If there is one photo that explains my current situation, this should be it...

Chennai Airport: Breaking stereotypes with Burgar and Nudles

Airports are often doorways to cities and sometimes to countries too, new airports built in India are getting bigger and better, here are few things that crossed my mind while spending time in them. Overall I feel it is hilarious that making the airports (doorways) efficient and leaving the rest of the country crippled.

During a recent India trip to India I visited several cities for the first time, most of my time was spent either on the research institute campus or airport. Perhaps some other time I shall write a review of research institutes and interviews, this time lets talk about airports.

Lets start with Chennai the closest to my hometown. Few months back when Chennai opened its new domestic terminal ‘The Hindu’ reported that pigeons reside in the terminal and water leaks from cooling units. Soon everyone was jumping up and down saying how sub-standard the airport was build and etc., When I spend sometime in the Bangalore airport there were sparrows inside the terminal. Happily singing and flying back and forth, picking the passenger overpriced spilled food. There were even some small shrub or trees (not sure if real), where the sparrows happily made their joint. It could be that these things were left intentionally to get a tropical forest effect. In my opinion Bangalore airport has succeeded pulling of the tropical forest effect (better luck with Terminal-2 Chennai!!). Hey Chennai, maybe try letting few stray dogs inside the terminal it would better make the feel of ‘Singara’ Chennai.

The outrageous thing and perhaps the most baffling experience in this whole trip was the absence of idli-vada and its relatives in Chennai. When I checked the whole terminal, there was not a single stall after security check offering south-Indian cuisines. Wherever I turned I found Maggi noodles, Burger and sandwiches! The most popular stall was Maggi cup-noodles of course! I even checked with the stall person, about my desire to eat a Vada, he looked me pathetically and showed the menu board which had only Burgar*, Nudles* and Sandwiches. No puliyogarai and thaiyarsatham, perhaps the Chennaites have decided to break the idli-sambar stereotype. Most ironic thing is except for Chennai, all the other airports where I flew from had a strong presence of Idli-Vada-Dosa.  But in other places I opted for Samosa, Kachori, Vada pav, Puttu and even dum Briyani.

Moving on to other airports, Pune has a small, cute airport, but far away from city. Speaking of far away Hyderabad airport tops the chart of farthermost, but perhaps the best airport in India. The highway leading to the Hyderabad airport from city is really a nice drive.  Delhi comes first in terms of connectivity, the metro from airport to the city-metro station is a wonderful experience, and hope Reliance keeps this way. One sad thing about Delhi domestic terminal is that there are no book/magazine stores!  Trivandrum has big, new swanky, eerily empty airport, reminded me of unoccupied convention centers. But one thing all the airports have in common, pretty women security personnel!

Picture in Picture - Mona Lisa

 

Perhaps one of the most pictured painting, somehow when I saw the portrait in Louvre, Paris I could not appreciate it well. Rather I was amused by the craze of people to capture it within their camera. So i took pictures of them!!

Extreme Sagging

Happy New Year folks

Foliage and Plumage

 Nature never ceases to give amazing pictures.

A close look of a leaf from an unknown plant at Arboretum SF . Below is a close look at the feathers of a bald eagle of SF Zoo (the national bird of USA). Staring longer upon these pictures there are some striking similarities. Although they are evolutionarily very distinct structures nature has enforced a main stem and branches (veins in case of leaves and barbs for feathers). If you think a little further the main stem/stream and branches are very predominant, even outside nature such as main stream fields and branches. Perhaps having a main stem/stream and branches is a fundamental phenomenon in the physical world that its nearly impossible for any system to not have it. More to follow up in forthcoming posts, for now just enjoy the pictures.

96 well-thought reasons (well almost*)!

If you are doing biological research chances are very high that you must have at least once used a microtiter plate 96-well high throughput (HTP) also commonly know as 96-well. For some the HTP or even a hyper HTP (384-well) is bread and butter. The American National Standards Institute has even defined the dimensions for 96-well format. But have you ever wondered why is it is a 96-well not any other number. Well if you have some thoughts it will be great to hear as well. But here is what we in the lab came up with, ‘we’ here are myself, John, Marvin, Enfu etc., thanks to lively discussion and contributions.

