Issue One, this seventh day of March, 2003

'We still don't have a war'

Greetings to the exiles. Life continues under the iron thumb of Sauron, in this first full week after all the remaining humanity has been expunged. Few things have changed; Sauron is yet using the plate-binding assay to back-stab the Bearded One by the numbers, and NTF2 gets half an hour to itself in the lab meeting.

Talking of lab meetings, we were late for the off today - 11:15 according to Grasshopper's anally-retentive notes, but your correspondent went for the world anti-endurance record today and had lost the will to live by half eleven. The only thing that kept me going was licking the sugar from the doughnut trays, and I spent much of the meeting thinking of tulips, strangely enough - their 3-fold symmetry is really quite remarkable; you should examine one sometime.

The stunning thing about this lab meeting was Sauron, in response to a suggestion from your correspondent, telling my very young apprentice ('Jazza') _not_ to set up crystal screens because it would 'take six months of your life' to solve them and it might be a boring answer anyway. Never mind that one does the biochemistry to see if it's interesting while waiting to see if crystals actually form. . . so much for doing several things at once. And he thinks this particular binding will be 'interesting' anyway. Sometimes I wonder if Sauron has a selection of brains and forgets to install the correct one (hmm, Sauron Gummidge). Actually, I think he was po'd because he didn't say it first. I predict he will tell Jazza to set up the screens, if not next week then on his return from the land of Oz.

My very young apprentice has managed to make a very powerful enemy. He bought a pizza from across the road, and took it up to the canteen at lunch. Afterwards, I fielded a call from a very loud Joy of the Canteen complaining that this was 'cheeky' and should not be done in future. Jazza, God have mercy on his soul, actually went up to argue the toss, but gave in when Joy said he 'even had the cheek to put the box in the bin'. We're wondering whether he should have eaten the evidence.

Back to the lab meeting. Apparently it's possible to use PCR primers designed to lift out 30 residues of a sequence to *delete* that sequence from the original sequence. I shall have to persuade Sauron to talk us through that one. The latest breaking news is that any complex with NTF2 will give twinned crystals, and any complex containing IB442 will be difficult to solve. It's nice to see that at last! there is predictability in crystallography. NTF2, Rosanna will be glad to hear, has a new lease of life because it binds to the C-terminus of Nup1. Failing that, Nup2 will be the new NTF2 - Yoshi is still struggling away with this, making hundreds of constructs - after all, it's only 2 letters different. Sai has the Ran core project, and is using the amazing, new GST technology to get it to express. On a happier note, we all decided that Yoshi should be cloned at the earliest opportunity, so that we've got someone to do all our molecular biology.

That's all for this week. I'm now off to cut my head off with a chainsaw.

Keeping the faith,

Richard (aka Samwise).