I am preparing an introduction-to-fungi class. Found this cool Aspergillus-related animation: Life on Earth never fails: Not sure what this is: Of course, there are the zombie ants I have written about before:
The first bioinformatics meeting I went to was in 1996 at the Nachsholim resort, north of Tel Aviv. I received a fellowship for the duration, and shared a room with the brilliant Golan Yona, then a grad student at the Hebrew University. I was doing biochemistry at the time and knew next to nothing about […]
For those who are not in the structural biology community: Warren DeLano wrote and maintained PyMol, the software of choice for molecular visualization. Practically anyone who published anything requiring a biomolecular image used PyMol. It is a great piece of software, powerful and extensible. Warren was strongly committed to writing quality product that served the […]
I didn’t write this one, but I wish I did. I found it on Science after Sunclipse. I guess that a CC license can be safely applied to anonymous chain letters. Today CBSG continues with its pointers for budding scientists with the second part on serving as a peer reviewer for papers and grants. Okay, […]
One problem that I am facing is convincing colleagues of the utility of an Open Access publication. The usual arguments: more visibility, retention of the right to re-use material, the Greater Good, taxpayer access to taxpayer-funded research and so on don’t stick very well when faced with a $1500-$2500 or higher publication fee. These can […]
Glimmer is a program that predicts ORFs in bacterial and archeal genomes. The input is the assembled genome FASTA file, the output are several files of the predictions in different stages. The terminal output file is the .predict file. which looks something like this: >NODE_1_length_38001_cov_935.551880 orf00001 481 362 -2 1.45 orf00002 451 567 +1 0.59 […]
Respected Sir, I am Distinguished Professor First Class Nebulous Nimbus, Department of Organismal Motility of the University Technicality of Upper Freedonia. I have many articles accepted and pending in PLoS Biology, PNAS, and BMC. Unfortunately I cannot pay the Open Access publication costs as my University has suffered abysmally from ill-advised investments in derivatives both […]
One aspect of living in any kind of social setting is being assessed, rated and tested by one’s peers. Constantly. We are social creatures: we need to know who we are up against in any given setting. It is, after all, a matter of life and death, or at the very of gene dispersal. We […]
As resident bioinformatician in many places over the years, I got many of requests to help. Anything from a short blast run to a full-fledged collaboration. I love that. I always like learning about new problems, and those requests may blossom into full research collaborations. So yes, drop me an email or step into my […]
Following the post on methane release in the Arctic due to global climate change, here is an informative image comparing temperature differences between two five year periods: 1999-2003 and 2004-2008. The time window comparison shows a significant warming in the arctic,when compared to the rest of the planet. Created by the people at The Real […]
Blog Action Day focuses this year on climate change, which, like everything else on this planet, is also a microbial matter. Howzat? Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas which has heat retention capability 23 times of that of CO2. Soil methanogens are the chief global producers of methane. There are an estimated 7.5x 109 tons […]
Seven shades of brilliant, put a big smile on my face.
This has been a topic of discussion since I was in grad school: when will the Nobel prize for the structure of the ribosome be finally awarded? Well, it finally has. Ada Yonath, Thomas Steitz and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan received the Nobel for work that has spanned three decades and an equal number of continents. […]