In order to cut the bone at an angle to the collagen fibres we have had to design a system to hold the bone sections in place for the bone saw. Today I glued about 30 pieces of bone onto chunks of polystyrene. The polystyrene will be held in the bone saw clamp allowing us [...]

One of the ways in which we are experimenting with preparing the bone is to soak it in a formic acid solution to remove the hydroxyapatite. I left these old pieces of pig bone in 5% formic acid for six days and they came out slightly bendy, which is what I was expecting because it [...]

In order to contain a buffer solution filled with suspended E-coli bacteria in an electrophoresis gel structure in such a way as to allow the current to run through the buffer but not to allow the bacteria to seep out, it has been neccessary to make agarose wells on slides. The bacteria is contained in [...]

Usually such an event would pass me by entirely, but yesterday there were a couple of separate incidents that brought it to my attention. After yoga I dropped by a friends place and we were talking about how it would be very different to grow up in a place like Rome where you are rubbing [...]

Well I’m finally ready to get started on my vibrating tissue culture experiments. I have strung the structure with elastic to support the tissue culture flasks and wired up all the electronics. I had to buy a new vibrating bullet for the blue vibrator because I accidentally blew it up a couple of weeks ago [...]

Well you woudn’t believe how long it takes to thoroughly de-fat a bone. I finally seem to be getting the hang of it. The trick I found is to scrape them down with a scalpel before placing in the bone rotting tank. Then it doesn’t take so long for all the flesh to come off [...]

Experiments with galvanotactic bacteria. Galvanotaxis refers to the phenomenon whereby an organism moves in response to an electrical current. In this project I am working with E-coli, one of the most common bacteria used in the life science. E-coli has been shown to move in a current – either towards the anode or the cathode, [...]