THE NEXT INSTALMENT OF : JANE'S ADVENTURES IN LAB LAND

Yet again  a wonderfully informative and surprisingly visual visit to MedImmune, last week, has led to several more pages of notes and sketches in my notebook. I had a great meeting with Jefferson Revell and his team in Peptide Chemistry. I am particularly fascinated by their use of 

coloured tape to indicate different samples or experiments as they travel round the lab. I managed to get some samples here in my notebook and I intend to create a colour map of the route they take around the room, not too dissimilar to a tube map with the different areas or processes being the stops along the route. 
I also met Rob Howes who spent some time showing me around another lab and different equipment as well as explaining what it is they do. Plus, I got to spend the afternoon with the lovely Lesley Jenkins in that same lab shadowing her while she did an experiment. We had a great chat, she was really enthusiastic when I told her I had an idea to get any staff who knit (Lesley is one of those) involved in making a piece of work with me. I haven't come up with the idea of exactly what we are going to make but I just love the idea of involving the staff, especially as I hear from Lesley there is already quite a strong knitting contingent there!
My knitted wire cells are coming on; I am hoping to create a galaxy of them, so there are still plenty more to make but they are looking good so far and I feel confident they will look good suspended.

 This a new idea that I have to give Lesley some credit for. After I said I would like to use some of the equipment like those in the lab, to create work from, she showed me how these Eppendorfs - miniature test tubes - can be joined together by their lids. This gave me the idea that I could create peptides from them by filling the different tubes with coloured fluid/powder/beads and twisting them to create the helical shape of a lot of peptides. As there are only 20 naturally occurring amino acids to make up the peptides (plus a few man-made ones), it will be a nice palette of colours I can create. Now I just need to get more Eppendorfs so I can play some more.