Quoth Dr. Stemwedel, from Adventures in Science and Ethics. In the case of Universities and four-yr colleges, I completely agree. If you're looking for job training, go to a community college. This post is in response to one of the comments from the other day. This commenter expressed frustration at ...
"It's all about saving Aunt Millie" – Bob Swanson Co-Founder of Genentech. Jim DeKloe wrote this post as a guest author a few years ago. Jim is one of the most inspirational educators I know and he's the sort of person that reminds you why educating students about biotechnology careers ...
Blogging from Bio-Link, part III[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"2636","attributes":{"class":"media-image","typeof":"foaf:Image","style":"","alt":"i-6acc85780a72ebc76de64b3369707f04-clock.jpg"}}]] High school teachers have different techniques for selling their students on the benefits of science and math. When some high school instructors step in front of a class, the quiet demeanor gets put away and another persona steps out - the USED-CAR SALESMAN SCIENCE EVANGELIST ...
It must be spring. Summer course announcements are popping up everywhere and this site is no exception. Last Friday, I posted an announcement about our summer bioinformatics course in Alaska, June 27-29th. This week, I have a couple more conferences to announce. Naturally, I'll be at both of them, leading ...
No one in a life science-related industry or research lab, in Western Washington, is safe at this time of year. Surely, you're joking! No, seriously, there are teachers and science enthusiasts everywhere looking to sign you up! And don't call me "Shirley." Sign me up? That's right, it's time to ...
I don't know if any DIY biologists are looking for projects, but I think engineering yeast with a gene to detect heavy metals might be a good DIY biology project and I have some ideas for how to do this. What are the advantages of using yeast and working on ...
I learned via e-mail yesterday that the biotechnology program, that I taught with for ten years during the 90's, is ending due to low enrollments. I also learned yesterday, via the Seattle Times, that a resurrected version of ICOS called CMC Icos Biologics is planning a $35M expansion of their ...
This morning I attended the Fifth Annual WBBA Governor's Life Sciences Summit. The breakfast was great; the talks were okay. I do enjoy the stories about people who's lives were saved because of biotechnology and I agree that the focus of the summit, research and discovery are important, but I ...
What do genetic testing and genealogy have in common? The easy answer is that they're both used by people who are trying to find out who they are, in more ways than one. Another answer is that both tests can involve DNA sequence data. And that leads us to another ...
It seems kind of funny to be thinking of anti-freeze at the moment, with heat waves blanketing the U.S., but all this hot weather makes me miss winter. And so I decided it was time to re-post this from the original DigitalBio. Winter is coming soon, my bike ride to ...
What's the difference between a synthetic drug and an antibiotic? Sometimes there's no difference at all. Let's take a look at chloramphenicol and couple of pencillins. Chloramphenicol kills many different kinds of bacteria by interfering with their ability to make new proteins. Here's a point where language gets tricky. Originally ...
This is a video that a friend made that shows, very clearly, how to pour an agarose gel, load the samples and run it. I especially like the way he used a bit of time lapse photography to show the dyes separating as the gel ran.
Considering that several genomes that have been sequenced in the past decade, it seems amazing in retrospect, that the first complete bacterial genome sequence was only published 12 years ago (1). Now, the Genome database at the NCBI lists 450 complete microbial genomes (procaryotes and archea), 1476 genomes from eucaryotes ...
"How much do I love you? I'll tell you no lie. How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?" - Irving Berlin The other installments are here: Part I: Introduction Part II: Sequencing strategies Part III: Reads and chromats Part V: checking out the library We all know ...
About a week ago, I offered to answer questions about subjects that I've either worked with, studied or taught. I haven't had many questions yet, but I can certainly answer the ones I've had so far. Today, I'll answer the first question: How do you sequence a genome? Before we ...
Shotgun sequencing. Sounds like fun. Speculations on the origin of the phrase I think that this term came from shotgun cloning. In the early days of gene cloning before cDNA, PCR, or electroporation; molecular biologists would break genomic DNA up into lots of smaller pieces, package DNA in lambda phage ...
