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 ...
My husband brought this fantastic book home from the ASHG* that I think many of you will find interesting. The book is: Making the Right Moves A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty, published in 2006 by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Howard Hughes Medical ...
Do mosquitoes get the mumps? Part V. A general method for finding interesting things in GenBank This is the last in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in mosquitoes and a general method for finding other interesting things. In this last part, I discuss a ...
yep, I've become a videoblogger, at least sometimes. See the first video below. Be kind in the comments, this is a new thing for me. This video introduces the different blast programs, discusses word size, and how blastn works, the blastn score and the E value. The treatment is light ...
It was a wet and rainy day yesterday, and we have a dissecting microscope, so I decided to see if I could find some tardigrades. Tardigrade photo by nebarnix Reposted from Nov. 2006 I went outside and scraped a bit of moss and some lichens off of our deck. Then ...
Amateur astronomers unite! The pros want your help! image from Astronomy Picture of the Day, Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Aloisi (STScI / ESA), Hubble Heritage (STScI / AURA) - ESA/Hubble Collaboration I learned about this from the Washington Science Teachers Assocation. Galaxy Zoo and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey are ...
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 ...
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.
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 No. This year, the "dead" databases (links no longer valid) outnumber the new ones.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 ...
Biology as a second-language: the immersion method Language teachers say the best way to learn a language is by total immersion and even better, spending time in the country where it's spoken conversing with native speakers. See it, hear it, speak it, use it! Put yourself in a position where ...
The fall soccer season is well underway and the Hummingbirds soccer team is kicking everything in sight. The hummingbirds in these two series of photos are much quicker, considerably smaller and certainly cute. A friend sent me this link since I manage the Hummingbirds soccer team. Hopefully, the person who ...
No biology course is complete these days without learning how to do a BLAST search. Herein, I describe an assignment and an animated tutorial that teachers can readily adopt and use, and give teachers a hint for obtaining the password-protected answer key. Development of the tutorial and the activity were ...
One of most wonderful things about the Internet has been the emergence of research projects that involve the general public. Universities like Cornell, Kansas University, and the University of Minnesota, to name a few, have established web sites and on-line databases that encourage both students and amateur biologists to participate ...
The NASA Earth observatory has some amazing photos of the wildfires in California. I've put a small version of one image here, but you should go to the NASA site and see the high resolution images. The fires are horrible but the images are fantastic.
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 ...
Next Saturday afternoon, at ScienceOnline2010, the science goddess, the chemspider, and I will be presenting a workshop on getting students involved in citizen science. In preparation, I'm compiling a set of links to projects that involve students in citizen science. If you know of any good citizen science efforts, please ...
Metagenomics is a field where people interrogate the living world by isolating and sequencing nucleic acids. Since all living things have DNA, and viruses have either DNA or RNA, we can identify who's around by looking at bits of their genome. Researchers are using this approach to find the culprit ...
Last year I wrote about an experiment where I compared a human mitochondrial DNA sequence to primate sequences in the GenBank. Since I wanted to know about the differences between humans, gorillas, and chimps, I used the Entrez query 'Great Apes' to limit my search to a set of sequences ...
Many of you might take this for granted, and I know it seems amazing today, but I when first started teaching, our access to scientific literature was pretty limited. I could go to the UW and use Grateful Med to search Medline, but we didn't have anything like it at ...
Today, we're going to look for rainbows in double-stranded DNA and see what they can tell us about DNA structure. First, we're going to get a structure for a double-stranded molecule of DNA and open it in Cn3D. 1K9L If you want to do this at home and you haven't ...
In last week's episode, your assignment was to think of an interesting plant trait and find a description about a gene, related to that trait, by searching PubMed. Since coming up with an interesting trait might be a challenge for some people, let's think about how to approach this step ...
Why do I love Cn3D? Let me count the ways. What does Cn3D do? ( Hint: say "Cn3D" out loud). Seriously, Cn3D is a program that draws lovely pictures of molecular structures by using experimental data from techniques like X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Surprisingly ( to some) ...
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 ...
Yikes, I've spilled some DHMO on my hands! What do I do now? Do you know the truth about DHMO? Look at this web site and tell me if you still want to go swimming.
