lab life
apalazzo | April 1, 2008NCBI Core nucleotide # U41319.1.
Don't believe me? Click here.
For more info on this NCBI entry, check out Sandra Porter's post.
apalazzo | March 12, 2008Sorry about the paucity of posts. I've been running around lately. Friday right after the Origin of Life Symposia we took off for NYC. After a day of mental stimulation, including stops at the Whitney and the Met to hear Janine Jansen play Bach and an incredible Schnittke String Trio, we raced back to Boston on Sunday to catch a ride up to the White Mountains (that's New Hampshire for you non-east coasters) to attend the almost annual Rapoport Lab retreat. There I participated in the mandatory alcohol toxicity seminar that lasted into the wee hours of the morning. After a quick nap we sprang…
apalazzo | March 12, 2008We've got a great line up this week including one of the coolest findings of the year. The email is below the fold:
Hello All,
The next meeting of the New England RNA Club will take place Thursday, March 20th, a week from tomorrow. We will have beverages starting at 5:30PM and talks from 6:00-7:30PM in the Cannon Room of Building C at Harvard Medical School. Food and beverages will be served after the talks. Our speakers will be:
- Graham Ruby, Bartel Lab, Whitehead (MIT)
The mirtron biogenesis pathway.
- Amanada Young, Sharp Lab, Whitehead (MIT)
Targeted deletion reveals essential and…
apalazzo | March 11, 2008From the HHMI website:
Through a national competition that opens today, HHMI plans to select as many as 70 early career scientists from a wide range of scientific disciplines relevant to biological and medical inquiry. These scientists, most of whom will be assistant professors at the time of the award, will receive six-year, non-renewable appointments to HHMI and receive the substantial research support necessary to move their research in creative, new directions. HHMI will invest more than $300 million in this first group of scientists and plans a second competition in 2011.
...
HHMI is…
apalazzo | March 6, 2008According to the latest issue of The Scientist.
Rankings for American institutions:
1 The J. David Gladstone Institutes, San Francisco, CA
2 National Jewish Medical and Research Center, Denver, CO
3 Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM
4 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA
5 M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston TX
6 Genentech, South San Francisco, CA
7 Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia, PA
8 The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, Ardmore, OK
9 The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, ME
10 Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore, CA
11 US Environmental Protection Agency…
apalazzo | March 5, 2008Each row of colonies represents one yeast strain lacking one gene from the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome. There are 8 rows per dish, and 550 dishes, resulting in 4400 strains. Saccharomyces cerevisiae has about 6000 coding genes. Strains lacking essential genes are not included for obvious reasons.
apalazzo | March 5, 2008I'm excited, baymate and I will be off to Radcliffe to attend a symposium entitled, The Origins of Life: The Earth, the Solar System, and Beyond.
In related news I learned from Corie that over the next year, Craig Venter will be a visiting scholar with Harvard's Origins of Life initiative.
apalazzo | February 27, 2008It's been a while ...
We'll start off with Science and Art: Design and the Elastic Mind at MoMA (NY Times article)
RPM at evolgen ponders about faculty members that blog. And now there are even journal editors that blog. In another post, RPM discusses the various phenotypes found in the typical audience attending the weekly departmental seminar.
We also have a pair from PhysioProf at DrugMonkey:
Submit Your RO1 Now
New Fiscal Policy at the NIH FY2008 - Cuts in existing RO1s
You gotta love Sunil's great stories. In a recent post he tells a few tales about the giant scientific egos he has…
apalazzo | February 15, 2008(Yes I'm 2 days late, but I had to give journal club - which I postponed due to the grant - I finally presented this afternoon - the topic was all these paper describing transcrition profiles of the whole genome, I'll blog about the wonderful chaos in the transcription field some time soon)
Yes, Harvard goes open access (the vote was unanimous!)
Read it at the Boston Globe, the Scientist, the Harvard Crimson (again), The NY Times, A Blog Around the Clock, Open Access News (again again), and Effect Measure.
apalazzo | February 13, 2008Great posts by DrugMonkey and Dr. Free-Ride (part I and II).
It reminds me of a bit of advice given to a fellow postdoc by Dr. Richard Hynes - try to attend every seminar. I would also add that in my comparatively short science career I have found that conferences are great as well. You meet people, people meet you, you learn, you communicate, and you develop this type of long distance acquaintance. Over the years as a grad student I got to know quite a few of my peers in the cytoskeleton community, only to jump ship and enter the RNA community. Although I haven't been going to many…
apalazzo | February 12, 2008Harvard is to spearhead an Open Access Portal? We'll see after today's vote. From the NYTimes:
Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish -- on the Web, at least -- free.
Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.
Although the outcome of Tuesday's vote would apply only to…
apalazzo | February 12, 2008What a great day. The grant is done and now I can get back to the bench after about one month of tapping away at the keyboard.
Writing a K99, which uses the same format as an R01 (or the main NIH grant) plus a wee-bit more, is quite an experience.
Putting together a scientific manuscript for a journal is easy, all the data is at hand and your task is to convey to the reader the logic of the experiments and the implications of your results. But writing a grant is ... much harder.
In the methods, you've got to plan ahead in some coherent logical way. You've got to project the pitfalls, you've…
apalazzo | January 28, 2008Arrive to the conference early to take in a day of skiing before the conference.
+
90 minute delay in take off at Boston, with a mad dash to our connecting flight in Portland.
=
Luggage stuck in Portland = No ski equipment = No skiing = Working on the talk and the grant.
apalazzo | January 24, 2008Unfortunately I'll be out of town, but I encourage anyone in the Boston area to go. Here's the latest from Corie:
Hi everyone,
The new year is well underway so it's time for another one of the famous Nature Network Boston pub nights!
(For those of you new to NNB (http://network.nature.com/boston), the networking website for Boston scientists, we host monthly informal gatherings at a local pub for Boston-area scientists to meet, chat, and have a drink. We believe in online networking, but we also believe in old-fashion facetime...with a bit of alcohol too.)
When: Tuesday, January 29, 2008, 6:…
apalazzo | January 19, 2008Wow! I really need this! With this program you can store, search and organize all those PDFs.
From the website:
Do you have dozens of PDF files from your favorite scientific articles scattered on your harddrive? Do you also try to desperately organize them by renaming and archiving them in folders? But like the piles of printed articles on your desk, you can't keep up with all the new papers you download, and despite all your efforts it has become impossible to find that one article.
Finally that all belongs to the past. We've been there, trust us, we know. That's why we wrote Papers, our…
apalazzo | January 19, 2008I read an interesting article in today's NY Times. Apparently, the inspector general's office of the Department of Health and Human Services released a report suggesting that the NIH should do a better job of monitoring potential conflicts of interest. From the NY Times article:
The health institutes awarded more than $23 billion last year through over 50,000 competitive grants to more than 325,000 researchers at over 3,000 universities. Each grant typically underwrites only a part of the cost of the research at issue.
Universities are increasingly seeking other sources of income to support…
apalazzo | January 18, 2008Baymate just freaked-out over that bio-rad PCR clip that's been making the rounds. If you really want to see it, look beneath the fold.
apalazzo | January 10, 2008Sometime last year Mitch Waldrop conducted extensive interviews with many who were experimenting between Science and the Web2.0. The result is this article that appeared yesterday on the SciAm website. In keeping with the spirit of Web2.0, you can add your comments or suggests edits to the article before it appears in the magazine as a hard copy. Bellow is the email that Mitch sent out:
Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in "networked journalism," in which readers--you--get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form.
The article, below, is a particularly apt…