The bioinformatics classes that I teach use web services and web sites as much as possible, but I still find that it's helpful to have programs on our classroom computers. Here is a list of my favorite desktop programs for those of you who might want to add some bioinformatics ...
Last spring, I gave my first hands-on workshop in working with Next Generation Sequencing data at the Eighth Annual UT-ORNL-KBRIN Bioinformatics Summit at Fall Creek Falls State Park in Tennessee. The p roceedings from that conference are now on-line at BMC Bioinformatics and it's fun to look back and reflect ...
Vizzini: He didn't fall? Inconceivable! Inigio: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. - William Goldman, The Princess Bride Excuse me while I temporarily interrupt the genome sequencing series to define a word. Artifacts in the classroom It's disorienting. You learn ...
Students, teachers and scientists converge tommorrow morning from all around the Puget Sound region and elsewhere in Washington to share their experiences and talk about science. The students will present posters, science-themed music, art, drama, and many different types of projects that involved first-hand research and investigation. Scientists from the ...
One of the commenters on a previous post, pointed out that proteases have pretty diverse structures, even though they also share a common function. What else could I do? I had to take a look. I found structures for chymotrypsin (from a cow) and subtilisin (from a soil bacteria, Bacillus ...
Like everything else, if we want to know what's going on, we have to ask. So, it's time once again for the 2011-2012 National Biotechnology/Life Sciences Program Survey. Yes, indeed. Federal and state agencies will use the results to determine how best to support programs like yours. This study will ...
Do you want to learn how to use some cool biotechnology and bioinformatics methods in your college or high school class? If you're on the East coast, the best place to go is the Fralin Biotechnology Conference at Virignia Tech, July 18-21st. ( Yes, it's the same Virgina Tech, and ...
[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"2632","attributes":{"class":"media-image","typeof":"foaf:Image","style":"","alt":"i-d336adebb31e5453376e5d20cec6c970-ck_yarrow.jpg"}}]] Blogging from Bio-Link, part I I am currently in Berkeley attending the 2006 Bio-Link summer fellows' workshop. It's hard to believe that it's been eight years since the first workshop was held. We're still meeting here in the same lovely Clark Kerr Center and I'm still, as every year ...
" Did you know," my friend whispered, " that the Humane Society funds terrorists?" I was stunned. What? That's crazy! I've adopted pets from there. No way! How could those be the same people?? My friend and I were suffering from "brand confusion." In business, this happens when different companies ...
Students in the United States take many convoluted and unnecessarily complicated paths when it comes to finding careers in biotechnology. If Universities and community colleges worked together, an alternative path could benefit all parties; students, schools, industry, and the community. The image below illustrates the current paths and the approximate ...
What do people in biotechnology do on the job? What can students do with a science degree once they've finished college? Some answers can be found at the " Life Sciences Central web site. Created by the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County, this is a wonderful resource for anyone ...
I had an enlightening experience recently, after I wrote some bioinformatics activities, under contract, for a community college. At the end of the project, the person at the college asked me if the activities were anything like the things that a " bioinformatics technician" would do on the job. tags ...
I don't usually blog about work for wide variety of reasons. But, last week, since I wanted to write about bioinformatics software companies, I broke with tradition and wrote about Geospiza as an example. Naturally, I got some feedback about this. Some people liked it, but one of the most ...
Over the years, I've seen many biotechnology education programs at community colleges embrace outreach to high schools as part of their mission. This kind of enthusiasm for outreach seems unique to biotech. No other kind of science or engineering program seems to do this sort of thing, at least not ...
What roles should community colleges play in training the bioeconomy workforce of the future? Send your answers to bioeconomy@ostp.gov by Dec. 6th. One night towards the end of October, we happened to meet with someone who could tell us more. We asked him about a request for information (RFI) soliciting ...
