(Photo)Synthetic Endosymbiosis
Category: evolution
The story behind the story of my new PLoS ONE paper, "Towards a Synthetic Chloroplast."
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 5:00 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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Notes, thoughts, and news on synthetic biology by Christina Agapakis.
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experiment:
Experimental Livestream
Category: bacteria
My friend Patrick is embarking on a 48 experiment, studying circadian rhythm and destroying his own in the process. He's also embarking on a social media experiment, live-streaming the whole thing on ustream. Tune in to watch real science in...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 8:40 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Scientific Color
Category: standards
We can babble philosophically about whether or not what we call "red" looks the same from another person's eyes, we can compare the adjectives we use to specify colors--is it maraschino red or cayenne?--but when we're talking to our computers,...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 11:49 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Holding on to cells with DNA
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
Emergent Cooperation
Category: cooperation
My good friend and labmate just published an awesome paper: "Emergent cooperation in microbial metabolism." His experiment started with 46 strains of E. coli that had mutations in their metabolic pathways that prevented them from being able to grow without...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 9:49 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Plant Transformation
Category: plants
Sometimes among all of the tedious protocols and mundane inconclusive data, I forget that I'm doing something amazing and incredibly powerful. Almost all my experiments require altering a living organism to do my bidding--to hold onto and replicate a piece...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 11:22 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
DTL: Learn Molecular Biology The Jersey Shore Way
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
Optimization of the albumen denaturation protocol
Category: food
Science is cooking done in a lab. Mixing carefully (or not so carefully) measured components, heating, cooling, observing phase transitions, exploring the behavior of animal and plant proteins, exploring the properties of different chemicals, slowly changing variables to optimizing procedures....
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 1:02 PM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Extracting Genetic Material
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
Transgenic Silk
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
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