A little redecoration...

You may notice that a lot from the left sidebar is missing. I'm doing some moving around, changing some things, trying to make use of Blogger's new feature "The Blogger Template Designer" to give MolBio Research Highlights a new look.

You may also have noticed that there are a couple of buttons on the top: they may stay there after everything settles down, but I'm still testing it. Do you think they are useful?

Things may be a little weird during the next few days, but all content will still be available.

Read More......

What does Spring Break mean to grad students?

This?

Not quite.

To us, spring break, is just that time of the year when:

1) we don't have to wait in line at the University cafeteria
2) we can park wherever we want
3) we can sit wherever we want at the library
4) your PI spends more time at his/her office and thus, pops up in the lab asking how experiments are going, more frequently

(From Phd Comics)

--
(Top Image credit)

Read More......

Yes we can! (work in a developing country)

(...) We showed unequivocally that working in a developing nation is no bar to doing excellent science. (...) Our key strategy was to work as a team with an innovative horizontal philosophy that involved people from different areas of research in various countries.

Such multinational collaborations are crucial to the success of science, technology and innovation in developing nations.¹

Exactly. Multinational collaborations are indeed required and not only in the context discussed in the article, but in general. Collaborations are, in my opinion, our best approach to the advancement of science.

__

¹ From Nature 464, 486 (25 March 2010) | doi:10.1038/464486c

Read More......

With respect to 'epigenomics'....

Be sure to check this recent Correspondance over at Nature expressing reservations regarding a recent Editorial on the International Human Epigenome Consortium.

I've commented before on the loose use of the word "Epigenetics" [What is Epigenetics? An operational definition], so I found this quote particularly interesting:

With respect to 'epigenomics', we wish to stress that chromatin 'marks' and local chemical modifications of DNA, such as methylation, are the consequences of DNA-sequence-specific interactions of proteins (and RNA) that recruit modifying enzymes to specific targets. They are thus directly dependent on the genomic sequence. Such marks are the effects of sequence-specific regulatory interactions, not the causes of cell-type-specific gene expression.

The authors also direct the reader to a letter by eight prominent scientists expressing serious reservations about the scientific basis of the epigenome project (which you can access here)

Read More......

I won!!

Richard Grant, Information Architect at F1000, organized a fascinating Twitter contest. The idea was to "post your most embarrassing scientific error or egregious lab-based manipulation to Twitter with the #scifubar hashtag".

I read about it last night and decided to enter with two funny stories from my Department (remember you can post up to 140 characters in Twitter):

1) I saw someone try to melt agarose by adding a magnetic bar and placing the bottle on a magnetic stirrer #scifubar

and

2) Undergrad said he couldn't "paint" the black lines on the autoclave tape as good as his supervisor (he even bought a black marker) #scifubar

Today, the winners where announced through Twitter (by @f1000) , and to my amazement, I won!!:

We have a #scifubar winner! @aemonten for autoclave tape shenanigans http://bit.ly/bakPy9 ^rpg

A bag of F1000 swag, including the much-coveted laser-stylus-pen-torch thingy, is on its way to Chile!

Thank you "anonymous" undergrad, and thank you Richard!

Read More......

Dominant transposases, becoming famous for your lab mistakes and more, in my Picks of the Week from RB.

Another week has gone by and some very interesting molbio blog posts have been aggregated to Researchblogging.org. Every week [see my opening post on the matter], I'll select some blog posts I consider particularly interesting in the field of molecular biology [see here to get a sense of the criteria that will be used], briefly describe them and list them here for you to check out.

Note that I'm only taking into consideration the molbio-related blog posts aggregated under "Biology".

Congratulations to everyone who got their post selected.

Transposable elements can greatly influence the structure and dynamics of the genomes they populate. Class 2 transposable elements or DNA transposons, are mobile genetic units that move using a single or double-stranded DNA intermediate. Moselio Schaechter at Small Things Considered comments on a recent Nucleic Acids Research paper reporting that transposases, enzymes involved in the movement of these genetic units, appear to be the most prevalent and abundant set of genes in nature (or at least in our genomic databases).

Everyone has made mistakes at the lab. In fact, you can check hundreds of them in Twitter under #scienceconfessions or #scifubar. Setting things on fire and throwing nasty solutions down the sink are part of the history of every lab. But what if a particular “mistake” turns out to have a tremendous influence on your field? Michele Arduengo at Promega Connections talks about “Sloppy Technicians and the Progress of Science” using the history of Hela cells and cytogenetics as an example.

(Image credit)

In addition to these posts, this week I’m launching “honorable mentions” for Picks of the Week. Posts under this category will only be linked to and quoted, but not summarized.

This week’s honorable mention goes to Lucas Brouwers at Thoughtomics, for his post entitled “On the Origin of Animals”.

“In a Nature paper published last month, a team of researchers used the conserved expression of microRNAs to piece together some information about a great-great grandmother of animals”

That's it for this week. Stay tuned for more MolBio Research Highlights!

---
Some of the articles discussed in this week's selected posts:

Aziz RK, Breitbart M, & Edwards RA (2010). Transposases are the most abundant, most ubiquitous genes in nature. Nucleic acids research PMID: 20215432

Christodoulou, F., Raible, F., Tomer, R., Simakov, O., Trachana, K., Klaus, S., Snyman, H., Hannon, G., Bork, P., & Arendt, D. (2010). Ancient animal microRNAs and the evolution of tissue identity Nature, 463 (7284), 1084-1088 DOI: 10.1038/nature08744

Read More......

A new kind of periodic table

The famous science writer David Bradley (@sciencebase in Twitter) has created the Periodic Table of Science Bloggers. In that table you'll find very interesting blogs on a variety of science topics. Each element's abbreviated name comes close to the blog or blogger's name, twitter account, etc.

If you’ve got a chemistry/science blog and your initials or its initials fit one of the elements that I haven’t used for my own stuff, let me know and I’ll add you to my PT.

Our blog is under Tm (for The Molbio Research Highlights).

Check it out here!

Read More......