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Cake day: October 21st, 2023

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  • I have this problem with a bunch of new hires. I’ll show them another way to do something and they’ll ask, oh where was that written down? I said Just think about what I just did and how it makes sense, its not written down this is a neat trick i’m showing you. I swear there is no creativity or critical thinking anymore, just a bunch of automatons that follow protocol to the letter and the second there is a situation outside those very narrow parameters they just implode. Someone had to figure all of this out at one point and make the protocol in the first place, sometimes there is no step by step guide and you need to exercise judgement and make some decisions on your own.





  • I don’t think you can do that with a single population of cells. Theres a group of cells that sample antigens and process them for presentation then a separate group of cells that the first group will present the antigen to. Once presented there are a set of standardized regions related to the class of antibody then a set of “hypervariable” regions. You would need an organoid/organ system to accomplish this in vitro or ex vivo. Most of the time it will be a macrophage or something that for example ingests a live bacteria (or venom), it will register this as foreign, process the particle and travel to a lymph node where all the immunology takes place (B cells). I don’t think theres a simple way to recreate this in the lab its completely different from synthesizing chemicals since each antibody is fine-tuned to its antigen. You might even get different antibodies generated for the same compound depending on how everything went down and which region was presented (eg monoclonal vs poloclonal products).



  • To my knowledge its easy to do this with proteins that are directly coded for in our genes. For example there is a gene for insulin so we can clip it, transfect it into a cell culture and get those cells to crank out a bunch of insulin that we can extract, purify and make into a usable, stable product. The problem with antibodies is that we need to be exposed to an antigen capable of stimulating the development of the corresponding antibody. There is a very complicated set of receptors that capture the antigen, internalize and process it to present it to cells that will modify a whole bunch stuff (Thats the limit of my personal knowledge) to generate an antibody capable of neutralizing that substance. In short you still need a living being with some sort of immune system capable of processing that compound and generating an antibody to it, its unbelievably complicated. The good news is once that cell starts cranking out antibody it starts to clone itself so we can extract it, make a hybridoma (fuze the antibody-producing cell from a live animal with immortal cancer cells to create an immortal hybrid that cranks out the desired antibody) then we can continue with the process in cell culture as per usual. Its just cheaper and easier to use live animals with high titre to that antibody. Source: I’ve taken a couple immunology courses and my lab specializes in immunohistochemistry so I’m quite familiar with antigen/antibody interactions but not so much with antibody production.


  • The immune system is super complicated but essentially when an animal or person are exposed to some sort of substance white blood cells sample that compound and create an antibody that is tailored to bind and neutralize it. Different substances range in their ability to induce this response and it often takes repeat exposures to get the titre to high enough levels. So one way or another some sort of animal needs to be exposed to the venom whether it be horse, goat or mouse and we would harvest the antibody for use in emergency situations where we need to immediately reverse the effects of a snake bite.

    Another way would be to do this in cell culture but I’m not quite sure how that works, I think thats easier to do when the proteins are directly coded for like insulin or something. You could probably harvest B cell clones that produce the antibody to the venom, make them immortal and harvest it that way but I’m less familiar with that sort of wok so I can’t really comment further.






  • GingaNinga@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    I can’t remember the last time a movie came out that made me want to go see in theatres. Tickets are so expensive that I only want to go to one or two movies a year. Then with TV I find every show these days has “netflix syndrome” with lazy writing, exposition dumps, dummed down dialogue, I’m just not interested in what they have to offer most of the time.