Author Archive
The oldest DNA ever found?
Genes ordered at your friendly Mr Gene’s store are as fresh as can be (a point of honour, of course!). That freshness, however, isn’t really the case with the “dirt DNA” that has been digged up by Danish biologist Eske Willerslev.
Willerslev, the head of the “Ancient DNA and Evolution” lab, is a professor at the […]
Order non optimized
This tutorial shows how to order genes without optimizationPlease note: Adobe Flash player needed!
How to optimize
This tutorial shows how to optimize genes using mrgene.com
Please note: Adobe Flash player needed!
 Feel free to post comments on how to improve the usability!
Who’s calling? - it’s me, your houseplant!
Any hobby gardeners aboard? Recently, I came across a somehow weird website that promoted “communication between plants and people”. Plants (soundbite!) “that might otherwise be neglected are given the ability to call and text message people to request assistance”.
Plants that place phone calls for human help! No kidding!! Such well-connected networking plants will be all […]
Harvard “EXPERTS” blow away 16 billion
Ever toyed with the idea of sending your spoiled offspring to a US-based elite academy, say Harvard University?
Forget it. Harvard, the oldest institution of higher learning in the US (world-renowned for its multi-billion foundation and its 43 Nobel laureates!), is setting its sights lower.
Most laureates are still aboard, but many billions vanished recently. Blown away! […]
Genetic Code
E. crassus - a marine protozoan - uses UAG to code for cysteine AND seleno selenocysteine. I don’t think that I will need to implement this ambiguity into the algorithms used for codon optimization but I will stay tuned.
Read more at:
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/108/3
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55327/Â (registration needed)
Crichton’s “crazy” concepts
A visionary but also controversial genius recently has left us. Michael Crichton, the famous writer, filmmaker and, less familiar to most people, skilled anthropologist and medical doctor, died of cancer at the age of 66.
Crichton by no means was a blatherer. Far from it! He was a Harvard graduate, a lecturer in anthropology at Cambridge University, […]
Spitting and popping genes
Did you ever toy with the idea of having your own DNA analysed? You didn’t? Well, 25-year-old reporter girl Boonsri Dickinson from the NYC-based Discover magazine did.
Dickinson spat and popped, then she sent, ugh!, saliva and cheek cells by mail and subsequently was disclosed frightening things.
DNA testing isn’t no more bloody expensive. There are a […]
And the winners are:
finally - all winners have received their iPods. Thanks for participating in Mr. Gene’s SynBio 4.0 iPod lottery!
#1
iPod® touch:
Martin Jennings, PhD, University of Manchester, UK
#2
iPod® nano:
Irina Borodina, PhD, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
#3 … 10
iPod® shuffle:
Nicholas Wall, Graduate Student, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, USA
Craig Ellermeier, Assistant Professor, University of Iowa, USA
Filipe Pinto, PhD […]
The truth about credits
There’s one thing that is more thrilling for a scientist than his thrilling experiment’s results themselves.
It’s the author’s ranking on the resulting publication. This ranking always gives pain, being the reason for hassle and hatred between former colleagues and close collaboration partners.
Of course, the most important position on a scientific paper is the first one. […]
