The methionine cycle in Japanese

Drugs today at last, and results so far as expected. I can't post them on this site because someone will somehow steal my project and I will die with nothing. The fan or senpuki was a spark of genious and I no longer have to sleep on the diningroom floor so I've been in a superb mood all day which unfortunately can lead to singing out loud while doing dissections which was safe to do at 10pm back home but here there are still 2-3 people working. If I could imitate Celine Dion well that would be one thing.
I attended a Japanese seminar today. Dr. Kuromi thought there would be some pictures and figures I could follow along with and he was right and I'm glad I went. It was a true fish aquarium experience, Janel in her own little world listening to science progress and not understanding more than an occasional expression like "that's right," "yes," and molecular words at random with sore wa and kore wa indicating this and that which was mostly Kanji bullet points. The presenter was Dr. Ishii from the 4th floor, and his talk was about sphingosine-1-phosphate signalling and the methionine cycle. These are crazy pathways in English, looking at them in Japanese was probably just as useful as anything else. As far as I could tell he has knocked out a couple of spingosine-1-P receptors in mice and found some gliosis in the hippocampus, but maybe not as nasty a phenotype as some other people reported due to a different genetic background in his mice. The embryos looked kind of crappy with dark stuff in them, and I copied down a cool looking Kanji to later find out it meant "blood clot." He then showed a drug that looked like spingosine but I don't know what he did with it. He switched to the methionine cycle then and talked about homocysteinemia which sounds bad, and some mice he had with a cystathione-gamma-lyase knockout or a CBS knockout. CBS is an enzyme that does something to cysteine. Maybe I should know these things. There was a really funny joke that went over my head, and in the end it seemed that maybe some of those mice had a problem in milk production and some cells died. I couldn't catch the major purpose of his stuff, but on the way back to the lab Atsuko mentioned she had trouble catching the point of the research so maybe I didn't do so badly. The questions at the end focused on free radicals so it would have been nice to know what they were talking about. Maybe I'll get there someday, the anesthesiologist/grad student at the desk next to mine taught me how to have a nice conversation about whether or not there is a television at someone's house. He also taught me to say "you look so young!" which can come in handy any time. It's good practice, the sentances are so completely backwards from English that anything helps.

I guess I'm missing lab meeting at home. That's weird. I got my own dustbox today. That's a garbage can. Later!
Janel