One of the courses I took this semester is called "Milestones in Neuroscience". Although some may argue that it's not an important course, I really enjoy it. This course is the first that arranges all the information I learned in other courses in to a chronological order of events and points out the interconnections between them. Since it doesn't have a real syllabus, the lecture subjects are undetermined and mostly based on the on-going discussion held in class.
"If there is no syllabus, then on what will the test be?" was the first question asked during the opening lecture of the course. The answer was early to come -- "You shall write a paper about any topic you wish, as long as it's a milestone in Neurosciece". The race begun. Since that day, I've searched the Internet and read many articles looking for an acceptable milestone. unfortunately, none of the topics I suggested were accepted by the professor.
Since I come from the field of computers and have some very little experience with computer vision, I decided that the Nobel Prize research on the mechanisms of vision could be a suitable topic. However, this topic wasn't acceptable---not because it's not a milestone, but because the professor wanted to dedicated a lecture for discussing this discovery. So, I continued to search around, and came across an article about the Allen Brain Atlas project. This topic was also not accepted in the claim that it's contribution to neuroscience is undetermined yet (because it's too new). Turns out, this paper will be harder then I thought! Still trying to stay somewhat related to computers, I wanted to write about the contribution of computer science to vision research. I spent more than 6 hours reading various articles, blogs, and web-pages, just to get to the realization that it's hard to count it as a milestone.
I almost gave up on finding a subject for my paper. And then there was neurophysiology! During one of our lectures in neurophysiology, the professor talked about the invention of cellular fluorescent painting (FURA-2). That day, while reviewing my notes, I knew I found my milestone. From reading on the Internet about FURA-2, I landed on the Wikipedia page about GFP.
Green fluorescent protein (GFP), is a protein that exhibits green fluorescent light when exposed to blue light. Although there are many fluorescent proteins, this jellyfish isolated protein is unique in that it is able to enter the genome. Therefore, a researcher can paint the genome of one mouse and all it's children will be automatically painted as well. This is very useful for tracking genetic patterns. Basically, GFP is a very popular method.
Right now, I don't know too much about GFP but it was accepted by my professor as a topic for my paper. Now I need to read more about it and find some articles that will be accepted as references of the paper. Hopefully, finding the right articles will be easier than finding the right topic. I'll update on this assignment later on another post.
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