Welcome Bio256 students! This quarter, we're going to do some very cool things. We are going to use bioinformatics resources and tools to investigate some biological questions. My goal, is for you to remember that these resources exist and hopefully, be able to use them when you're out working in ...
A little over ten years ago, Dr. Elaine Johnson obtained funding from the National Science Foundation to start Bio-Link, an Advanced Technology Education center, focused on biotechnology. Since that time, Dr. Johnson has become a national leader in biotech education, enlisting the country's top educators and industry captains to ensure ...
I'm in Berkeley right now at the annual Bio-Link Summer Fellows forum. We're getting to hear talks from people in the biotech industry, listen to enthusiastic instructors describe their biotech programs and ideas, and try out new educational materials. Yesterday, two speakers (Damon Tighe and Jason Baumohl) from the Joint ...
It looked like just any other rainy Saturday morning in the Pacific Northwest, but no, this Saturday was a day for microbiology. Reluctantly, I crawled out of my warm bed and headed over to the University of Washington to attend a meeting of the Pacific NW branch of the American ...
Many medical conditions today are treated but never cured. Imagine, a child with a genetic disease like juvenile diabetes or hemophilia. This child will be taking expensive medications for their entire lives. In the case of some diseases the cost of the medications might be more than child or their ...
If you've read any of the many stories lately about Craig Venter or Jim Watson's genome, you've probably seen a "SNP" appear somewhere. You may be wondering, and rightly so: just what is a SNP? Never fear, hopefully this post will answer some of those questions. SNP stands for Single ...
A long-sought goal in genetics has been to develop therapies that can use correctly functioning genes to replace genes with defects. If we had the technology to predictably modify our genomes, we would have the ability to cure many diseases instead of having to place people on medications for their ...
Reposted in honor of the "glow in the dark" kitty clones. Last year, I wrote about photographs of jellyfish that were altered by newspapers, scientific publishers, science education companies, and me ( for the purpose of the article) to make it look like the jellyfish glowed. Those jellyfish do NOT ...
Why the ABRF of course! I spend a fair amount time every summer giving workshops for college and high-school teachers on genomics and bioinformatics. One of the things that always surprises them, is the amount of lab work that's carried out by people working in shared, or core lab facilities ...
I mean phone call. Because, if I thought he remembered me, I would call and say " thank you." Because of the time I spent in his lab, I know that cloning started long before Dolly. The first vertebrate animal was cloned over 50 years ago. And it wasn't a ...
Right now, I'm sitting in the audience at a symposium on Science, Engineering, and Business at the Leading edge. The symposium is sponsored by the Institute for Systems Biology and it's Lee Hood's 70th birthday. Every speaker is beginning with a wish for a happy birthday. I'll have updates, as ...
Why should professional scientists have all the fun? Researchers have been engineering glowing cats, and selling glowing fish at pet stores. High school kids can do genetic engineering too, if they have the right equipment. And you can help them get the equipment by contributing to our DonorsChoose fund drive ...
Two teenagers, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, carried out their own science project over the past year. They visited 4 restaurants and 10 grocery stores and gathered 60 samples of fish and sent them off to the University of Guelph to get sequenced. I like this story. One of my ...
It's true. Chimeras are out and walking among us. These aren't quite the chimeras that RPM is obsessed with, but they're certainly bothersome to some. From Genome Technology Online, we have a report that James Derr, at Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine, wants to sequence the genome from a ...
Grasses at Yellowstone National Park are able to grow temperatures (65°; C) that would toast most living things. Step right up! Watch original research, as it happens, on the web! I'm going to use bioinformatics to see if I can find that answer to the puzzle of heat-tolerant plants. Previous ...
A simple web search says biotech is really big. One estimate indicates that the industry will have $400 billion in sales in 2017 with growth to over $775 billion by 2024 [1]. Another report suggests there are over 77,000 employers [2]. That’s big, but is it real, and what you ...