A quick Google search will give you the history of microtiter plate and here is a quick primer.  The very first microtiter plate can be traced back to the Hungarian scientist Dr. Gyola Takátsy around 1950s^(1-3). Dr. Takátsy used this innovative technique for influenza virus detection during an epidemic. He published the idea, which was picked up by the Linbro Company and made 96-well microplate. More refinement of microtiter plate, automation and wide applications came along afterwards. A list of further reading can be found at the end if you would like to know more about the evolution of microtiter plate^1-6.

So after reading all about the history/evolution it is still not clear how Dr. Takátsy came to a conclusion that 12x8=96-well is the best format. It seems that Dr. Takátsy very first microtiter plate was a 6x12=72-well, he also has tried 10x10=100-well. To quote from an article⁴

“For time-saving, Dr. Takátsy soon replaced the wire loops by thin iron or steel knitting needles that could be flame-sterilized. He arranged the needles in a way that he could keep them in his hands without problems. This led to a plate with 8 x 12 wells that could be quickly and easily filled the 96-well plate was born”.

The 96-well format has began its humble being from early 1950’s, this rules out the ‘chicken-egg problem’ of which is earlier the 8x12 tip boxes or 8x12 plate. Thus the 96-well format has clearly dictated the market to make 96 tip boxes, multi-channel pipette, PCR blocks etc.,

Coming back to the original question of why 96? Conventionally a 10x10=100-well seems to be an ideal plate, 100 a round composite number. Where in the first instance 96 might look like a random number, but it the highest number below 100 to have maximum positive divisors (96 is divisible by: 1, 96 and 2,3,4,6,8,12,16,24,32,48). This means one can make easy partitions, serial dilutions, duplications and combinations. There smaller options too but they are basically divisors or 96 (for eg., 24-well crystallization plate/tissue culture plate).  Nextal has made a new format of 6x3=18-well crystallization plate, but again not a square plate (see below).

A perfect 10x10=100-well will give you a square block and it is quite easy to mix-up with a four equiv-dimension block. Although to some extent this argument holds true for a rectangular 8x12 block too, but there is only one possible way doing wrong with a rectangular block. Plus a 2:3 ratio as originally Dr. Takátsy said is easy to hold/handle by hand.

We can argue more good things about the 8x12=96-well format, but to some extent it sounds like there is ‘no choice of other option so we like it’. It is nearly impossible to even think about another format (the 384 and more are mere multiplications of 96). According to Dr Peter Banks⁵ the 2009 global market for microplates is ~$500million. If you add up the entire tip box formats and other instrument formats the sum will go considerably higher. So for the moment sit tight and do your HTP assay in 96-well format (or more) thinking how good the 96-well format is. But don’t forget to thank Dr. Takátsy for inventing a tool that makes our life easy.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtiter_plate.

2. http://www.plastiquarian.com/index.php?id=13&subid=179

3. http://www.oek.hu/oek.web?nid=499&pid=1

4. http://www.biotek.com/resources/docs/Necessity_is_the_mother_of_invention_GIT-  Verlag.pdf

5. http://www.ddw-online.com/enabling-technologies/p92824-the-microplate-market-pastpresent-and-futurespring-09.html

6. http://www.labmanager.com/?articles.view/articleNo/3551/article/Evolution-of-Microplate-Technology

* I couldn’t come up with 96 reasons, it’s like using only few wells in a 96-well plate!

The casual visitor and a resident bug

Jewel beetle (Ponvandu in Tamil) is one of the colorful insect and probably the most pleasant insect to observe. These insect sightings are becoming rare these days, but here is a casual visitor who showed up in our previous garden in Ranipet, India.

The below one was pictured in our new home garden, unlike the above casual visitor this one is a permanent resident hanging out in maize bloom.