What I actually do all the time

I'm glad I can report all those nice bike rides, downtown and beach trips, but that's not what I have been mainly up to during the last days or even weeks: I work on sea urchins and their embryonic cell division at the very first stages (from one cell to two cells). Indeed, my project is not really about sea urchins; they are only the cell model to gain experimental data and we can look at other cells with the same techniques.

 

Sea urchin (wikipedia), but it's not exactly the species we work on.

However, sea urchins have got many advantages compared to other cells: The fertilization of eggs is easy to initialize and the first division of the main cell happen after about 1.5 h and not after about 22-40 h which is the time for a human embryo to divide once. Furthermore, you gain a high amount of eggs and sperm from one animal, so that you can observe many embryos within one sample from two sea urchins.

There are easy to handle and to grow. The necessary paperwork due to the "animal experiment" is also minimal, since sea urchins are not vertebrates (Wirbeltiere). Basically, they could be thrown away after fertilization...

Sea urchins are also easy to manipulate on a cellular and molecular level. We keep the sea urchin embryos in a gel directly after fertilization so we can observe their behavior under growth. Finally, we collect data about the actin network to find out, which forces act during the cell division.

It's all about networking ;-)