I've just returned from two conferences that focused on educating students for careers in science and technology and what do I find here at the home fort? There's Chad writing a very nice series on science careers! I was a little puzzled by PNAS acryonym in his titles since to ...
Last spring, I gave my first hands-on workshop in working with Next Generation Sequencing data at the Eighth Annual UT-ORNL-KBRIN Bioinformatics Summit at Fall Creek Falls State Park in Tennessee. The p roceedings from that conference are now on-line at BMC Bioinformatics and it's fun to look back and reflect ...
I don't remember learning about plasma when I took physics, but it's amazing stuff. Last week at the Hi-Tec conference in Arizona, I got to learn how an electromagnetic field can be used to push plasma around a tube. Community college students get to play with the coolest toys! Here's ...
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 ...
There aren't many reports of 14 year-olds making scientific contributions. Even in the field of astronomy, Caroline Moore, the youngest person to discover a supernova, is a bit unusual. This supernova comes from Astronomy Picture of the day. Photo credits: High-Z Supernova Search Team, HST, NASAHT: National Science Foundation The ...
One of my all time favorite books is South: The Last Antarctic Expedition of Shackleton and the Endurance (The Explorers Club Classic) . It's an amazing adventure and an incredible story. It's a comfort to know that any challenges I face will be easier than those conquered by Shackleton. Luckily ...
For those of you who may have been wondering where I've been, these past few weeks have seen me grading final projects, writing a chapter on analyzing Next Gen DNA sequencing data for the Current Protocols series, and flying back and forth between Seattle and various meetings elsewhere in the ...
One of the interesting things I learned today was that many people are calling for the genome sequences of the chimps and Macaques to be finished. This is especially amusing because the human genome isn't quite done. We're primates, too! Why not finish our genome? [I blame these new-found revelations ...
We always enjoy home science experiments and it was fun the other night to learn about a new experiment we could try with our teenage daughter and an iPhone. As it turned out, the joke was on us. My husband is an enthusiastic fan of the iPhone store. Last night ...
Warfarin, a commonly used anti-clotting drug, sold under the brand name of Coumadin, has a been a poster child for the promise of pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine. The excitement has come from the idea that knowing a patient's genotype, in this case for the VKORC1 and CYP2C9 genes, would allow ...
Nick's post on Amantadine resistance in swine flu was so interesting, I had to look at the protein structures myself. I couldn't find any structures with the S31N mutation that Nick discussed, but I did find some structures with the M2 protein and Amantadine. Not only are these structures beautiful ...
No more delays! BLAST away! Time to blast. Let's see what it means for sequences to be similar. First, we'll plan our experiment. When I think about digital biology experiments, I organize the steps in the following way: A. Defining the question B. Making the data sets C. Analyzing the ...
We'll have a blast, I promise! But there's one little thing we need to discuss first... I want to explain why I'm going to use nucleotide sequences for the blast search. (I used protein the other day). It's not just because someone told me too, there is a solid rational ...
We had a great discussion in the comments yesterday after I published my NJ trees from some of the flu sequences. If I list all the wonderful pieces of advice that readers shared, I wouldn't have any time to do the searches, but there are a few that I want ...
We were joking about this a couple of hours ago, but I just picked up the phone and learned that two middle schools will be closed for the week. Aki Kurose and Stevens middle schools are closed from tomorrow to May 8th. Yikes!
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 ...
I'm teaching an on-line bioinformatics course this semester for Austin Community College. They are in Texas of course, but I am in Seattle. This presents a few interesting challenges and some minor moments of amusement. Today, the school sent all the faculty emails telling us to stay home if we're ...
What tells us that this new form of H1N1 is swine flu and not regular old human flu or avian flu? If we had a lab, we might use antibodies, but when you're a digital biologist, you use a computer. Activity 4. Picking influenza sequences and comparing them with phylogenetic ...
This afternoon, I was working on educational activities and suddenly realized that the H1N1 strain that caused the California outbreak might be the same strain that caused an outbreak in 2007 at an Ohio country fair. UPDATE: I'm not so certain anymore that the strains are the same. I'm doing ...
I was pretty impressed to find the swine flu genome sequences, from the cases in California and Texas, already for viewing at the NCBI. You can get them and work them, too. It's pretty easy. Tomorrow, we'll align sequences and make trees. Activity 3: Getting the swine flu sequence data ...
