Steve Block is Crazy : Transcription and Translation

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Alex Palazzo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at The University of Toronto.

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Steve Block is Crazy

Category: Pure Biology
Posted on: August 16, 2006 6:58 PM, by Alex Palazzo

(in the best possible way)

I'm scanning through Science when BAM:

He's imaging RNA polymerase as it transcribes DNA .... nucleotide by freakin' nucleotide ... it's sequencing at the individual molecule level.

(To all those thinking about the future of biology and day dreaming of "big biology", this is where it's at ... single molecule enzymology.)

Ref:
William J. Greenleaf and Steven M. Block
Single-Molecule, Motion-Based DNA Sequencing Using RNA Polymerase
Science (2006) 313:801

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Why you do you always make the big/small biology an either/or debate? You'd be hard pressed to argue that "big biology" projects haven't produced some outstanding results (Human Genome Project anyone?) There's also plenty of evidence that suggests that the two approaches complement each other in all kinds of useful ways.

Why don't we all just get along and focus on the real issue facing science: How to get more funding and get more mileage out of the funding we have?

Posted by: Chris | August 16, 2006 7:32 PM

alright, yeah, that's pretty damn cool. but I don't understand the anti-big biology thing. if that gets scaled up and widely used, it would be "big", no?

and while the future of biology might be in that technology, it might also be in technologies like this one, which is excellent "big biology" (though microarrays as well started "little"). the difference between big and little is smaller than you think.

Posted by: JP | August 16, 2006 9:56 PM

I guess I hit a nerve. No more gratuitous Big Biology bashing, I promise (and you used a DB paper to bat me down, tsk tsk). Let me paste a comment I left at evolgen:

I have pissed (maybe a little too hard) on the proponents of Big Biology, but criticism is sometimes directed to ideas/trends/fads that are oversold. So oversold that others suffer. That's what happens when we spend all our resources on sequencing everything for the sake of doing it or measuring the level of every protein just for the sake of doing it. Too much big biology is brainless.

Posted by: apalazzo | August 16, 2006 11:23 PM