So, I'd like to poke my head into this discussion to try to do a little clarification. (famous last words.)
When we talk about cloning an organism it is different than cloning a gene. Cloning a gene involves finding the DNA sequence for the gene and getting it into a workable format. Like a glorified copy-paste operation.
Cloning an organism is quite different. To clone an organism you don't need to sequence its genome. For instance, those sheep they keep talking about, I don't think we've finished the sheep genome. We've cloned mice as well, and that genome project is still chugging along (or at least it was the last time I looked). To clone an organism you use somatic cells (these are cells that aren't germline cells - ie not sperm or egg) and manipulate them (insert mad scientist laughter here) into becoming an embryo.
At this point in time it is not possible (with few few exceptions) to create a living organism from just its DNA sequence. So the goal of these scientists is to find some nice healthy cells within the frozen mammoth and then screw around with them to see if they can get an embryo.
If you could clone any extinct animal, what would it be?
So, I'm writing something slightly off topic again. My bad. But I think it is important.
Please register to vote.
Please vote
I don't care who you vote for, but I'd like the next presidential election decided through the normal system and not by the Judicial system. Thank you.
other mice, other wounds
on
Weapon-X Mice
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· Score: 1
There are actually other studies done quite a few years ago about quick-healing mice. If anyone is interested, and I think you can actually read these articles without the benefit of a subscription (take that Elsevier!), you might want to take a look at the abstract for one of these studies; or if you're feeling feisty, the full article. This article requires a subscription, but is a nice review of how they found the trait and what has been done more recently. Another, I believe subscription required, Nature article, summarizes more stuff on regeneration.
My apologies for so many subscription-required articles. Unfortunately, the biosciences are just like that. There have been some moves lately to make this less so, but large publishing companies like Elsevier and the Cell people and Science und Nature have been rather resistant. Hmmm, I wonder why.
But how long would it be before the spammers are using this game to send spam to other players? I can think of nothing more annoying than turning on my little game object only to find hours of clips from Bambi Jenkins about her excapades (rhymed of course) with her friends and/or pets. And I don't want to know what you can rhyme 4.9% with.
When I started doing lab work we were trained to mouth pipet. So that's one way. I don't mouth pipet anymore though.
I've splattered bacteria all over the place resuspending stuff doing maxis. And it inevitably manages to get on my face.
I'm sure we get a lot of aerosolized bacteria working in lab on a day to day basis.
I don't like using carbenicillin either. Way too spendy and I seem to remember it being difficult to dissolve? Like when I make stables I don't like using G418 - puromycin being cheaper and faster.
Years ago I worked in a prokaryotic lab and we used all sorts of coli strains - I remember the first time I tried doing qiagen minipreps on an endotoxin expressing strain. Ok, so now I'm getting nostalgic. Now I'm in a protein biochem lab doing cancer-related stuff.
ps, e.coli in LB tastes nasty. salty and sour and quite a bit like it smells.
The number times that I've accidently swallowed E.coli which carry antibiotic resistance genes while doing lab work is rather large. Also, we do use bacteria that are RecA+ (recombination gene) all the time when expressing protein. BL21 are RecA positive as are just about every other protein expression strain. I've never tried to "cure" a strain of a plasmid, but I've heard that it isn't as few passages as you'd think. Also, if you ever wanted an Amp equivalent that was less heat-labile, try carbenicillin.
So, tell me about this lucrative salary thing that happens when I do my postdoc? Fortunately, I do love my research. I just miss the outside when it is light out.
Our IT department just sent out a notice to the institute about security over the holiday weekend. I'd love to see our website hacked. It is one of those no useful content sites with lots of tasteful colours and pictures. But don't quote me on that.
"The holiday weekend affords us an opportunity to get away from our workplace, relax and enjoy the summer weather. However, not everyone will be outside in the sunshine. Hackers will be in front of their computer screens trying to get into all of those computers"
I think the thing that pisses me off the most is that they assume that everyone gets to take the holiday weekend. I'm a grad student, I'll be inside working. They're such insensitive jerks sometimes.
If there were to be a problem - and there will be
on
Microbe Processors
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think that you could set this up so there was a nice way to kill all the bacteria in the event of a screw up. You could either make them reliant on a specific form of nutrient which could be withdrawn in the case of an emergency, or choose any one of a large number of antibiotics to kill the bacteria off. Both methods have flaws - there are a large number of genes for drug resistance and nutrient stuff that come handily packaged in plasmids. The way to handle this particular problem is to use both methods. Combinatorial, baby.
So, if coli make an error in DNA replication 1/10^6 bases, and we make a huge guess at the probability of this error being somewhere important and doing something bad being 1/10^9, and we replace the cells living in the bloodstream once a year, and we have the safety features mentioned above, this becomes a very long sentence. There is little chance of something going wrong.
I'd still like to see how they are going to get these bacteria to live happily within the human body and not be noticed by the immune system, and not produce too much trash, and not grow uncontrollably.
