In no particular order or ranking, recent and not-so-recent articles from PLoS-1. The common thread (if any): I thought they were pretty cool in one way or another. 1. Men don’t tell the truth about their penis. No kidding? But this is somewhat more serious. It has been accepted for some time that male [...]
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. – William Hazlitt We like to think that we are the only species capable of emotional self-awareness and therefore the only “animal that laughs [...]
Genomics is a new and exciting programming language based on Brainfsck. Here are the commands: g Move pointer to the right. e Move pointer to the left. n Increment the cell at the pointer. o Decrement the cell at the pointer. m Jump forward past the matching i if the cell at the current pointer [...]
Miami University has joined the National Genomics Research Initiative (NGRI) offered by HHMI Science Education Alliance (SEA) in their Phage Genomics course. The students go directly into the lab, participating in an authentic research experience. In a full-year academic course they: isolate and characterize bacterial viruses from their local soil prepare the viral DNA [...]
So here are EssOh and OhOne assembling a rather frustrating puzzle containing cows. The same 5-6 cow “characters” are repeated, which is a perfect way to illustrate low-complexity DNA sequences, and why they are hard to assemble, especially when the pieces are small, like those you get from some second generation sequencers.
The Genome Center at University of California Davis and researchers at UC Santa Cruz are organizing a genome assembly competition which they call The Assemblathon. They have released two simulated genomes for competing groups to assemble as best they can. Assemblies are due February 6th, 2011. So there is still time, if you would like [...]
Nature Genetics seems to have taken a page from the Food Network Magazine by timing two publications to the annual obsession with festive foods among many, NG readership included. I am talking about the genomes of the Strawberry and of the Cocoa plants. Both are important crops, both are components of luxurious eating. Both papers are comprehensive [...]
The personal genomics company 23&me is hosting a poetry contest. The winner receives a free pass to the Personalized World Medicine Conference. Poems should include a bunch of keywords having to do with 23&me, personalized genomics and all that jazz. I’m no poet (and don’t you know it), so here is my Haiku non-entry: My genome was seq- [...]
cag·ey /ˈkājē/ (adjective) Reluctant to give information owing to caution or suspicion CAGI /ˈkājē/ (acronym) Critical Assessment of Genomic Interpretations. For details keep reading. The ability to sequence one’s genome adds a new dimension to the ancient maxim “know thyself”. What could be more revealing of one’s self than one’s own blueprint, explaining existing [...]
Yes, it’s that time when we all get together in front of the screen to watch another beautiful game played by that fantastic team contributing to the Carnival of Evolution. This time hosted on the lovely green pitch of Byte Size Biology. So get your popcorn, sunflower-seeds, crisps or any other culturally-appropriate sports-watching food and…… [...]
It isn’t junk DNA: God just commented out a lot of crappy code as he rolled out releases. – An old bioinformaticians’ joke (Hey, I never said it was a funny joke…) Why are some genomes so big? I mean, seriously. Why would the marbled lungfish with a genome weighing 132.83 picograms (pg) need an [...]
The trouble with genomic sequencing, is that it is too cheap. Anyone that has a bit of extra cash laying around, you can scrape the bugs off your windshield, sequence them, and write a paper. Seriously? Yes, seriously now: as we sequence more and more genomes, our annotation tools cannot keep up with them. It’s [...]
René Goscinny would probably have done a better job of naming the new trend of personal genomics (genomix?) companies to sequence celebrities genomes. Heck, we might have even done Obelix’s and Asterix’s genomes to find out if Obelix can drink the magic potion without Getafix’s (Panoramix’s) admonishments that it might do him harm, or to [...]
