Last fall, Dr. Thomas Tubon and I presented a Bio-Link webinar on Genome Engineering with CRISPR-Cas9. Since my part will be to help our audience understand the basics of this system, I prepared a short tutorial with Molecule World . Enjoy!
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 ...
For many years, many of you have been using our popular BLAST for beginners tutorial and the BLASTing through the kingdom of life activity. We decided with the recent updates to the NCBI BLAST pages that it was a good time to update the tutorial and some of the sequences ...
Computers, biological data (molecular sequences, structures, and other data), websites, and databases are integral to modern research. Innovations like precision, or personalized medicine, expect a certain level of patient participation, and our future food and environmental sustainability will require that society can access a multitude of computer-based resources. Thus, higher ...
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 ...
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 scale and proportion are best understood using the scientific practice of working with models.
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.
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 ...
Someone missed the memo. Over the past year, news and presentations by NIH leaders like Philip Bourne have communicated that the proliferation biologically focused databases is unsustainable. However, unlike last year, where the number of databases tracked by Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) dropped by three databases, 2015's net growth was ...
" 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 ...
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 ...
When finding a female scientists' data turns into an archeological treasure hunt. A few months ago, I decided it would be interesting to celebrate various scientific contributions by making images of chemical / molecular structures in the Molecule World iPad app and posting them on Twitter ( @MoleculeWorld). Whenever I ...
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 ...
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?
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 ...
Digital World Biology is happy this summer to be partnering with Shoreline Community College and NWABR to help students attending their summer camps, Project Biotech and Camp BIOmed, explore 3D structures of proteins, DNA, chemicals and other substances, in Molecule World.
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 ...
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 ...
