Ask Dr. Science:
And so do you.
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Posted on April 4, 2008 12:45 PM • 21 Comments •
A reader from the UK sent me these lovely photos that he took of a jellyfish and asked for my help in identifying it. Unfortunately, while I'm pretty good with bacteria, plants, and tropical fish, my taxonomy skills don't go much farther unless I have a sample of DNA. These photos were taken at La-Manga off the coast of southern...
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Posted on September 13, 2007 11:34 AM • 4 Comments •
Adding the costs and doing the math.
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Posted on September 6, 2007 12:16 PM • 13 Comments •
How do microbiologists determine which microbe caused a disease? As Tara has eloquently described (I, II), we are covered with bacteria and other microbes. A reasonable question then, is when we get sick, how do we which little devil deserves the blame?...
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Posted on February 17, 2007 3:29 PM • 7 Comments •
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!" - from Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll I'm certain that if we ever sequenced DNA from the frumious Bandersnatch it would match hypothetical and putative proteins....
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Posted on February 8, 2007 3:17 PM • 1 Comments •
How to win the X PRIZE in genomics In October, 2006, the X PRIZE foundation announced that second X prize would focus on genomics. The first team to successfully sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days will win $10 million dollars. And I would venture to guess, that the winning team would also win in the IP (intellectual property) game...
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Posted on February 5, 2007 9:00 AM • 2 Comments •
Defining a biology term for scientists in other disciplines.
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Posted on February 2, 2007 2:23 PM • 6 Comments •
Chimeras invade the sequencing lab!
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Posted on February 1, 2007 6:01 PM • 0 Comments •
Send in the clones, but only the random ones.
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Posted on January 31, 2007 1:02 PM • 2 Comments •
"How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?"
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Posted on January 30, 2007 4:49 PM • 2 Comments •
In which we define reads, chromatograms, and shotgun sequencing.
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Posted on January 28, 2007 8:51 PM • 2 Comments •
Some background on the strategies: mapping vs. shotgun
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Posted on January 27, 2007 1:50 PM • 2 Comments •
Ask Dr. Science: yes, I do take requests.
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Posted on January 22, 2007 8:59 AM • 7 Comments •
In the effort to help us define a few basic concepts, PZ started out by giving us a nice simple definition of a gene, but as he, rightly noted: I tell you right now that if I asked a half dozen different biologists to help me out with this, they'd rip into it and add a thousand qualifiers, and it...
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Posted on January 21, 2007 3:44 PM • 7 Comments •
or you can try asking me.
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Posted on January 13, 2007 3:07 PM • 10 Comments •