apalazzo
Posts by this author
June 4, 2007
(via biocurious)
I don't know if you remember the news item that Reed Elsevier, publisher of many scientific journals, was funding arms trade shows. It got to the point that the editorial board of the Lancet, which is owned by Elsevier, agreed with researchers who wanted to boycott their own…
June 4, 2007
Last night we hosted another instalment of our monthly "book"club at our place. It's an excuse to meet up for a nice evening of food and drink. Note that the word "book" is in quotes because we alternate each meeting between reading a book and watching a movie. As you can tell from the photos, last…
June 3, 2007
Welcome to the 15th edition of Mendel's Garden.
This month Gregor wanted to compile a summer reading list for all those going to the beach. But watch out, a sandy keyboard is never good!
So here we go:
First off, Gregor would like to point out this very interestin peice on what exactly caused…
May 31, 2007
Soon it will be clear that this year old manuscript by Kazutoshi Takahashi and Shinya Yamanaka will be the basis of a future Nobel Prize.
The paper is how to transform any cell into a stem cell. In the paper the authors took an "I'm so smart" approach to the whole problem. These smart guess…
May 30, 2007
Rumour has it that last week a junior faculty here at Harvard Medical School showed up to his lab and with no prior warning announced that he was leaving academic science. The next day he was gone. All of his students were absorbed into neighboring labs. Apparently he took some lucrative position…
May 30, 2007
This past weekend in a review of Natalie Angier's new book Steven Pinker wrote something I'd like to share with you (below the fold):
A baby sucks on a pencil and her panicky mother fears the child will get lead poisoning. A politician argues that hydrogen can replace fossil fuels as our nation's…
May 28, 2007
Have a great entry on genetics, genes, evolution, cell biology or any other relevant topic? The 15th edition of Mendel's Garden is now requesting entries. You have until June 2nd to send 'em in. Just email me or submit them to Mendel's Garden Carnival Page. The final compilation will be posted here…
May 26, 2007
Here is an amazing clip from BBC's Planet Earth demonstrating the life cycle of a member of the Cordyceps family of parasitic fungi.
For more, here is the Wikipedia entry on Cordyceps.
May 25, 2007
In the past 15 years, the two biggest technical advances that have helped us Cell Biologists are RNAi and green fluorescent protein, aka GFP.
You see before the advent of GFP, researchers could only analyze the distribution of proteins in a living cell by first fixing and thus killing the sample.…
May 24, 2007
This is a cleaned up version of a comment I left on Larry Moran's blog.
As a cell biologist, I view genes as tools that contribute to the building and maintenance of different cell types. Vertebrates all have the same types of cells and thus it is no surprise that most of our genes have…
May 23, 2007
After picking colonies, preparing DNA samples from them, digesting a small aliquot of the plasmid prep with the appropriate restriction enzymes and preparing an agarose gel ... you end up loading your minipreps instead of your restriction digests.
Damn.
May 23, 2007
Stanley Miller, of the famed Urey-Miller experiment, died Sunday (NYTimes Obit).
Here's an entry from over a year ago that was catalyzed by a conversation with a former member of the Miller lab:
Last night, my wife and I had dinner with a friend of ours from the Szostak Lab (yes at Buddha's…
May 22, 2007
This idea that most of your DNA is continuously transcribed has been floating around scientific circles.
I've blogged about it at least twice, and Coffee Mug at GeneExpression has mentioned it.
Keeping this in mind, here is some more interesting data from Danesh's lab.
Background: Certain small…
May 22, 2007
Overheard in the hallway:
First postdoc: I have basically wasted a year.
Second postdoc (muttering to himself): I wasted a decade.
May 22, 2007
CCP asks
What is the phylogenetic distribution of centrioles? Does it match that of cilia / flagella?
Just to summarize what all these cellular structures are, centrioles are distinct structures found in most eukaryotic cells. They are composed of nine microtubule triplets and two of these…
May 21, 2007
A few days ago I wrote about Ron Breaker and Riboswitches, and today I was alerted to this really neat advanced online publication by the Breaker group on how a riboswitch in Neurospera regulates alternative splicing. Wow.
So what is happening?
When the fungi Neurospora crassa is exposed to…
May 21, 2007
From a new Science paper:
Centrioles duplicate once in each cell division cycle through so-called templated or canonical duplication. SAK, also called PLK4 (SAK/PLK4), a kinase implicated in tumor development, is an upstream regulator of canonical biogenesis necessary for centriole formation. We…
May 20, 2007
It has been a while. Here goes:
'Do you want to catch up on your Darwin?
Here's a link to the Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online.
Want something to listen to while you are stuck in traffic? How about the audio version of The Origin of Species.
Also there is a great podcast from the Whitehead…
May 19, 2007
Well it looks like I'll be helping out Paul and Rich with Mendel's Garden.
I'll also be hosting the next Mendel's Garden at The Daily Transcript on June 3rd. To submit an entry email me or click here.
The July edition (#16) will be hosted by Hsien at her new home, Eye on DNA. If anyone wants to…
May 19, 2007
Lab work made sexy on primetime?
Don't you hate it when your BLAST searches turn up nothing!
May 18, 2007
Over coffee we were flipping through the May edition of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Newsletter when we saw an article on riboswitches, RNA aptamers and the RNA World. The piece features Ron Breaker from Yale, who is most known for describing riboswitches. These RNA elements usually sit on…
May 18, 2007
This is part 5 of the biomedical science serries on Charlie Rose, enjoy.
(P.S. Keep your eyes open, in a couple of months there will be a major revolution in this field.)
May 17, 2007
Flipping through Nature, I stumbled onto this commentary: The good, the bad and the ugly. Here's a taste:
To correctly capture images using a modern microscope, researchers must have a good grasp of optics, an awareness of the microscope's complexity and an obsession for detail. Such skills can…
May 16, 2007
Wow, yesterday was great! We had food, beer, wine and over a hundred people in attendance. There was plenty of conversation and I got a chance to talk to many people, although I wish we had more time to socialize.
Thanks to everyone who came. And thanks to our sponsors Alnylam and NEB.
Here is…
May 16, 2007
I finally got off of my butt and read the latest paper from the Hegde group at the NIH. They answered a fundamental problem in membrane biology: how do you insert tail-anchored proteins into the membrane.
When proteins are synthesized, any newly made signal sequence or transmembrane domain that…
May 15, 2007
Wow, what a week. I finally submitted my paper to PLoS Biology and we finally got our RNA Data Club up and going.
This event/series was conceived in a drunken state at a happy hour about 1&1/2 months ago and now has become bigger then anyone of us originally imagined.
When we pitched this…
May 14, 2007
From an email I just received:
RNA Processing Group (RPG) is intended solely for the person(s) who genuinely believe that RNA research is the coolest thing in the world. To become a member, you have to openly claim that RNA research is cooler than music, money, history, sex, engineering, more money…
May 11, 2007
From the Federation of American Scientists for Experimental Biology (for all you non-biologists who are wondering who FASEB is):
Urge Congress to Support Research
Increase for NIH and NSF Depends On It!
ACTION REQUIRED NOW! The 2 Most Important Weeks for NIH and NSF Funding in FY2008
Dear FASEB…
May 11, 2007
But this is no time to rest ... Tuesday I'm giving the first talk of our inaugural New England RNA Data Club (yes we've renamed it to the New England RNA Data Club ... we're having folks from out of state). There will be a total of 3 talks in this first assembly, mine + two on miRNAs.
I'll let you…