Now on ScienceBlogs: Oldest Human-Made Object in Space
Notes, thoughts, and news on synthetic biology by Christina Agapakis.
Category: research
Last month I wrote about my friend Devin Burrill's paper about synthetic memory in yeast cells. There were a lot of really interesting questions left in the comments, and I asked Devin if she would write a guest post to...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 3:06 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: iGEM
It's been a few weeks since the iGEM jamboree, a whirlwind, completely exhausting weekend of student synthetic biology projects. This tweet from Robin Sloan from the #igem2010 stream is a pretty good way to sum up the weekend: .bbpBox987719207489536...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 3:32 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: DNA
Mammalian cells need something to hold on to before they can stick to each other and form tissues. The plastic dishes that cells grow on in the lab need to be first coated with special chemicals that grab the cells...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 11:46 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: DNA
Thanks to the internet, you can find out your pirate name and your Jersey Shore name, and now thanks to the EMBL-EBI learning tools, you can find your protein name too! When you type your name into the box, the...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 8:59 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: DNA
A recent survey of 3,000 people worldwide found what many have known all along--that Legos are the best toy ever made. For synthetic biologists, this doesn't come as much of a surprise--Legos are at the heart of the concepts underlying...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 10:21 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: iGEM
It turns out that my wonderful iGEM students, besides being brilliant scientists, are also excellent, hilarious actors. Please enjoy their Jersey Shore inspired video about molecular cloning:...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 4:20 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: iGEM
The first (and sometimes 3rd, 12th, 25th, 134th...) step of any genetic engineering experiment is often extracting DNA from some organism or another. While novel gene synthesis technology will likely make this procedure obsolete, these days it's still most economical...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 5:15 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: silk
Silk is an amazing biomaterial, cultivated and prized for more than 5,000 years. The silk threads that we weave into our shiny fabrics are actually enormous protein crystals produced by insects. This industrial silk that you can buy at the...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 8:38 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: biosafety
Biosafety has been on everyone's mind this week after the announcement of the J. Craig Venter Institute's successful transplantation of a synthetic genome. What horrible pathogen will future bioengineers be able to design? What unforeseeable environmental catastrophe will befall us...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 10:52 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: genomics
I had the pleasure of chatting with John Hawks about the two big science news stories of the past few months, the synthetic genome and the Neandertal genome, for Science Saturday at bloggingheads.tv. John is a professor of anthropology at...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 6:32 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Orac 02.14.2012
Tim Lambert 02.01.2012
Jason Rosenhouse 02.12.2012
Orac 01.26.2012
Steinn Sigurðsson 02.14.2012
