RADIOACTIVE SLIME!

[Evan Brown]

April fools! Okay, so it's not radioactive. But it sure looks like it, and I figured April fools day was as good a day as any to share. This is my current project, inspired by quarantine boredom. UV reactive fluorescent slime!

[RyChu]

Wow! Fascinating! How?

[Evan Brown]

Oats laced with fluorescein. I want to try it with strontium aluminate based glow powder so hopefully it will glow in the dark. I have another method I want to eventually look into using CRISPR to insert a bioluminescent gene. No idea how either of those will work out yet though.

[RyChu]

WOW! Glow-in-the-dark slime would be great for display! No light needed.

[ian]

I couldn't persuade them to eat strontium aluminate! If you fed another culture rhodamine or eosin and had a couple of cameras you'd be able to follow the mixing ( with two cams you could use R & G filters to separate signals ).

Bioluminesence would be hard - we do use luminescent constructs of cells and plants but in many cases luciferin has to be added and the signal isn't naked eye visible . If you put the full pathway in for luciferin/ase it's a major drain on ATP for the organism.

There are GFP physarum constructs around ( I'd love to get my fingers on one ) - you can neatly tag the GFP to different parts of the cell. Damn I miss the lab - it's been 4 weeks since I shot anything with a class 4 laser.

You wouldn't need Crispr by the way - physarum you can just bang a plasmid in there, give it an electric shock ( electroporation  ) and away you go! I'd put money on just straight injecting it working - it's not a permanent transformation but it's good for hours-days. It might be worth buying a GFP bug kit and just try the plasmid on it.

[Evan Brown]

I just ordered some strontium aluminate to try out, I intend to mix it into some oat flour with a bit of Valerian root to see if I can get them to eat that. I think I have some eosin laying around somewhere. I just noticed today that the advancing edge of the plasmodium is showing a much stronger fluorescence than the middle portions. It's really fascinating to watch how it changes.

I wasn't aware of the electroporation, thanks for that info. And it's good to know I don't have to shell out the money for a full CRISPR kit. Now I just need to look into getting some GFP plasmid, which I've been wanting to play around with anyway.

That's a shame that you're separated from your lab, but at least you have a class 4 laser. I'm expecting some chromium oxide in the post tomorrow to attempt to make my own synthetic rubies to build a laser out of.

[RyChu]

Pew pew! [Insert other laser sounds]

[Evan Brown]

Lol, more of a "WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, CLICK!!" sound. But I am considering adding a pew pew sound effect just for fun.

[RyChu]

Do it I dare you. Then post a video.

[Evan Brown]

You dare me? Well I guess I have no choice then.