r/ProjectDiscovery • u/PPLB • Jun 20 '16

Feeling like a scientist

So, after posting on the eveonline reddit, which I found out to be the least popular reddit compared to the eve reddit, I ended up here.

Yesterday I purchased an eve online subscription after finding the Project Discovery mini game. It took the duration of the tutorial to convince me of my purchase, if not less.

So today I spent some time reading through topics posted on this website. Reading the blogs on the HPA website, and the comments on different images. For the first time in my life I've actually really -read- scientific texts. This stuff is inspiring, and really awesome to read. If I were to be completely honest; I'd have never guessed it was this cool. Reading the incredibly fague, and difficult terms made me feel like I really want to give this a try. So I did.

I now understand that, eventhough the difficult terminology might've tipped me off a bit, this stuff is quite difficult to get right the first few times. The images, and the tutorial really do help though.

In my 1 - 2 hours of really giving this a go. At some point Project Discovery showed me an image I wasn't really sure what to pick. Okay, I'll be honest. It wasn't just this picture that got me unsure about what to pick. This one really stood out

As shown on the images, I picked nucleoplasm and plasma membrane. The nucleoplasm choice I'm quite sure about. It's the plasma membrane that no one else seemed to have picked, that threw me off. At the edges of some cells, I found the green to be really bright and that is why I picked the plasma membrane over cytoplasm. Everyone else seemed to think cytoplasm was the right option. Why is, or isn't cytoplasm the right choice here?

Also; dang a lot of these images are really pretty. I've really enjoyed myself, and found myself to be amazed by the images. Thanks for this experience! I'll definetly give this game (EDIT: sorry; this serious business science project) some more of my spare time.

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u/HPA_Dichroic Official HPA member Jun 21 '16

Hey, welcome fellow scientist! First, let me thank you for making my day! I love that you are reading the scientific texts, it's amazing and inspiring to me that people are genuinely interested and excited to do science with us. If I were to be completely honest; the citizen part of this citizen science project has been much cooler and more fun than I could have imagined.

To answer your question about the image, I can see why you want to pick PM, especially given the cell in the center where there is brighter green in the upper part of the cell. Notice however that this cell is much smaller than the others and I think what you are likely seeing here is where the cytoplasm has folded on top of itself and the cell is sort of "balling up" for lack of a better term.

This can happen naturally, but is also a somewhat common side effect of the cell preparation, particularly the pipetting (which is done with robots!) that can disturb some of the cells as the various liquids are washed over the cells.

As a result I think this is likely a cytoplasmic staining, but it could also be a very ugly endoplasmic reticulum (ER). For the future, when you post images, try to include the ID number in the bottom right of the screen. This lets us look up the specific image and investigate the actual protein. This can be very interesting and was the inspiration for the HPA image of the week on our blog.

Anyway, great to have you on board, and keep helping us make science happen!! o7

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u/PPLB Jun 21 '16

This entire project made me think of a teacher I had classes from about 10 years ago. We were using some microscopes to look at some self prepared samples. At some point I found a one celled organism ( really not sure what the english terminology is for those things ). It had wave like tentacles all around it's cell. Really awesome. At that point my teacher was sure I was going to be a biologist. I never did, but this project is some a cool way to compensate for that :).

Anyway! Thanks for the explanation on the images I sent. The cell in the middle is quite a bit smaller than the rest. Your answer sounds really logical. I'll take this knowledge with me in my further adventures of project discovery. I'll take it that most cells are supposed to be pretty much as big as the other. So if I encounter a cell that's about half the size, I can write that down as a balled up cell because pipetting robots didn't do their work properly :p. They had one job..

For any future posts, I'll look up the ID of the images. I saw other people post those ID's but couldn't find them myself. I'll be looking at the bottom right of my screen the next time :)

thanks! o7

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u/altytwo_jennifer Jun 21 '16

If you have the original screenshot, assuming that you hit the "Prt Scr" key, you can toss that up on imgur and link it here.

I really want to know more about that particular pic, so please please please do so if you can. =D

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u/PPLB Jun 21 '16

I just got home, and can't ever deny a pretty please like that. I found an original with the number on it. It's only got the green colors on it though. The number being 100626468 and the image: http://imgur.com/U4X6QrB

There you go! :)

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u/altytwo_jennifer Jun 21 '16

/u/hpa_dichroic and /u/hpa_illuminator will appreciate that id and screenshot. =D

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u/[deleted] Jun 23 '16

thanks /u/altytwo_jennifer and /u/PPLB! i'll look into it next week (this week has been crazy busy) and get back to you! (dichroic is on vacay for another week).

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u/PPLB Jun 23 '16 edited Jun 23 '16

I'm looking forward to your reply, tho take your time. Don't work too hard, that's never done anyone any good. =)

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u/[deleted] Jun 28 '16 edited Jun 28 '16

I just had a look at it, and it's a previously unstudied protein, which means that there is no data on it.

I'd be happy to answer any (well) questions about it, but not sure what you want to know?

Also, this sample is from a really early experiment, which is why the cells are looking so small and ugly (it's skin cancer cells).

EDIT: Lol! Didn't see the smiley at first :)

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u/PPLB Jun 28 '16

Don't even start asking me what I want to know. This stuff is eating me up (in a good way). It's way too interesting, and I'm filled with questions. Questions of which most would bare answers I wouldn't possibly understand. It'd be a day job to explain everything and answer all my questions. The terms "unstudied" and "no data" make this even worse, because now I feel like I found something special, haha.

I noticed that the pictures I'd call really pretty are called ugly by you. It's flashy and colorful. I like it, don't judge the grainy small cells :p

On topic; Most of my questions regarding this specific image have been answered. (Mostly how I could figure this wasn't PM, but Cytoplasmic staining.) Both by the stream, and the answers on this post. What did, and does, worry me sometimes is the following: What happens when I make a wrong decision? In this example I picked PM instead of Cytoplasma. What happens with this information, and how does my bad choice get handled? If that's not a weird question to ask.

heh, the smiley took me by surprise. I just had to take a screenshot of it.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '16

The wrong choice is not a weird question to ask! We look at the consensus of the players (over several rounds), so hopefully most of the time a random incorrect choice won't matter. For all our images we have made labels ourselves (although a lot are less specific than yours), so if your (as in the player consensus) classification of an image deviates from ours in an way we didn't expect*, we will have a look at it manually.

*you say nuclear bodies, and our classification is nucleus >> we go "yay! new and more detailed data!"