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 ...
tags: I meant for this to be a three part series, but in part II, I learned that one more experiment had to be done. I had to know if the articles I found in PubMed Central were the same articles that I found in PubMed. Part I and part ...
tags: This three part series covers the problem of finding scientific articles, compares results from a few different methods, and presents instructions for the best method. A day in the life of an English physician In April, I had the great fortune to attend (and speak at) a conference on ...
tags: This is the second part in a three part series on finding free scientific papers. You can read the first part here: Part I: A day in the life of an English physician Today, we do an experiment with PubMed and PubMed Central to determine the best way to ...
tags: This is the third, and last part in a three part series on finding free scientific papers. You can read the first part here: Part I: A day in the life of an English physician and the second part, where I compare different methods, here. Today, I will show ...
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 ...
Last night, the phone rang at 9:22 pm. I quickly glanced at the caller ID. Hmmm. Why is the Seattle School district calling us at this time of night? Apparently the swine flu has come to Seattle and the school district thought we should know. Those messages are helpful if ...
Goodbye desktop, we're off to see the web. Both my students and I have been challenged this semester by the diversity of computer platforms, software versions, and unexpected bugs. Naturally, I turned to the world and my readers for help and suggestions. Some readers have suggested we could solve everything ...
I read about this in Bio-IT World and had to go check it out. It's called the Genome Projector and it has to be the coolest genome browser I've ever seen. They have 320 bacterial genomes to play with. Naturally, I chose our friend E. coli. The little red pins ...
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 ...
Why is an eye, an eye and a nose, a nose? Why do different cells create different kinds of tissues when all the cells in a single organism start out with the same set of instructions (aka DNA)? Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes is a learning activity that helps students ...
HealthMap is a great site that could be an excellent resource when teaching a biology, microbiology, or health class. Not to mention, I can picture people using it before they travel somewhere or even just for fun. I learned about HealthMap awhile ago from Mike the Mad Biologist, but I ...
If like me, you were a little disoriented and confused when you visited Second Life and traveled through orientation island, then you may like this. The Wired Campus (from The Chronicle for Higher Education) led me to an interesting post from the New Media Consortium and a new place to ...
One time, I suggested in a list-serve that science teachers make more use of primary scientific literature. Naturally, I learned all the reasons why teachers don't do this-lack of access being one of the biggies- but I also learned something surprising. One teacher wrote that she re-writes a lot of ...
I've been reading quite a bit lately about Universities setting up virtual classrooms in Second Life, so when Bertalan Meskó from ScienceRoll invited me to come give a poster, I decided it was time to take the plunge. Besides, I'm going to be teaching an on-line bioinformatics course this spring ...
A long time ago, I saw a Star Trek episode where the crew encountered aliens who lived at a different frequency. I may have this backwards, but I think the aliens moved so quickly that no one knew they were there. And until problems struck, our heroes were happily oblivious ...
I read about this in Science and immediately had to check it out. Instant gratification on the internet is such a wonderful thing! The Ed Kravitz lab has made movies of fights and even put them on the web for your viewing pleasure. You can see the following fly fights ...
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 ...
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 ...
We heard quite a bit about rainforest destruction in the 80's and 90's. Even the Grateful Dead joined the efforts to raise awareness and gather support for rain forest preservation. In the past, the Dead stayed away from political activism because ( quoting Jerry Garcia): Power is a scary thing ...
Would you like to have some fun playing with chromatograms and helping our class identify bacteria in the dirt? This quarter, my bioinformatics class, at Shoreline Community College, will be working with chromatograms that were obtained by students at Johns Hopkins University, and graciously made available by Dr. Rebecca Pearlman ...
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 ...
DNA sequence traces are often used in cases where: We want to identify the source of the nucleic acid. We want to detect drug-resistant variants of human immune deficiency virus. We want to know which base is located at which position, especially where we might be able to diagnose a ...
I found it in the MeSH database. Really! Looking for a quick answer? Don't ask a scientist It doesn't take long to realize that scientists can spend countless hours debating the meaning of words. Our very own ScienceBlogs is a great example, just look at the many ways we can ...
