Salt Lake City in May - yeah!

After some revisions during the last days, the abstract was finally submitted today. Maria, another graduate student in the lab group, together with the professor have decided to go to the 58th ASMS (American Society of Mass Spectrometry) conference in the end of May. This year it's in Salt Lake City City in Utah. The conference is quite large, a few thousands of participants usually. Later on Maria will have to prepare a poster were she will present some of her work. A prerequisite if the professor should pay the trip, as well as a contribution from the department.

On the way home a few days in New York City is planned, so finally Maria will visit some of the big cities on the East Coast. A short visit, but staying in Manhattan might help us to be able to see some hot spots.
Maria also decided to take a side trip before the conference, visiting one of her best friends from Madison, who now lives in Houston, Texas. Hopefully it won't be too hot already in May.

Orbitrap up for fight!

During three days we had a service engineer working on one of our mass spectrometers, the Orbitrap that Maria is the main user of. Not that anything was broken, but it was time for the yearly service (the instrument was installed 10 months ago). Maria kept following the engineer about all the steps he did. Interesting to see when he took apart some parts of the instrument (liquid pumps, instrument interface etc), and at the meantime try to learn how to do smaller repairs. He didn't do anything with the most advanced/expensive parts, meaning the internal mass analyzers, these you probably you do more harm than good if you touch.
Afterwards we hope the sensitivity will be higher than before. One way to decrease the background noise, would be to clean the solution bottles and put newly prepared solutions.

Group meeting of the year

Today all of Maria's research group went to Baggböle Herrgård. There everyone had a 15-min presentation about the research plans for the coming year. Interesting to hear about all the persons' work, even if in a short version, including the directions for our bosses (our group meetings are combined for two research groups).
For lunch we had a Christmas plate, that showed up to be a three-meal-course with inspirations from traditional Christmas food.


We could notice it was a nice sunny day outside, much more daylight than normal. Good thing that the daylight time is longer than the time the sun rises above the tree line. At 10.30 am we enjoyed the "sunrise" and at lunch time 1 pm it was gone again.


In the afternoon back at work again, we learned more about ribosomes and antibiotics listening to the Nobelprize winner Ada Yonath.

Education also need recovery

During two days UPSC (Maria's workplace) has been to Kronlund outside Vindeln. A lot of seminars from younger scientists at the departments were interesting, as well as to hear more about the new big plant project here in Umeå; sequencing of Norway spruce, the plant of biggest economical importance in Sweden.
Thursday evening we relaxed in the sauna for a while and had nice relaxing chats. When some people had had enough there finally were space in the hot tubs. Maria ended up drinking a few beers and not leaving the hot tub until 1.30 am. Why leave earlier? You can sleep some other time, and breakfast wasn't until 8 am next morning.

For Friday lunch we had traditional Swedish Christmas smorgasbord (=smörgåsbord, "julbord"). There were a lot of different fishes for the first plate/meal. As usual you eat until your stomach is overfull. No need for more food this day.

Before taking the bus back, we had time for a short walk. We were surprised to find Vindelälven frozen, but it wasn't that much more snow over all than in Umeå.

A hard work week

This week Maria started to analyze the huge amount of samples on the GC-MS. Since the 350 samples also needed to be modified before analysis, this meant Maria has been sitting pipetting for three hours a day this week - a hard time for her thumb.
Except some adjustments of the instrument during day two, the GC-MS instrument was running for 105 hours in a row starting Tuesday lunch. To be sure the instrument didn't stop working or a samples missed to be injected, a late check in the evening is a advantage. So around 10 pm Maria and Olle (thanks for the company!) biked to work, just to notice everything worked as it should. Saturday evening/night we both were glad the GC-MS run was over - it had been long days and not much of spare time this week (but time for exercise at IKSU in between working hours).
As usual the data analysis will take longer time then the data collecting. So Maria knows what she's doing the next month(s) or so. Doesn't help when you should use new programs and are not familiar with statistical analysis.

Campus Culture

During lunchtime today Maria went to listen to Stockholm Jazz Orchestra, one of the best big bands in the country. They were really good music players and and had a nice guest singer as well.

