The Hallowe'en Party

Delivered to both rooms in the morning were large bouquets with notes personally written by Nirvana Crump on the part of her staff and herself. They were inviting the group to an evening party of appreciation in the hotel's main ballroom. In the intervening hours, Mary Lou had wandered off down the Boardwalk and became intrigued by all the hooplah at Planet Hollywood. There she stayed for nearly three hours.

Upon finally returning her room she found her friends were joined by Harjot of the Los Alamos Lab and were so deeply engrossed in an argument about one of Mary Lou's own research projects of several weeks back that they didn't notice that she had returned. She was proud to hear about how she had discovered the Saguaro Measles Virus.

"Oh, Mary Lou, you startled us!" Cheryl chastized. "Where have you been?" inquired her brother. "Oh, I was mostly over at Planet Hollywood. My type of place. For awhile the crowd was doing some nutty dance called the Macadamia, and then there was a fashion show." And she continued much of the afternoon ad nauseum about fashions. She had even bought several fashion magazines, which she poured over while her colleagues talked with Harjot about her ideas for saving and extending the range of the saguaros. What Harjot's group had considered was that if saguaro could be made to tolerate warmer temperatures, it would be able to grow down in the valleys and the lower deserts of not only the Sonoran Desert but also over most of the Mojave Desert as well. She noted that Dr. Bengston's group here was instrumental in showing that the SMV and MMV proviruses became derepressed at higher temperatures and killed the plants. What the Los Alamos Lab people wanted were some virus-free saguaro plants in the hopes that those could grow at higher temperatures. So what Harjot reported that what they had done was grow some saguaro cell cultures at cooler temperatures so that a considerable amount of (undifferentiated) callous tissue was produced. Then these were heat shocked to induce the provirus, but in the presence of acridine orange, which intercalates into the helical structure of naked dsDNA. At the proper moment, the cells are given a flash of high intensity UV, which caused covalent bonds to link the dye with the DNA - effectively inactivating the viral DNA molecules with little to no damage to the cactus cells.

Meanwhile Mary Lou continued to pour over the fashion magazines and to occasionally strutt around the room fantasizing about being a model. But across the room the other five were intently listening to Harjot give the sad results of her group's work. It seemed that while the virus-free cells could be induced to begin differentiating and grow into small plants (and presumably into large ones), they grew fine in the greenhouses, but when set out into their natural habitat, they rapidly caught another disease - something rapidly spreading and necrotic. At this, for some reason, Mary Lou was paying a little attention and asked what 'necrotic' meant. Being told it was dead tissue - sort of like an animal would get gangrene, she immediately sought to name the disease as "saguaro gangrene."

Finally it was time to go to the party, and the group of students and their teacher were ensconced at an elevated dining table along with Nirvana Crump and her daughter Nirvanka. Mary Lou's eyes were glued on her hostess's fine dress, and also at that worn by Nirvanka. Below them were hundreds of other people at tables - the hotel staff.

Nirvana beckoned the group to join her at the lecturn. "Ladies and Gentlemen, I want to introduce you to these brave young people who with no small risk to their own lives saved this company and our jobs from mob takeover. With some degree of stage fright, Mary Lou's eyes were lowered to where her fingers fumbled nervously with the program. She read: "The House of Nirvana - International Entertainment Hotels and Parisian Fashions." "Oooh yes," she thought to herself, "Nirvana owns three fashion houses in the City of Lights. I sure wish that I could go there to seeŠ" Suddenly she awoke from her trance when she heard her name and those of her friends being called out.

"Now, my brave friends," continued Nirvana, "you have recovered nearly all of the $1.5 million dollars stolen from me. And you, Mary Lou, were instrumental in that brilliant foiling and capture of the criminals. Mary Lou, what can I do to show my appreciation?"

"Paris - Send us to Paris!" Mary Lou blurted out.

The mouths of the others fell open. "How did you find out? Who told you?" asked Prof. Bengston and Jason simultaneously. "The telegram arrived in our hands only a few seconds before we were called to stand up here!"

She then found out that they had all been invited to make a presentation about their SMV research before a joint meeting of the Karlinskainstitut and the Institut Pasteur next month in Paris! "How did you know?!" they asked again.

With a shrug, she responded: "Just lucky, I guess."

The group had been arguing about the nature of Harjot's new "communicable" disease of SMV-free saguaros, and by what mechanism "saguaro gangrene" was prevented from developing in the saguaro that possessed the SMV-proviruses. Give two mechanisms by which the pro-SMV could prevent infection by the S-gangrene virus, and an experiment that would differentiate which of the two alternatives it would really be. For sake of uniformity in grading this quiz, pretend that the disease was caused by another virus.

P.S.: Most of the current students will have opportunityies sometimes in their lives to present their research results at future meetings. These "Mary Lou" quiz stories are in part to get you in the mindset of going to meetings, presenting your work and network building.

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