much that it needs to be recommended.

Background: This diagram represents what goes on inside your cell as insulin is present. Specifically, this helps explain Type 1 Diabetes response. The GLUT-4 vesicle is a glucose channel, which normally is inside the cytoplasm. It is recruited to the plasma membrane when signalled by insulin through a cascade of events.
(side note: the method they used for detecting the movement of the GLUT-4 vesicle was by tagging a GFP (green fluorescent protein) to the GLUT-4 and viewing the cell under resting conditions then with an insulin stimulus they can visualize the vesicles moving towards the PM)

Today, in one of my biochem courses, we came across this slide. When the prof put it up, he admitted that he was sorry he had to do this to us. To some temporary relief, he said we didn’t have to know half of this pathway (until the next slide…). But as I listened to him chat off about what some of these proteins do (ex: Akt signaling many different pathways, like PDE3B (phosphodiesterase which converts cAMP>AMP) thereby inhibiting cAMPs which prevent activation of PKA (Protein Kinase A which phosphorylates the hormone-sensitive lipase and requires cAMP for activation)), I couldn’t help but laugh, because it was SO detailed, to think people out there have put this map together really blows my mind.

But what got me was that I saw this map and thought, How can people say there is no God? How can they believe that all this happened through random chance. Sure, evolution dictates that only the fittest and most efficient traits will be passed onto future generations, but there MUST have been a start point. Some creator that had designed this. Each pathway has its own set of regulatory systems, with the more important pathways having very strong levels of regulation. It’s fascinating to see how mutations in a single protein can result in cancerous growth because all of a sudden the cell is now proliferating out of control. As I tried to make sense of it all, I wanted to post this just to share it. I suppose Biochemistry is interesting. Lot of the material being taught goes back to cancer.

Addendum: If you notice, some of these names are so random: SHIP, ASIP, JAK, CRK, SOC, SOS, Ras, Mek 1/2, Bad, Grb1 (pronounced greb). While some scientists like to keep things simple (ex: MAPKKK > MAPKK > MAPK), others like to add to confusion by giving a second name to them but it’s really the same thing (same pathway: RAF > MEK > ERK)

everybody has a point to make….

when are we going to see some updated TPX photos =P yfa…