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 ...
If you're in Seattle, Dr. Bruce Alberts will be talking tomorrow night (Jan 5th) at the Seattle Aquarium on science education and the role that scientists play. There are also some really interesting talks at a day-long workshop, Wednesday (Jan 6th) at the UW South Campus Center. The details and ...
Do citizen science efforts ever go beyond "feel good" contributions? Do the data get published in peer-reviewed journals? In an earlier post, I started a list of citizen science projects that allow students to make a contribution. Many commentors are graciously adding to that list and I thank you all ...
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 ...
"What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet" - Juliet, from Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare I realized from the comments on my previous post and from Mike's post that more explanations were in order. It seems we have ...
I guess I put my foot in it when I wrote that Genome Technology article on DIY Bio. I've already gotten a couple of e-mails today and I can see on the Google groups DIY bio section, that I managed to offend some people by suggesting doing biotechnology successfully at ...
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 ...
I'm a big of learning from data. There are many things we can learn about swine flu and other kinds of flu by using public databases. In digital biology activity 1, we learned about the kinds of creatures that can get flu. Personally, I'm a little skeptical about the blowfly ...
Genome sequences from California and Texas isolates of the H1N1 swine flu are already available for exploration at the NCBI. Let's do a bit of digital biology and see what we can learn. Activity 1. What kinds of animals get the flu? For the past few years we've been worrying ...
That's how new life forms are created every day in the wild, folks. Human researchers of course have added a few twists on the theme. If we can't induce bacteria or animal cells to collect new bits of DNA on their own, we turn to electroshock therapy. With plants.... aw ...
The HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology is a non-profit organization that opened it's doors in April, 2008. One of the great things about this institute is it's commitment to sharing biotech knowledge with the surrounding community. For the general public, HudsonAlpha has a ongoing written series on biology topics called Biotech ...