It's hard to teach bioinformatics when schools work so hard to keep us from using computers. Anecdotes from the past Back in my days as a full-time instructor, I fought many battles with our IT department. Like many colleges, we had a few centralized computer labs, tightly controlled by IT ...
The Ask a Science Blogger question of the week asks if organic foods are really worth the hype. I'm afraid my answer can't fit into one blog post. Let me start by telling you about my garden. This year my garden has been a home to local wildlife, but during ...
Last spring, in a coffee shop in Berkeley, I saw an amazing thing. It was a cup made from corn. The information on the cup says that it is made from corn, is environmentally sustainable, and 100% compostable. My fellow ScienceBloggers have written several articles lately about corn in fast ...
Some of the things that are attracting people to DIY biology are: the idea of doing science with others for fun the possibility of doing something that might be beneficial to society being part of larger movement All of those notions appeal to me and since I've been involved with ...
Last week, we decided to compare a human mitochondrial DNA sequence with the mitochondrial sequences of our cousins, the apes, and find out how similar these sequences really are. The answer is: really, really, similar. And you can see that, in the BLAST graph, below the fold. A quick glance ...
"Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!" I realized that I should add just a bit more information to last answer on gene identification, so here it is. After the last installment, Diego commented: but still you do not know exactly what part of your DNA ...
Last Friday, we had another in the series of weird DNA structures. (You can see the first here). I asked the audience to identify the unusual feature in this molecule. Here's the first picture: tags: Here's the answer: Steve L. guessed it correctly. This is not just DNA, it's a ...
Last week, we embarked on an adventure with BLAST. BLAST, short for Basic Alignment Search Tool, is a collection of programs, written by scientists at the NCBI (1) that are used to compare sequences of proteins or nucleic acids. BLAST is used in multiple ways, but last week my challenge ...
Welcome back! If you've just joined us, we're in the middle of a quest to find the identity of an unknown nucleotide sequence. To summarize our results so far, we used this sequence to do a blastn search of GenBank, using all the default settings at the NCBI. You can ...
Cloning the gene for green fluorescent protein is fun. Lots of fun. Cloners have put the GFP gene into rabbits, plants, cats, fish, and worms, and made mutants that code for proteins in every color of the fluorescent rainbow. Teachers like GFP so much that every year, high school students ...
My oldest daughter's favorite sweatshirt is one from the Seattle Children's Theatre Drama School, with the motto, " What's your motivation?" I was reminded of motivation the other day, as I talked about projects with the DIY biology group. It's pretty clear that you can't pick a project without knowing ...
This afternoon, I attended the first meeting of a DIY biology group in Seattle, after a kind invitation from one of the founders. DIY, for those of you new to the acronym, stands for "Do It Yourself." But, you say, there are lots of people who do biology on their ...
This the second part of three part case study where we see what happens when high school students clone and sequence genomic plant DNA. In this part, we do a bit of forensics to see how well their sequencing worked and to see if we can anything that could help ...
This the third part of case study where we see what happens when high school students clone and sequence genomic plant DNA. In this last part, we use the results from an automated comparison program to determine if the students cloned any genes at all and, if so, which genes ...
A few days ago, I wrote about a cool project that some high school students did where they used DNA sequencing to identify seafood. One question that came up from one of my commenters was how a school would start a project like this. I'm totally biased, but I think ...
I get asked this question often enough and now that's it's come up again, it seems that I might as well answer it once and for all and get it over with. First, I want to change the question. Of course they don't need to learn programming. A better question ...
Well, I had to test Scribd with something. Why not use a document on the Massachusetts Life Sciences Industry? Scribd is sort of like the YouTube of electronic paper. I found Scribd from TomJoe's post about Life on Mars. His PowerPoint talk is really much more interesting than the life ...
Reposted from the original Digitalbio. About a decade ago, I took a fascinating summer course at the UW on bioethics. We read about the Nuremburg trials and the Geneva conventions. We learned about horizon problems and eugenics. And we discussed lots of challenging scenarios with genetic testing, autonomy, family relationships ...
