POP-FAME

I can try to guess what you are thinking having read the title and guarantee you are miles away.

It stands for polycyclopropanated fatty acid methyl ester. 

Means nothing to you?  Means nothing to me.  It got F all excited though.  She was reading up on FAME - a common enough cargo in chemical tankers these days, and the makings of bio-Diesel, when she encountered the below piece of information: (thank you Wiki)

Every microorganism has its specific FAME profile (microbial fingerprinting).  After triglycerides, fatty acids and certain other lipids of some cultured microbes are esterified, they become volatile enough for analysis with gas chromatography which is used to create FAME profile. These profiles can be used as a tool for microbial source tracking (MST) to identify pathological bacteria strains and for characterizing new species of bacteria.

For example, a profile created from cultured bacteria from some water sample can be compared to a profile of known pathological bacteria to find out if the water is polluted by faeces or not.

In June 2022, Polycyclopropanated fatty acid methyl ester (POP-FAME) fuels were biosynthesized from Streptomyces coelicolor bacteria, which have energy densities of more than 50MJ/L larger than the most widely used aviation and rocket fuels.

If that is goobledy gook to you don't worry.  This post is not about organic chemistry.  That and biology were F's favorite subjects at High School (in fact she won the biology prize in her last year at school).  The post is a musing on what one's life might have become if careers advice in a small rural town high school had amounted to any more than trying to find local apprenticeships, and jobs in retail.  The kids who did go to University were left to work out for themselves where or how they might thrive.  A career in scientific research never suggested itself to F, and she left school early to do a version of what she had grown up with - producing stuff from land.  Her family hadn't been wealthy and the idea of leaving school seemed to mean 'go earn a living', rather than 'incur yet more debt'.  She went from farming sheep to growing trees for industrial uses. 

Who knows maybe woodchips from some of her trees are making their way into the manufacture of bio-Diesel, but what really excites her is how little we know about the microbial influences in our eco-systems and how many more opportunities exist out there for generating sustainable cycles in energy and food production.


What might your life have been if high school careers advice had been worth the ground rent on the office it occupied?



Comments

  1. Yamini MacLean2 March 2023 at 05:47

    Hari OM
    Quite so, Tigger mate; I can identify very much with that 'careers guidance system' of state schools of our youth. But I also acknowledge that we are who we are with the experiences we have lived and they are every bit as valid as the 'what ifs' ...Hugs and whiskeries, YAM-aunty xxx
    (NB... I had to use the magnify tool to read the sciencey bit - then highlight the last few lines as the white text disappeared on the white background... Not insurmountable, though a little untidy. Perhaps F forgot to do a preview prior to posting?)

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    1. Tigger's Mum2 March 2023 at 07:05

      Thank you YAM-aunty. After dozens of previews and a complete retype because the reformating evaded her tech skills she missed the fact that some of the imported white background remained and ate up some of the non-imported message. (Bother said Pooh.) We think it is fixed now. Xxx Mr T

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  2. jabblog2 March 2023 at 09:34

    I think F is doing very nicely and clearly the brain is in outstandingly good order too understand all that sciency stuff. I jest. Science was poorly taught in my grammar school but has fascinated me since I left. As for careers advice - what??
    How is the joinery going?

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  3. MadSnapper2 March 2023 at 14:00

    Having been raised by parents that were born in 1913 and 1925. And having finished school in 1962 and also living in the deep South of the USA the only thing that they wanted girls to do then let’s get married and have babies. Go to high school graduate get married and have babies that was it. We did not even have anyone in a guidance office anywhere to guide us or if we did I never knew it and the majority of the people that graduated in1962 did not go to college. It was something for the rich folks kids. I have often thought what I would be and where I would’ve gone if I was living my teenagers Live now. It would be much different. And all of the stuff that I read that you said might be gobbledygook is that for me because I never took chemistry because I knew I would fail it and I barely got out of biology with a passing grade.

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  4. Boud2 March 2023 at 14:39

    As a star student, everybody assumed I understood everything! No advice at all, from anywhere! Parents left school at 12, couldn't help, but fully expected I'd just know! Picked own university and coursework, no advice, stumbled through life, doing interesting things, but no support system at all! First member of my family to get as far academically as I did. I had a vertiginous learning curve among affluent fellow uni students. Coursework no problem, but socially, financially, worlds apart.

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  5. The bike shed2 March 2023 at 20:21

    Our careers advice was equally useless - but it's maybe not fair to judge by today's standards. I went to university to escape home as much as anything and never came back or looked back. I'm grateful for that opportunity and delighted to be going back to my old Uni this weekend with my youngest son - who is planning on going to the same place to study the same subject - how lives come full circle!

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  6. northsider 3 March 2023 at 15:35

    I have had an autodidact approach to self education Tigger. John Seymour the smallholding guru writer and listening to Prog Rock have been my biggest influences.

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  7. Amy3 March 2023 at 19:37

    Well back in high school I wanted to be a graphic designer, way before the internet was invented and at the beginning of the computer world but sadly my parents didn't think there was much work for that so I ended up taking subjects I hated. Luckily I did get to experience that job in a way about 15 years ago when I owned by own business briefly making websites for people.

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  8. At Home In New Zealand3 March 2023 at 19:52

    Listening to the younger generation here now, I don't think "guidance" counsellors are any better than they used to be. We did go through a time when they were telling everyone (regardless of ability) to go to university, but now it seems to be more "what do you want to do" and that isn't much help to most of them.

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