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Notes, thoughts, and news on synthetic biology by Christina Agapakis.
Category: food
Thanks to some informative comments on my post about figs and wikipedia my knowledge of botany is slowly improving and my admiration of figs steadily increasing. Many species of figs are pollinated by symbiotic wasps, but there are other fig...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 2:01 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: symbiosis
A delightful lunch conversation about fruits introduced me to what may be my new favorite symbiotic relationship! Figs are not actually fruits but a mass of inverted flowers and seeds that are pollinated by a species of tiny symbiotic wasps....
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 1:27 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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
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: iGEM
iGEM officially starts for the Harvard team tomorrow for some good old-fashioned fun with BioBricks, arabidopsis, protein-based sweeteners, and shRNA! Our goal is to make a system for genetically engineering plants safely and easily with some hopefully fun and useful...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 4:12 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: plants
What is a true food allergy, and what can be done to fix them besides banning peanuts from schools and avoiding foods that make us itchy?
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 3:28 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: biosafety
The fight over genetically modified foods, whether they're safe, healthy, good for the environment, or just plain "unnatural," has been going on for a long time now. Most people in the scientific community agree that genetic modification in general is...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 10:50 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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