Off-Topic Forum

Project Engineer, currently in the Aerospace and Defense sector.

Retired software developer/manager.  I fill my time officiating volleyball several nights a week and doing handyman work.  I even drive Grubhub and UberEats now and then.  All more fun these days than sitting behind a computer screen all day.

I work for a large school district...data anaylist, but I have over 1200 subscribers on You Tube...does that make me a "YouTuber" too??? ;) (I know, don't quit your day job!!)

Missionary Pastor in small town, rural Northern California. Loved reading through this thread and seeing the vast range of backgrounds and careers! 

I mow the lawn. My wife and I are both retired, hope to do more traveling once this Covid is done.

Wet bench scientist - worked on lots of different targets and therapeutic modalities such as small molecules, gene editing and other biologics.

Do you want to elaborate on that in any way? I am seriously curious. I understand some of it and would like to know more.

Yeah sure.  Sorry it took so long, I just have a lot of work.

The central dogma of biochemistry is structure = function.  How do we study that relationship?  Through a variety of engineered systems that start with the word recombinant.  So, we make a recombinant DNA plasmid that encodes a gene of intresest.  That gets put into a recombiant cellular system, for example an engineered e. coli strain that transcribes the DNA into RNA that gets translated into protein.  We isolate the protein of interest from all the e. coli material.  We then create assays to characterize the protein.  Since structure = function, we can create mutations and other variants of the protein and see how it changes how the protein behaves in our assays.

Some assays can be enzymatic assays - for example, does it digest a substrate or attach a chemcial to another biological molecule.  If the protein is not an enzyme, we can measure it's biophyscial properties such as how tightly it binds to other things.  

For drug discovery, you can then test how these processes get disrupted when you add in non-native chemical matter (again as just one example).

Hope this gives you a better idea of what I do!

I actually do understand what you are saying and what you do. Thank you for expounding on that! It's way more complicated than what I do, as well as being more complicated than what the people are doing that I am coming in afterwards to clean up the mess. What you do leads to what they can do for the patients and I just make sure the clinic is clean and sanitary for the next patients arriving every morning!

I've been a soldier, construction worker (heavy equipment operator) & warehouse worker. Semi-retired now, wanting to travel this great country of ours.