An interesting idea, but... give 'em a few grants and wait a few years.
Ah the differences between PCP and PCR...
I don't think drugs have changed all that much since I was in college. In the 60s my college was the acid distributor for the East Coast. I was there in the early 90s and there were still a suspiciously large number of chemistry majors.
"There was speculation that the mass might be a whale skin, but Cabrera said it was too big and did not have the right texture or smell."
The thing that intrigues me is that there are people who have expertise in the area of texture and smell of decomposing whale skin. Is there a professional society for these people?
Anyway, sounds neat, and I'm sure they can figure out if it is a whale by doing a little PCR and sequencing. (I think this is my answer to most science questions these days)
Besides doing a lot of slithering? I just thought it was a whack turn of phrase. So I was sitting there trying to think of an animal that would fit the phrase "flexible like a [X]" and nothing really came to mind. And then I started wondering how flexible salamanders really are. And is this a property that one could quantitate? And then I remembered that I was at work and that we have all these measuring devices... but no salamanders.
And at the end of it all, I decided that this series of thoughts was completely off topic.
As a curious person (who wishes that she too had the "flexibility of a salamander"), I'm tempted to go home and try this all out in the bathtub. But I'm not sure how I could measure the diameter of my own pupil.
It does strike me that the article initially tries to persuade one that this is a genetic trait, and then sneaks in the possiblity of a learned behavior. I think that this is a little cheap.
And that is why when the post asks me who I am, I am a 57 year old man from Washington DC. 20002 is my favorite made up zipcode.
Then again, you seem to do topology and knot theory. Which are about the only areas of maths that I can think about at all (I'm a biologist). I also like 3D tiling, but can't do any of the maths involved. I'm happier playing with models.
I think my view of MSRI is coloured a bit by knowing a good chunk of the people involved. There are some pretty crazy stories there...
I should note that I don't think that MSRI is miserable at all, I just liked the self-deprecating nature of the nickname. I've never been there, but I've heard that it is really lovely.
So, I just wanted to poke my head in here and note that MSRI (where the pictures are taken) is pronounced "misery" by the maths community.
My (insert close relative here) does minimal surfaces and hangs out with some of these guys. They look far too neatly dressed in the pictures. Anyway, for a good time, you might want to take a look at some of the galleries of images that these crazy minimal surfaces guys do. I remember about ten years ago, one of my (insert close relative)'s colleagues sold a few images to the Grateful Dead for their concerts.
Well, since I spend my day screwing around with protein complexes, I don't have much time for toast after all that. But I can make a mean apple pie and my gujarat-style greenbeans are damn tasty.
I think that anyone who does work in a biology lab who can't cook or at least follow a recipe is probably a bad biologist as well. I was raised to believe that you should make a cake from scratch and that any cookie that comes out of a plastic tube is just plain wrong. (unless you're stoned. which is different. and has very little to do with how I was raised. )
But any food that can be constructed using lab equipment gets super extra double bonus points for coolness. Sprinkling curry powder on those biodegradable foam packing peanuts doesn't count.
I mean, we've got a honking big tank of nitrogen in lab here. And a couple of dewars. And I think I can rummage up the rest of the ingredients at Wawa (regional convenience store chain), but what I really want to know is does this impress men too?
'Cause I refuse to do something that might just break a nail if it won't impress the boys.
Yeah, I'm in west philly, and I'm trying to get some of my friends together to go over there and see what is going on. I wish i had known earlier. I might have skipped work to check things out.
Sometimes I think my undergraduate degree is worth about $19.95. This is why I'm getting another worthless degree now. But at least this time they pay me to go to school.
I've decided to devote the next few years of my life to delving into the kind of stuff that when I was a bit younger I associated with teenaged guys. (No, not pr0n.)
I'm a chick. I didn't know about comics or manga or anime when I was younger, and now that I'm older (oh the grey hairs.), few of my friends (or enemies) are interested in these things. I've tried the simple technique of going to different comicbook selling sites and going to the local university library. I've seen a lot of Moore, and Miller and Gaiman, but I haven't been able to branch out further than that. The university library has an interesting selection of French comics - Baru and so on. I've been able to get all nostalgic about tintin and asterix, but I know I'm missing out of this whole crazy world out there.
So, after a long spew of babble, I just wanted to say that I'm happy to see this particular string talking about places to find good stuff. Thanks guys.
The ALA is a wonderful group of people who have been doing good things for years especially in the area of internet privacy and censorship. I have to admit that I'm a little biased on this subject. I dated a guy who worked in the information technology policy office at the DC branch of the ALA. On a daily basis they took on such giant many headed monsters as the FCC and megalo-phone companies like Verizon. All in the name of making libraries and schools good places to use a computer in an affordable and uncensored manner.
I am aware that people have differences of opinion on the concept of filtering in schools and libraries, but I don't think that there is a difference of opinion on the idea of phone companies paying back the loans and subsidies that the government gave them year ago by giving reduced rates to educational facilities.
