Stephen, Ben, and Latasha discuss lab procedure

Last Wednesday afternoon, Stephen Colbert stepped on the BioBus to have his cells “immortalized.”  Using the same research microscopes we use to teach thousand students a year aboard the BioBus, I captured several time-lapse videos of Colbert’s crawling white blood cells. Working on-location outside underprivileged schools in the Bronx and across the country is our specialty – this time we just happened to be outside the studios of the Colbert Report! I was assisted by two BioBus Visiting Scientists, Lynn Biderman of Columbia Univ. and Latasha Wright of Cornell Medical Center, who are adept at getting celebrities and BioBus students alike excited about science. Thanks for your help, Lynn and Latasha.

We were rewarded for our work with front row seats to last nights screening of the Colbert Report. The videos we captured using the high-power microscopes and digital cameras aboard the BioBus were featured in an interview segment on last night’s show. Mr. Colbert interviewed Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book discussing ‘immortality’ found in the unauthorized harvesting and reproduction of cells from an African-American tobacco farmer in 1951.  Those cells can now be found in labs across the country, and have been used for genetic research ranging from mapping the human genome to finding a cure for cancer.  Though I did not immortalize Colbert’s living cells (one of the issues the book deals with is the legality of keeping someone’s cellular materiel), he captured them in another way that may last even longer! Check out the clip below, and remember, while getting a mention of TV is nice, we need support from you to keep the BioBus rolling.

They invited the BioBus there to work with two of their student groups, and we had a lot of fun checking out various crustaceans and protists. Check out one of the movies the students made of a paramecium, where you can see lots of beating cilia and chunky organelles inside:

And if you have time, please join us later today (Saturday, Feb 20) at the Williamsburg Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. The BioBus will be there from 12-1:30 putting on a special program for Green Apple Kids, but people of all ages are welcome to stop by!

Gabriella's Beautiful Micrograph

While there, we had some very nice visitors. First Tim, an NYU ecology student, Susan, a teacher at the Columbia School, and Joan and her daughter Gabriella, a student at the Earth School, came for a tour of the bus. Gabriella already had her microscope operator’s license, and she jumped right in, showing us the different parts of the microscope and then taking some very nice images of DNA and cytoplasm of some cells. One of her images is shown here.

Colin then gave me a tour of the park, which, as I mentioned, has a beach! It is really beautiful and when the tide is low the beach is even bigger and nicer, according to Colin. When we got back to the bus, John, a teacher at City-As-School, along with a group of his students, were checking out the bus. They had been on a walking tour of the city, and heard the rumor that the BioBus was in town, so they stopped by. We had a really nice conversation about the history of the project and then toured the lab and watched some cell movies. If I am lucky some of those students might do an internship with the BioBus, which would be very neat. I was really impressed by how nice that group of students were, I really hope that some of them get involved with the project.

Colin and Tim Looking at the Receding Cloud Front

Green actin with blue DNA

The microscope slide I used to make this picture was donated to the BioBus by Tomas Perez at Columbia University. Tomas uses fluorescently labeled cells in his research to let him track the whereabouts of certain proteins inside the cell. For instance, in the above image you see that the blue stained DNA is located at the center of the green-stained cytoplasmic network of actin. Do you know why DNA stays in the center of the cell and doesn’t spread out into the cytoplasm? Hint: it starts with the letter ‘N’.

These cells came from petri dishes that Tomas keeps full of so called ‘immortalized’ mouse cells. Immortalized means that these cells can grow forever on a petri dish, without ever needing to be in a mouse again! Tomas then chemically ‘froze’ or fixed the cells in place, after which he stained the cell with special chemicals designed to recognize only certain cell structures (in this case the structures of DNA and actin filaments) and make them glow. This is like putting fluorescent colored clothes on certain parts of the cell and then shining a black light on it, like you might do at a party! And believe me, cells CAN dance.

Our ability to take digital fluorescent images is also exciting since we are working on a grant to fund building a large library of fixed and stained samples for the BioBus in order to see all the different organelles and structures (like mitochondria and ribosomes). We can also look for differences between cells from different places. Perhaps student-researchers aboard the BioBus will discover a difference between cancer and non-cancerous cells? It’s not impossible.

If you are a scientist and you have fluorescently-labeled samples you would like to donate to the BioBus, please contact me (ben@biobus.org). We currently have filter cubes for UV, GFP, and Rhodamine excitable dyes.