Web Project 1
Coordinator: Paul McLaughlin
The purpose of this exercise is to let you see some of the techniques that are available in Cell Biology research. Most of these involve expensive apparatus and reagents so it is impossible to carry out such experiments in a practical class: therefore we have designed a Web-based exercise to illustrate important features of cell behaviour and to show the sorts of calculations a cell biologist might make.
You will view videos of Listeria monocytogenes, a bacterium that recruits actin polymerisation to one of its ends to form a 'comet tail'. By this means Listeria propel themselves from cell to cell and even through cell-membranes. Thus, unlike many other bacteria, they do not need blood to spread and so partly avoid the immune system. You will measure their rate of movement from a video clip and relate it to the structure and kinetics of actin molecules.
The plugins to run this exercise are all available in the computer labs. If you want to run it on your home computer, then you need to install them, but we will not provide further help on this. If you can't run it at home, you should use the computer labs.
NB. In the student lab's use Internet Explorer, not Mozilla, which does not appear to run applets. The molecular Graphics will not run on a MAC or on a Linux Machine. It is best to use a Windows machine.
Once you start the exercise you need to keep going forward and to finish it in one sitting (values are not stored). Accordingly, it would be sensible that you record the values your enter into your course book so that you can recover quickly if anything goes wrong.