Techwriting at Worm Breeder’s Gazette

It’s been a while since I worked as a technical writer, but last year I wrote up some improved C. elegans protocols for the Worm Breeder’s Gazette. That’s an open-source online newsletter where researchers can share useful information that doesn’t fit in the peer-reviewed literature. Here are my two protocols:

Improved thick 3% agarose pads for microscopy of C. elegans

Using improved thick 3% agarose pads and the paralytic levamisole for microscopy of C. elegans

They’re obviously Part I and Part II, but the newsletter editors have a 1-page limit.

Somewhere in my archives from my old computers, I probably have digital versions of writing samples from long documents from my days at Manual Labour in San Diego or Asymtek in Carlsbad.

Bio+Tech, DIY lab equipment, and PowerPoint

I had a great time at Bio+Tech at UCSF last night! The guest speaker had plenty of insights on science publishing, the Q&A discussion was what I wish all my seminar classes had been like, and I got to meet more interesting people who are fascinated with biology. It was great to chat with the DIY Biology BioCurious crew in a quieter environment than the Maker Faire, and hold the LavaAmp prototype. (A pocket-sized, portable, cheap and rapid thermal cycler for PCR… is that cool or what?)

Today I’m posting a few things people asked me about… such as a link to Ian Chin-Sang’s DIY LED-based GFP illuminator (translation: light that makes C. elegans glow), the appendix from my thesis showing my improvements to that system, and my latest PowerPoint production: selections from my thesis defense presentation.

Ian’s basic GFP illuminator

I’m sure that with more hacking, this basic idea could be incorporated into other fluorescence illumination applications. There are now commercial LED fluorescence systems–even for epifluorescence–so this approach is technically sound.

GFP Illuminator

Here’s the appendix from my thesis where I wrote up the improved version. My setup basically threw money at the problem of low signal-to-noise ratios that obscured the fluorescence from GFP-tagged cells (compared to a full-body GFP strain) by using an $800 set of GFP bandpass filters from Chroma. I’ll document this more concisely for the Worm Breeder’s Gazette one of these days.

Thesis PPT samples

This is the “good parts” version, since I’m sure anyone who waits to download a 15MB file and finds a lot of text-only slides, series of highly similar figures and graphs, and cut-n-pasted figures from other people’s papers (background info) will be disappointed. (Yes, I drew the cute food figures in the dietary copper slide.)

Someday, after I finish moving and writing up my research, I’ll go through my old class assignment PPTs and look for good ones. Although my presentation for Genetics Lab on how worms can teach us about aging contains some outdated scientific information (four years later, the Oxidative Stress Hypothesis of Aging seems to be losing ground, according to the buzz at the C. elegans Aging Topic Meeting)

Speaking of my beloved worms, if anyone’s curious about the Worm Breeder’s Gazette, here’s a nice blog entry about this community resource: http://toddharris.net/blog/2009/12/16/an-early-model-for-open-access-returns-say-hello-to-the-new-worm-breeders-gazette/

Before and after

Back when I was working on my MA in Biology, my advisor found a paper with an intriguing hypothesis that might help explain some of his students’ observations. The hypothesis was illustrated in the original paper with a figure that was hard to follow because it didn’t follow the visual conventions for depicting neurons. It was also the wrong proportions to fit on a PowerPoint slide. When my thesis advisor was invited to speak at a symposium, I volunteered to redraw the figure more suitably. I also included a few details I knew he would cover to put the hypothesis in context.

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Pictures with words

Here are some samples of graphic design from the last two years.

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Image smorgasbord

Here are a few samples from my portfolio and most recent show. Portraits, night travel photography, concert photos, and of course botanical photography.

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