Sticky Ends.

Jnr is having a rather stressful crisis at present; his next great treatise has to be submitted on Sunday – printed and bound. I am the reinforcement that is supposed to come galloping over the horizon, my remit being to highlight any portions of text that are a little vague; The Prof is hot on that, I have seen previously proffered documents covered in his red ink. He is, of course, absolutely correct; research is nothing if not a precise science and so the researcher must be pedantic in the extreme. While checking the text I came across the term, “Sticky end” and had to Google it to make sure that such a thing really existed; in spite the image I have of Ken Dodd asking, “Do you have sticky ends, Missus?” They really do exist, though more than that, I can’t tell you.
 
I am somewhat surprised to find that my little boy is there in a lab, in darkest Nottingham, cutting up bits of DNA and, apparently, using the pieces to synthesise proteins. Of course, I don’t understand it other than in the vaguest possible sense, though I have been to two talks recently on such topics. After the previously reported U3A lecture about Roslin’s most famous daughter, I was at Perth for a similar discourse on the honey bee genome which considered the topic of taking a sample of DNA from a bee and separating it from the non-bee DNA; welcome to the world of the microbiome. Amongst the non-bee material was Trypanosoma brucei, a monophyletic, unicellular, parasitic, flagellate protozoan whose generic name comes from the Greek for spiral and the specific from someone called Bruce. In vertebrates, this parasite is transmitted by the tsetse fly, infects the blood and causes sleeping sickness whose treatment is often fatal. In insects it is a gut parasite causing dysentery (I hope you’re not eating your breakfast, but you can guess how this variant is spread) and “negatively affects reproduction.” Completing the circle, T. brucei is one of the organisms whose genome Jnr is investigating and, I suspect that I have as much idea about what he is doing as he does.