Like many of you out there, I used to pass the incubation periods for my experiments by scouring YouTube for videos, both of the educational and entertaining variety. While the bulk of this was admittedly cat and animal videos and human misfortunes (that normally did not result in debilitating injuries or death, mind you), I did prefer the channels that were a combination of educational and entertaining, which is a philosophy I adopted as a teacher and mentor. So today, I'd like to share some of my favorite channels that might help you de-stress from a hard day at work, and also probably teach you something! You can click the headers to go to their main channel as well as check out the example videos.

My first experience in a basic research laboratory was a structural biology project, in which we were attempting to solve the structure of a nervous system protein known as myelin basic protein (MBP). As a rookie undergraduate scientist at the University of California, I had great mentors who taught me everything, from how to purify recombinant proteins from bacteria to doing library work to understand what had been done before so I could build upon it. I also learned how to use an electron microscope (EM) to gather structural data. MBP was an interesting challenge as it had multiple isoforms due to alternative splicing, and generally behaved like a random coil. ¹ The major function of MBP is to take advantage of its highly positive charge to compact myelin in higher organisms, with research over the years suggesting it may have some capacity to form alpha helices, although atomic-resolution structures have not yet been reported. MBP has also been reported as a biomarker in autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. ¹