New office tables

When two more girls arrived from maternity leave in September, we realized the office was not arranged for four persons in front of computers. Old crappy tables, not strong enough to hang the stationary computers as well as two of the girls hitting each others chair every time they moved a little bit. Not at all an acceptable situation. We argued for new tables to the room and finally these arrived today, after more than a month of delivery time. So now the office feels like a "new" office, with new tables together with the new office chairs we got a month ago. Both nice-looking and more functional.

Not a perfect seminar

During three days a group of Japanese researchers as well as some German researchers, are visiting Umeå. The days have been filled with seminars, to inform each others about our ongoing research, maybe we can create even more promising collaboration in the future. It's hard to have energy to listen all the days, when you are not used to it.
Thursday afternoon Maria had a twenty minute presentation of some of her work. Which meant she stayed late at work Wednesday afternoon to do the last changes. Except that the pointer stopped working, and the whole presentation freezed for some long seconds (with success she stayed cool, on the outside), Maria passed the presentation at least. As usual, afterwards you find out how you could have made it better.
In the evening she joined the tour of our facilities for the guest, anyway she hasn't been in the lab too long, so especially the plant growing facilities are still new to her. Growing trees is somehow different from growing smaller flowers, take longer time as well. Thereafter followed a dinner of nice dishes with local taste.

Learning Organic Mass Spectrometry

During both Saturday and Sunday Maria went to a short-course to learn how to interpret mass spectrometry spectra of different organic compounds. Unfortunately, the focus of were more on the old way of fragmentation, which is not the same in newer instruments.
During the first coffee break Maria started to talk to two English students (from different labs) joining the same course. They were alone as well for the day, their bosses would arrive later. We went for lunch together, as well as dinner in the evening. We ended up meeting some other Englishmen, from coworking labs to the other students, and went to a pub together with them. Food and local beers were paid by their boss, so just to enjoy the evening, which didn't end until after midnight.

Sunday afternoon the mass spectrometry conference (the main reason of the Bremen trip) started with plenary seminars. Afterwards, there were a welcome reception with some small food and free beer/wine.

Back at work

After a night on the train Maria arrived in Umeå, an hour later than scheduled. A shower later she biked to work, where she noticed that a lot of people still were on vacation. Not that much were done during Monday, but emails were at least checked. Being away from internet over all for a whole week, meant a lot of websites to check. In the evening she went grocery shopping, by bike of course.

Hopefully Maria will be more productive at work in the nearest days, after updating her science brain what she did before leaving for the three weeks of vacation.

Vacation next!

So finally it's the last day of work before vacation. Not that much of new experiments done, more of summarizing what I have been doing the last weeks. As well as making a list of what needs to be done when coming back in August, to help the start-up then.

In the evening we celebrated the start of our vacation with a beer together with some (new) friends. Although we had to bike in the rain, it was a relaxing evening.


We will miss when all the fireweeds ("rallarros") is in full bloom up here in the north. It will be a magenta sea in a week or so.

UPSC anniversary

Today Umeå Plant Science Center celebrated the 10 years of existence. Several seminars during the day included some history about the center, as well as discussions about the future.
For Maria it was a good timing to hear some background of the working place.
During the evening there was a dinner, a nice day without any lab work. She also met one more group member, who is on maternity leave.

The new "toys" at work

Yesterday Maria's new computer arrived, so now she can spend a lot of time optimizing it for herself. But most time will not be playing around, but trying to understand the menus in Office2007, there's another layout than the older versions (our home computer has Office 2003 student version). Also trying to make the labnotes in OneNote is new, so there's a whole new program to learn how to handle.
During the afternoon today Maria spent a few hours in front of the instrument she will be using a lot during the nearest months - of course a mass spectrometer. The Orbitrap was installed during March, so no one in the group is an expert on the instrument so far. A mass spectrometer measures really small weights, and the Orbitrap should be very precise. Part of her work will be to identify the compositions of the different molecules in her samples, being able to decide how many atoms the molecules include (as well as if it is carbon, hydrogen or oxygen). The project will study metabolites in poplar, correlating different concentrations to different phenotypes.