(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.)
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There is a paper in last week's Science that describes a proofreading mechanism in prokaryotic (i.e. bacterial) RNA Polymerase, the enzyme responsible for transcribing DNA into RNA. When RNA Pol incorporates the wrong base into a growing RNA, the enzyme moves two steps back and cleaves the…
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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?
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.
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: