"Yo, you regulate it's genes" The English makes me cringe, but I love the idea. Tom McFadden, an associate instructor at Stanford, has made a series of Biology rap videos and posted them on YouTube. Yo, check it out.
I made this video (below the fold) to illustrate the steps involved in making a phylogenetic tree. The basic steps are to: Build a data set Align the sequences Make a tree In the class that I'm teaching, we're making these trees in order to compare sequences from our metagenomics ...
Have you ever wondered how to find things in the NCBI databases? Maybe you tried to find something but didn't know how it was spelled. Or maybe you tried to use a common name like "pig" or "deer" to find information in a database, not knowing that all the organism ...
For the past few years, I've been collaborating with a friend, Dr. Rebecca Pearlman, who teaches introductory biology at the Johns Hopkins University. Her students isolate bacteria from different environments on campus, use PCR to amplify the 16S ribosomal RNA genes, send the samples to the JHU core lab for ...
What do you do after you've used DNA sequencing to identify the bacteria, viruses, or other organisms in the environment? What's the next step? This four part video series covers those next steps. In this part, we learn that a surprisingly large portion of bioinformatics, or any type of informatics ...
This is third video in our series on analyzing the DNA sequences that came from bacteria on the JHU campus. In this video, we use a pivot table to count all the different types of bacteria that students found in 2004 and we make a pie graph to visualize the ...
Do different kinds of biomes (forest vs. creek) support different kinds of bacteria? Or do we find the same amounts of each genus wherever we look? Those are the questions that we'll answer in this last video. We're going to use pivot tables and count all the genera that live ...
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.
Conflicts between predators like cougars and coyotes and human companions like pets and small children are becoming more common as people move into areas that used to be wildlife habitat. The Seattle Times has a great story this morning about biologists in Washington who are studying cougars to learn if ...
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 ...
Over 2600 genetic diseases have been found where a change in a single gene is linked to the disease. One of the questions we might ask is how those mutations change the shape and possibly the function of a protein? If the structures of the mutant and wild type (normal) ...
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 ...
Before mammals, before dinosaurs, before bacteria, or plants, there was something else; a protocell containing RNA. The Exploring Origins Project has excellent animations of protocells, a timeline of life's evolution, and best of all- fantastic animations of the RNA world. You can see how RNA folds, ribozymes (RNA that catalyzes ...
The Periodic Table of Videos from the University of Nottingham has 118 short YouTube clips about the elements. Wired Campus recommended the Sodium clip (below). I liked it, too. It's not quite as funny as Mentos in Diet Coke, and but it's still cute and the narrator has a haircut ...
If you haven't seen these, check out Jake Young's collection of videos showing T cells getting infected by HIV. The best one is at the bottom of the post.
In the class that I'm teaching, we found that several PCR products, amplified from the 16S ribosomal RNA genes from bacterial isolates, contain a mixed base in one or more positions. We picked samples where the mixed bases were located in high quality regions of the sequence (Q >40), and ...
Ribosomes are molecular machines that build new proteins. This process of synthesizing a protein is also known as translation. Many antibiotics prevent translation by binding to ribosomal RNA. In the class that I'm teaching, we're going to be looking at ribosome structures to see if the polymorphisms that we find ...
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 ...
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 ...
I made this video last night with a Flip Cam Mino. There are some kind of wild trippy effects. Sometimes it even looks like there's popcorn shooting out the top of the space needle. It was sure fun! Happy New Year everyone!
Sometimes words fail me. Luckily, we have videos. Many of you have probably read about Roger Tsien receiving the Nobel Prize this work for his work with the green fluorescent protein (GFP), but I bet some of you are wondering, why a jellyfish protein is worth a Noble Prize. I ...
Pfizer has pledged to donate up to $10,000 to the cause of science education, through Donorschoose.org, but only if enough of you, dear readers go to Big Think: Think Science Now and vote for your favorite video. If you're not familiar with Pfizer, they're a pretty well-known drug company. You ...
What happens when a group of streptococci stick to cells in your throat and start to make toxins? Your body fights back by making clones. The animated video, Fighting Infection by Clonal Selection, from Etsuko Uno and Drew Berry is so good that if I didn't know better, I would ...
Okay, watching some of the other movies makes me realize that I've been very negligent in not uploading ours. Without further ado, here it is. Can you guess the age of the person who made the movie? I'll give you a hint. It wasn't me.
Teachertube looks and works much like YouTube, but you're much less likely to run across videos that Not Safe For the Classroom. All of these videos are made by students and teachers. According to the Dallas News, there are 54,000 videos on the site already and 800,00 visitors every day ...
David Ng from The World's Fair has made this wonderful video on public speaking. Or shall we say the funnier side of public speaking? I really enjoyed it! I'd say Dave's video ranks right up there with one of my other favories, the classic: " Chicken chicken chicken"
Jonathan Eisen (@ phylogenomics) shared this wonderful Lady Gaga lab spoof on Twitter the other day. It rocks. And, it makes me wonder if my pals who've been thinking about getting students interested in careers by having scientists talk on camera might be going at this the wrong way. Sure ...