Last summer, I had the good fortune to attend a conference in Washington D.C. on Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology education. There were lots of inspiring speeches, cool videos, and talks about building more student-centered classrooms and strategies for change. Surprisingly, many of the attendees seemed unaware that there ...
Two protein structures from an avian influenza virus are shown below. One form of the protein makes influenza virus resistant to Oseltamivir (Tamiflu®) Don't worry, these proteins aren't from H5N1, but they do come from a related influenza virus that also infects birds. One protein structure is from a strain ...
Why should students blog about science? Don't they have enough to do already? Last Thursday night I participated in a panel discussion about science blogging (see the video) at ScienceOnline Seattle ( #scioSEA)(video) and mentioned that we have two students blogging for us at Bio-Link. A question I saw afterward ...
The Backstory: As it stands today,when one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provides the funding for a scientific research project, and those results are published, they must be made freely available to public, within a set period of time. The reasoning behind this requirement is that taxpayers funded ...
Pet cloning is back! Pets are funny things. Some owners find their pets to be closer than some human friends, other owners never really bond with their pets at all. BioArts, a California biotech company, founded by ex-CEO of the now defunct Genetic Savings & Clone, is counting on the ...
This summer, I had the good fortune to attend three (or was it four?) conferences on science education. One of the most inspirational conferences was one on Vision and Change in Biology Education. This conference was co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the AAAS. It was a call to ...
Have you ever wondered how to view and annotate molecular structures? At least digital versions? It's surprisingly easy and lots of fun. Here's a movie I made that demonstrates how you can use Cn3D, a free structure-viewing program from the NCBI. Luckily, Cn3D behaves almost the same way on both ...
start all over again. MDRNA Inc., a Puget Sound area company formerly known as Nastech, announced on Monday that they'd be laying off 23 people including their president and chief business officer. This might not sound like a lot, but according to Joseph Tartakoff, from the Seattle PI, this brings ...
Every fall, we had to confront it. People would let their dogs run around on the field in the morning and by the time soccer practice started, the field would be full of deadly doo. There's nothing that hurts soccer practice more than a soccer ball or shoes that went ...
Many regions in the United States, and the world for that matter, are seeking to entice biotech companies to relocate. As Lorraine Ruff and David Gabrilska describe in their Genetic Engineering News Article, " Metrics for Economic Development," the exhibitors at meetings like BIO work hard to: ".. entice founders ...
In my last post, I wrote about insulin and interesting features of the insulin structure. Some of the things I learned were really surprising. For example, I was surprised to learn how similar pig and human insulin are. I hadn't considered this before, but this made me wonder about the ...
This structure is called a "kissing loop" and I find that name just a bit odd, given the source of the structure. Now, here's the puzzle: Why would I say that the name " kissing loop" is ironic?
Wired Campus shared an interesting story this morning about a career site for female science / engineering professionals. The site is called ASU CareerWISE and its mission is to help women with problem solving. I like the idea and I like that they built the site in Drupal, since I've ...
If you've read the previous posts on this topic, here and here, you're probably aware by now that I have this weird ( okay, maybe fanatical) obsession with data. Or at least, with knowing if my data are right so I can get on with life, do the analysis and ...
The first talk was by Irving Weissman, one of the pioneers in immunology and stem cell research. He talked about the stem cells that form blood, also known as HSCs or hematopoietic stem cells. These cells are great because they can self-renew, and they can divide and differentiate. That is ...
The second speaker was Eric Davidson who talked about gene regulatory networks. He works on sea urchins and showed us this amazing diagram that looked like a computer chip. The diagram describes the inputs and outputs of 50 genes during the first 30 hours of development. And, it convinced me ...
This is a-mewsing. (Photo Credit: Gyeongsang National University) When Genetic Savings and Clone shut their doors it looked like wishful cat owners were going to be out of luck and short of kittens. Never fear, the South Korean scientists at Gyeongsang National University have come to the rescue. I couldn't ...
I wrote earlier about videos of lab protocols and the benefit these could bring to people who are trying to learn new techniques or perhaps troubleshoot their own. Unfortunately, I suspect that the people who would benefit the most from movies of others doing lab procedures correctly are those who ...
