What’s the first you think about when you see a spider? Running away? Danger? Fairies? Spiderman? Do you wonder if spider silk is really strong enough to stop a train, like they showed in Spiderman 2? Whatever your thoughts, you’re probably not thinking about 3D printing in space. Yet, the ...
Do other organisms make antibiotics? As far as I can tell, most of the commercially produced antibiotics are made by bacteria, fungi, and a bit chemistry (more on that in a moment). It appears, however, that compounds with antimicrobial properties are made by just about everything. Just to make things ...
Something interesting happened in 2014. The total number of databases that Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) tracks dropped by three databases! What happened? Did people quit making databases? No. This year, the "dead" databases (links no longer valid) outnumber the new ones. To celebrate Digital World Biology's release of Molecule World ...
Did you know small fragments of DNA are circulating in your blood stream? These short pieces of DNA are left behind after cells self-destruct. This self-destruction, or apoptosis, is a normal process. In the case of fetal development, certain cells in our hands die, leaving behind individual fingers. Immune system ...
On pinene and inhibiting enzymes. People of a certain age may remember a series of really funny commercials featuring Euell Gibbons and his famous question about whether you've ever eaten a pine tree. " Some parts are edible" said Euell. Perhaps some parts are, but other pine tree products aren't ...
People of a certain age may remember a series of really funny commercials featuring Euell Gibbonsand his famous question about whether you've ever eaten a pine tree. " Some parts are edible" said Euell.
Perhaps some parts are, but other pine tree products aren't so nourishing.
Imagine a simple hike in a grassy part of South America. You hear a rattle and feel a quick stab of pain as fangs sink into your leg. Toxins in the snake venom travel through your blood vessels and penetrate your skin. If the snake is a South American rattlesnake ...
A few years ago, when the iPhone first came out, I fell in love with an app called "Molecules." It was easy to use, the images were lovely, and I thought manipulating molecules by touch could help solve some of the problems my students had with using Cn3D. I was ...
A key concept in science is molecular scale. DNA is a fascinating molecule in this regard.
While we cannot "see" DNA molecules without the aid of advanced technology, a full length DNA molecule can be very long. In human cells, other than sperm and eggs, six billion ...
A key concept in science is molecular scale. DNA is a fascinating molecule in this regard. While we cannot "see" DNA molecules without the aid of advanced technology, a full length DNA molecule can be very long. In human cells, other than sperm and eggs, six billion base pairs of ...
This video shows how we used the Molecule World iPad app to make an image of a folded insulin peptide. Protein folding brings the amino acid at the beginning of the protein chain near the amino acid at the other end.
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 ...
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 ...
A real family, struggling with a history of breast cancer provides the back story for this compelling lesson on genetic testing in the Bio-ITEST Genetic Testing curriculum strand. We recently updated lesson 5 for students using Molecule World. This video shows how we used the Molecule World iPad app to ...
National DNA Day has a fun challenge for teachers and classrooms using Pinterest. Your class can join a larger, national, effort to create a National DNA Day Pinterest board by making your own class Pinterest board on DNA, genetics, and genomics. Some possible topics are: Things to do with DNA ...
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 ...
Molecule World is a 3D molecular structure viewer for iPhone, iPad and Mac. This guide covers the free viewer and the Pro authoring tools: selections, scenes, model sets and collections. Version 5.0 Contents Using this guide 1. Molecule World 2. Free and Pro 3. iPhone 4. iPad and Mac 5 ...
A molecular viewer for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Open a structure from a file or fetch one by name, then explore it in 3D with multiple display styles, color schemes, and selection filters. Version 4.6 Contents 1. Getting a structure on screen 2. Moving around in 3D 3. Display styles ...
In 1925, dog sledders 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 Africa could use a similar effort today.
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 ...
" By night all cats are gray" - Miguel Cervantes in Don Quixote I've always liked Siamese cats. Students do, too. "Why Siamese cats wear masks" is always a favorite story in genetics class. So, when I opened my January copy of The Science Teacher, I was thrilled to see ...
To have an effect, a molecule must bind to a receptor and trigger a signal. Studying a receptor's structure can give us insights about the way this triggering process works. Capsaicin is a fascinating molecule that puts the "pep" into peppers. Curiously, the amount of capsaicin in a pepper is ...
We feel interesting and sometimes painful sensations when capsaicin, from chilis, and the allyl isothiocyantes from wasabi,bind to receptors in our mouths. In this article, we look at the structures that communicate information to the cell. How do they tell the cell that capsaicin or wasabi compounds are bound?
When my parents were young, summer made cities a scary place for young families. My mother tells me children were often sent away from their homes to relatives in the country, if possible, and swimming pools were definitely off limits. The disease they feared, poliomyelitis, and the havoc it wrecked ...
April 25th (4/25) is national DNA day. Digital World Biology™ celebrates by sharing some of our favorite DNA structures. We created these photos with Molecule World™ Molecule World is a tools for exploring molecular and chemical structures on an iPhone or iPad.
Today (4/25) is national DNA day. Digital World Biology™ is celebrating by sharing some of our favorite structures of DNA. We created these photos with Molecule World™ a new iPad app for viewing molecular structures. As we are taught in school, the double stranded DNA molecule is a right-handed helix ...
We created the structure collection feature in Molecule World because I knew it would be useful in teaching my courses. A request from the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota taught us structure collections could be useful in other ways, too.
The Weisman Art Museum collaborated with neuroscientists ...
Scale, proportion, and quantity belong to one of the cross cutting concepts in the next generation science standards (NGSS). According to Volume 2 of the NGSS, "in engineering, no structure could be conceived much less constructed without the engineer's precise sense of scale." The authors go on to note that ...
A fun thing we can do with molecular models is to create art. In Molecule World™, the residue coloring option applies a different color to each amino acid and nucleotide. When we're characterizing a protein and trying to understand its function, the residue coloring option helps us identify repetitive or ...
On Sept. 30th, I'm going to be co-presenting a Bio-Link webinar on Genome Engineering with CRISPR-Cas9 with Dr. Thomas Tubon from Madison College. If you're interested, Register here. Since my part will be to help our audience understand the basics of this system, I prepared a short tutorial with Molecule ...
Pull a spaghetti noodle out of a box of pasta and take a look. It's long and stiff. Try to bend it and it breaks. But fresh pasta is pliable. It can fold just like cooked noodles. When students first look at an amino acid sequence, a long string of ...
Replication fork - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere. Organisms with linear chromosomes have to solve the problem that DNA replication makes them shorter. This is due to the fact that DNA polymerase can only add bases to the terminal 3'-OH of a DNA chain. The DNA replication initiation complex uses RNA primers to provide ...
Replication fork - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere.
Every time their DNA gets replicated, it gets shorter. This is due to the fact that DNA polymerase can only add bases to the terminal 3'-OH of a DNA chain. The DNA replication initiation complex uses RNA ...
Sucrose Molecules of sucrose tore apart in their bellies letting glucose course free in their veins. Luckily for us, a system evolved long ago to capture that glucose and minimize it's potential for damage. Removing sugar from the blood and sequestering it in liver, fat, and muscle cells, minimizes the ...
It's well understood in science education that students are more engaged when they work on problems that matter. Right now, Zika virus matters. Zika is a very scary problem that matters a great deal to anyone who might want to start a family and greatly concerns my students. I teach ...
