I'm still alive, everyone, I swear!

I haven't disappeared, I'm not MIA, I swear - I've just been really busy with my first major seminar of my career, and with my thesis proposal due in 3 weeks, and my orals in 5 weeks, I haven't had much time to breathe!  Not to mention my boss just decided that I should totally change my proposal, and I'm back to square one. Grr....

Anyway, I thought it would be cool to post some of the images from my literature talk last week. It was a very cool talk - I got to discuss the role of two protein in 50% of human cancers. Amazing that in a lot of cancer cells, the crazy growth associated with cancer comes from the binding of two proteins.  A simple binding event.  Of course, other things go wrong in cancer, but a simple binding event can swing the pendulum towards cancer or non-cancer.  Blows my mind really!

Anyway, here's a cool image of the two proteins I gave a talk about (my whole talk had pictures like this...).  The p53 tumor suppressor is in pink, and the Mdm2 oncogene is in green:

And now for a slightly more Freudian look at a binding site (no I didn't say that in my talk, but I was sorely tempted!).  This is a cut into the binding sites of the two proteins:

Pictures made using Pymol, pdb code 1YCR.pdb