Flashback Friday: Phycocyanin in the Bloodstream (2/12/05)

I have a rift in my epidermis that quite possibly spans farther down into the dermis. No, not a rift as in a large-scale crack in the earth's lithosphere produced by the tensional forces of two plates or two slide masses collapsing in different directions, but a rift as in a large-scale crack in my thumb-skin caused by the seething sharpness of a shattered Pyrex test tube being dragged across my skin as a result of me trying to clean it of its chemical contents with a test-tube-cleaning-brush that was way too big and ill-suited for the task at hand.

So anyway, I was in chem lab and I was trying to figure out how to clean the green algae goo from the bottom of my test tube with the only devices I had--water and an over-sized test tube brush. The water wasn't working (damn you viscosity) and the brush was way too wide to fit in the small test tube I had. But with class nearing an end and my extreme desire to get out of there considering it was the last class of the day and I had absolutely nothing else to do for the remainder of the evening, I decided to jam the big ol' brush down in there. At first it seemed to be working and the green goo was being whisked away by the brushy brush bristles. But then I noticed that I wasn't holding a test tube anymore but instead I was holding a mass of shattered glass and goo and my thumb was bleeding profusely. I dropped the tube into the sink but it was no use, my once pure innards had been breached by the horrible chemicals in the tube, namely sodium phosphate, hydrochloric acid, and that ghastly chromoprotein PHYCOCYANIN! So there it was, there was now a rogue protein in my body and it was stirring up a frenzy down in my capillaries and having a blast of a time. I could just imagine those damn hydrophilic amino acids basking in the warm wonderland of my bloodstream and the hydrophobic ones cozy and safe from the evil water that pounded on their walls. I knew I had to do something so I ran around the lab screaming, "DENATURE IT! DENATURE IT!" Thanks to books I knew that there were five ways to denature a protein: the addition of a large quantity of a small polar molecule, the addition of a detergent, an increase in temperature, a change in pH, or a good old mechanical shock. The first four weren't going to be easy to come by so I decided to choose door number five: the mechanical shock, and so I started smashing my thumb on the counters leaving splotched bloody thumbprints on everything I touched. Finally Dr. Murphree came into the lab and told me to put on a Band-aid and so I did and that was the end of the fiasco.

Minus that little event the day was pretty uneventful so I guess I can't complain too much.