" Why won't biotech companies hire people with Ph.D.s to be technicians?" " I already have a Ph.D., how do I find a job?" These were some of the questions that commenters left after my earlier posts ( here, here and here) on biotechnology workforce shortages. Unfortunately, for these students ...
The other day, I wrote that I wanted to make things easier for my students by using the kinds of software that they were likely to have on their computers and the kinds that they are likely to see in the business and biotech world when they graduate from college ...
Tired of waiting for congress and you don't want to move to California or out of the US? Attila Csordas shows us in a few photographs how to isolate placental stem cells at home. His series brings back memories. My very first paid technician job in college involved visiting the ...
Theo chocolate is situated in a neighborhood called Fremont, in the city of Seattle, in the former Redhook brewery. I used to consult for Redhook in my microbiology days, when I had access to a -80°C freezer and a proper microscope, so the building has a comfortable feel and some ...
We've been fans of the Molecule of the Month series by David Goodsell, for many years. Not only is Dr. Goodsell a talented artist but he writes very clear descriptions of the ways molecules like proteins, RNA, and DNA work together and function inside a cell. To learn about proteins ...
The simple fact is this: some DNA sequences are more believable than others. The problem is, that many students and researchers never see any of the metrics that we use for evaluating whether a sequence is "good" and whether a sequence is "bad." All they see are the base calls ...
Disclaimers - just so you know... This information is cross-posted at www.bio-link.org All the data and graphs in this post were obtained from Simplyhired.com. I do not have any kind of commercial affiliation with this company I found their site via GenomeWeb. Having worked around biotechnology for several years, I ...
I touched a nerve in another post by mentioning molecular biology kits. Let's face it. Cloning kits, sequencing kits, and their relatives are the laboratory equivalent of frozen cookie dough. With frozen cookie dough, anyone can bake hot, steamy, chocolate chip cookies that taste great. You don't have to read ...
Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passing Where do all the flowers gone? Long time ago Where do all the flowers gone? Young girls picked them everyone, When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn? -Pete Seeger Where do graduate students and post-docs go when they ...
This video from WDSU shows Mr. Green Genes, the transgenic kitty, in the dark and in the light. There's also an interview with Dr. Betsy Dresser, who very briefly talks about the work at the Audubon Center for Research on Endangered Species. Other than clips of the cat, and Dr ...
You've probably heard about enterprising researchers attaching cameras to dolphins, dogs, and other animals, in order to learn how things look from the critter-point of view. Now, some enterprising lab rats have added a new twist to this technique. It's lab cam! From Attila Csordas , we have a report ...
Liveblogging from the Hi-Tec conference I'm currently at the Hi-Tec conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. (If you follow me on Twitter - www.twitter.com/@digitalbio - you may have seen me complaining about the temperature). It's an interesting conference, so I'm going to share some of the things that I'm learning. Dr. Travis ...
Long Branch, NJ, is a lovely town on the Atlantic Ocean, with long beaches and brand new shops and condos. It is also part of an area in, central New Jersey, where biotechnology education is entering an exciting time thanks to efforts of NJBEC, Bio-1, and a WIRED grant from ...
The National Science Foundation recently announced an ambitious plan to transform biology education across the United States called "Vision and Change." Funding for this mission is being provided by a new NSF grant program called "TUES" for Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science. This finding may have been a surprise to ...
In 1925, dogsledders raced through the frozen Alaskan bush to bring antiserum to the isolated village of Nome. The antiserum arrived in time, saved the lives of many villagers from the horrors of diphtheria, and inspired the Iditarod, a famous race in celebration of the dog sledders' heroic feat. West ...
Living in Seattle fosters a certain pessimism when it comes to large companies. Boeing has always been a poster child for employment uncertainty, regularly hiring large numbers of people and just as regularly, laying them off. Now, we have Microsoft and Amgen joining the club, with Microsoft layoffs impacting an ...
