The Acronyms Tell the Story

Can you identify all of the scientific acronyms in this story?

This is a story about MS SNuPE (1) the CP Scientist. MS SNuPE loved animals. In fact, she kept quite a menagerie at her house—she had two Siamese cats, a Black Lab, a parakeet, four FISH (2) and even a hamster. (Fortunately, MS SNuPE was single and had no small children to FRET (3) about.) She was most proud, however, of her newest acquisition: a giant King COBRA (4).

MS SNuPE loved her COBRA. She loved everything about it. She loved the little FLAP (5) of skin that made a hood over its head. She loved its beady black piercing eyes and its little grinning mouth. But what she loved most was the way it moved. All of her other animals trotted or fluttered or skittered, but the COBRA slid and slithered and glided. It was silent and graceful, and she thought that because of this, it must be the smartest animal. She decided that if she could train it to do tricks, she could quit her job as a scientist and join the circus.

Thus, MS SNuPE set out to teach it tricks. First, she tried to make it race the Black Lab and the hamster. This didn’t work, however, because the hamster always got scared and hid under the couch, and as soon as MS SNuPE coaxed the Lab to the starting line, it would realize it was next to a COBRA and start to throw a HisZiFit (6).

Next, MS SNuPE decided to teach her COBRA to do a FLIP (7). She set it on the kitchen table and started flicking its tail, coaxing it toward the edge. Her plan was to make it fall off, tail-over-head, and see how it landed. However, she failed to take into consideration the fact that snakes are all muscle and can wind their bodies into any contortion. Instead of falling off the edge of the table, as she had intended, the COBRA arched over the edge and wound its way around the table leg.

Finally, MS SNuPE tried to teach the COBRA to swim with a FLIPR (8). She bought a little blue one that fit right onto its tail, stuck the COBRA in her partially filled bathtub, and poked at it, thinking that surely its writing would translate into swimming. Unfortunately, it did not move its tail in the direction that would enable the FLIPR to displace water; rather than undulating up and down, the snake wriggled back and forth, slithering along the bottom of the bathtub and coiling into a protective ball at the end by the drain.

Oh bother, thought MS SNuPE, I’ll just send this useless thing back to CircusPets.com. If it doesn’t do any tricks, it doesn’t do me any good. The whole point in her buying a snake, after all, was to quit her job and join the circus. (Even though she loved being a CP Scientist; she had just always dreamt of being in the circus, ever since she was a little girl.) So she went out and bought a big box and some ropes to FRAP (9) it up, so that the COBRA wouldn’t escape. Finally, the package seemed ready to go: the COBRA was safe inside, and MS SNuPE was about to affix the proper postage on the box and call the mailman to pick it up. All of a sudden, though, she became very sad. Sitting down beside the FRAPped up box, she put her head in her hands. What would she do now? She had this big cage in her house, perfectly suited for a COBRA. She had grown accustomed to caring for ten animals, not just nine. There would be a big hole in her life without this COBRA, whether it made for a good circus act or not. How could she ever replace it?

On a whim, MS SNuPE glanced up at her perpetually playing television set. (She is a somewhat typical American after all.) There, broadcast across one particularly garish infomercial, was her answer: a host of small leafy green animals were collected upon a smiling woman’s windowsill. ChIA-PETs (10)!!!

(1) methylation-sensitive singlenucleotide primer extension; Current Protocols in Human Genetics 10.6

(2) fluorescence in situ hybridization; Current Protocols in Cell Biology 22.4

(3) Forster resonance energy transfer, or fluorescence resonance energy transfer; Current Protocols in Microbiology 2A.2

(4) combined bisulfate restriction analysis; Current Protocols in Human Genetics 10.6

(5) Fluorescence Localization After Photobleaching; Current Protocols in Cell Biology 21.1

(6) His6 Zn2+ fluorescent in vivo tag

(7) fluorescence loss in photobleach; Current Protocols in Microbiology 2C.1

(8) fluorometric imaging plate reader; Current Protocols in Pharmacology 9.2

(9) fluorescence recovery after photobleaching; Current Protocols in Microbiology 2A.2

(10) chromatin interaction analysis using paired end ditagging; Current Protocols in Molecular Biology 21.12 for the PET portion