VLAG FLASH - January 2007, Edition 6
On the 9th of October 2006 23 VLAG and WIMEK scientists were gathering at a casual youth-hostel in San Diego downtown. A few had traveled through deserts and great forests to get there. Most were still fresh, flown in straight from Schiphol the Netherlands. At last, well after the sun had set, all pHD-students had arrived. This group of ragged lab rats was headed by a few self-chosen "organisers" and Dr. Serve Kengen. This is their story of what happened in the next two weeks.
San Diego, as I'm sure everybody knows lies in the southwest corner of greater California (e.a. the golden state). Although it lies at a corner of the USA it houses some of the more excellent centers of sciences; a fact our group soon discovered. After allowing some rest for our travelers, which most spent cruising the San Diego beaches and parks, the time for science had arrived. Nearby San Diego, in a small town called La Jolla is housed the huge JCSG facilities. These enthusiasts have the ambition to crystallize all the proteins of (species?)! They have optimized procedures (some very simple, others highly automated) to clone, overproduce, purify and crystallize all the open reading frames they could find in this pet strain. If you check their website, the number of crystallized proteins is steadily rising from week to week. Hereafter, we went to the renowned SCRIPPS institute, here they explained what they are doing in biomedical science. The next place on the list was Diversa, a huge multi-million dollar company applying themselves to mining the global biodiversity and turning it into usable enzymes for industry. To accomplish this ambitious task, they were served by a small army of robots, high-throughput gene-alteration techniques and enzyme screening capacities using up to 400.000 wells-plates! In the next days we were allowed to equilibrate ourselves in the well-known familiar environment of the local universities. Prof. Peter Geiduscheck (USCD) and his group elaborated on Archea found an the ocean floors and the extreme environment of high acidic "acid-mine drains". During the night, after more pizza, we traveled the northwards to of the biggest cities on the planet: Los Angeles or the "city of angles". In the poorest of neighborhoods in this metropolis we found one of the richest of universities: USC. In this most expensive learning institute (annual tuition starts at 50.000$ / year) we heard interesting scientific people talk. We spent the days listening what happens genetically to long-term starved E. coli cells (a culture had been running for almost 5 years!), the interaction of vitamin(-B12) and oceanic microbiota and scientist working on various ocean archeal species. After USC was the turn of UCLA, which lies, in contrast, in one of the richest neighborhood: Beverly Hills. After gawking our eyes at the rich and famous we heard discourses on the "ring of life" by prof. James Lake, meaning the origins of eukaryotes and prof. Robert Club (more Archea).
Before the big-city smog was getting too much, we continued our trip towards our next destination Santa Cruz. But first we strolled along the "walk of fame" on Hollywood Boulevard and paid due homage to our beloved actors and famous personalities: Charley Chaplin, Arnold Schwarzenegger and last but not least Hugh Hefner. Riding along the beautiful costal highways, the pearls of the ocean displayed themselves with their majestic bulk on the beaches and oceans: Dolphins, Sea-elephants, Sea-otter, Sea-lions you-name-it. The wild-life of California has a reality factor that no Zoo- how natural it may seem- can match, there is nothing like seeing an animal in their Wilds. After a long days drive along the coast, our lungs delivered with fresh ocean breeze the strong LA smog, our cars turned into the parking lot of a Santa-Cruzian Hostel. We were steadily approaching the end of our first week. On the campus of UCSC, the University of California Santa Cruze, we met Todd Lowe, a prof. in biomolecular engineering talking about microbial mining of hydrogen-fuels from waste water. Later that night we had to move on and under the full moon we reached our final destination: San Francisco. This city lies on a huge peninsula and is a child of the gold-rush area, born from small villages to metropolis with luck-finders. Nowadays, the city is one of the most preferred cities to live in California with a high-culture, nice people and temperate atmosphere. As a matter of course this hubbub of people draws it's famous learning institute: Stanford, Berkeley, Davis and the famous DOE Joint Genome Institute. Stanford with prof. Wolf Rommer, surprised us with a different scientific meal: using fluorescence to demonstrate protein conformational changes in plants, an actual method to visualize glucose-states inside living cells. Next Barry Bochner, from Biolog, served an interesting story about the difference in phenotype of a single species by merely growing it at different temperatures. As a desert, on the last day we had a show of the DOE JGI-institute, the actual place where the human genome was sequenced, needless to say a true science-factory of sequencing. As all good things must come to an end, the science visits were over. We consoled ourselves in the night-live, on the Boulevards and by sentimental reflection on the Golden Gate Bridge. As quickly as everybodied gathered at San Diego two weeks earlier the whole party of 22 pHD-students and Dr. Serve Kengen dispersed again over the globe...
Rob Brooijmans
