I have the coolest sister in the world (+ miscellaneous MDTI thoughts)

The week of Jan 31st wasn't the greatest for me.  I got some bad news from family and then from friends.  But time's always moving forward, so I worked through everything.  Having the MDTI exam on 2/7/11 wasn't something great to look forward to either - it meant the weekend before that was completely devoted to studying.  

But there was a major high point.  My (rakhi) sister AS stayed up till like 2 am Tuesday morning baking me ~4 lbs of brownies and cookies.  She overnighted them to me via FedEx (took me a while to actually pick it up though).  That definitely perked me up.  Here's a shot of what they look(ed) like:

Usually it takes me forever to finish eating baked goods, but thanks to the impending MDTI exam (= stress eating) + studying with LV (= 2x stress eating), the baked goods were all gone in 1 weekend!

Thanks AS - you really made my week and weekend!  You are the best sister ever!

This post was actually supposed to be posted before the MDTI exam, but I (for once) decided to be good and not distract myself.  So it might be a bit odd to put up this post after MDTI ended... but anyway - one of the things we were learning about in MDTI were chimeric proteins.  These are proteins made by combining different parts of different proteins (so they have partial functionalities of all the proteins).  Most of these are very bad ass proteins - like Rituximab which specifically hits B cells, or certain TNF-Alpha inhibitors.  

Now, I know chimeric proteins are supposed to look something like this:

Or this:

But in my head, I always think chimeric proteins are kinda bad ass.  So instead of seeing the shapes above, I see this:

Am I the only one?  I think it's a much more accurate representation of fusion proteins!

On Tuesday (after we partied really hard Monday night to celebrate the end of MDTI) we started Brain & Behaviour.  This is apparently one of the most difficult classes at Penn Med.  But it's also one of my favorite topics in biology.  Somehow, it feels like a Clash of the Titans moment (I'm not really a titan, at all, but you get my point).  

I can't believe how fast time is flying by.