I've heard Watson speak on this stuff. It isn't science. It is not supported by data, and it doesn't help that the man is a jackazz.
He spoke at Berkeley and many faculty members walked out on his talk because it was simultaneously offensive and had no data. A piece on this in the Chronicle mentioned this walkout and the faculty members who admitted to walking out received hate mail from people who read it.
Go to pubmed and look at Crick's publication record and then Watson's. See for yourself.
Oh, I've worked in labs where people smoked pot in the fume hoods. But I like the sage idea. Yerba buena, I think that's another name for it.
My boss is so superstitious that he made us throw out a whole set of pipettors because this one guy he really didn't like had used them. He insisted that they were bad luck.
Slashdot Mirror
When we talk about cloning an organism it is different than cloning a gene. Cloning a gene involves finding the DNA sequence for the gene and getting it into a workable format. Like a glorified copy-paste operation.
Cloning an organism is quite different. To clone an organism you don't need to sequence its genome. For instance, those sheep they keep talking about, I don't think we've finished the sheep genome. We've cloned mice as well, and that genome project is still chugging along (or at least it was the last time I looked). To clone an organism you use somatic cells (these are cells that aren't germline cells - ie not sperm or egg) and manipulate them (insert mad scientist laughter here) into becoming an embryo.
At this point in time it is not possible (with few few exceptions) to create a living organism from just its DNA sequence. So the goal of these scientists is to find some nice healthy cells within the frozen mammoth and then screw around with them to see if they can get an embryo.
If you could clone any extinct animal, what would it be?
Please register to vote.
Please vote
I don't care who you vote for, but I'd like the next presidential election decided through the normal system and not by the Judicial system. Thank you.
My apologies for so many subscription-required articles. Unfortunately, the biosciences are just like that. There have been some moves lately to make this less so, but large publishing companies like Elsevier and the Cell people and Science und Nature have been rather resistant. Hmmm, I wonder why.
But how long would it be before the spammers are using this game to send spam to other players? I can think of nothing more annoying than turning on my little game object only to find hours of clips from Bambi Jenkins about her excapades (rhymed of course) with her friends and/or pets. And I don't want to know what you can rhyme 4.9% with.
I don't like using carbenicillin either. Way too spendy and I seem to remember it being difficult to dissolve? Like when I make stables I don't like using G418 - puromycin being cheaper and faster.
Years ago I worked in a prokaryotic lab and we used all sorts of coli strains - I remember the first time I tried doing qiagen minipreps on an endotoxin expressing strain. Ok, so now I'm getting nostalgic. Now I'm in a protein biochem lab doing cancer-related stuff.
ps, e.coli in LB tastes nasty. salty and sour and quite a bit like it smells.
The number times that I've accidently swallowed E.coli which carry antibiotic resistance genes while doing lab work is rather large. Also, we do use bacteria that are RecA+ (recombination gene) all the time when expressing protein. BL21 are RecA positive as are just about every other protein expression strain. I've never tried to "cure" a strain of a plasmid, but I've heard that it isn't as few passages as you'd think. Also, if you ever wanted an Amp equivalent that was less heat-labile, try carbenicillin.
So, tell me about this lucrative salary thing that happens when I do my postdoc? Fortunately, I do love my research. I just miss the outside when it is light out.
But don't quote me on that.
"The holiday weekend affords us an opportunity to get away from our workplace, relax and enjoy the summer weather. However, not everyone will be outside in the sunshine. Hackers will be in front of their computer screens trying to get into all of those computers"
I think the thing that pisses me off the most is that they assume that everyone gets to take the holiday weekend. I'm a grad student, I'll be inside working. They're such insensitive jerks sometimes.
Combinatorial, baby.
So, if coli make an error in DNA replication 1/10^6 bases, and we make a huge guess at the probability of this error being somewhere important and doing something bad being 1/10^9, and we replace the cells living in the bloodstream once a year, and we have the safety features mentioned above, this becomes a very long sentence. There is little chance of something going wrong.
I'd still like to see how they are going to get these bacteria to live happily within the human body and not be noticed by the immune system, and not produce too much trash, and not grow uncontrollably.
An interesting idea, but ... give 'em a few grants and wait a few years.
Ah the differences between PCP and PCR ...
I don't think drugs have changed all that much since I was in college. In the 60s my college was the acid distributor for the East Coast. I was there in the early 90s and there were still a suspiciously large number of chemistry majors.
The thing that intrigues me is that there are people who have expertise in the area of texture and smell of decomposing whale skin. Is there a professional society for these people?
Anyway, sounds neat, and I'm sure they can figure out if it is a whale by doing a little PCR and sequencing. (I think this is my answer to most science questions these days)
I just thought it was a whack turn of phrase. So I was sitting there trying to think of an animal that would fit the phrase "flexible like a [X]" and nothing really came to mind. And then I started wondering how flexible salamanders really are. And is this a property that one could quantitate? And then I remembered that I was at work and that we have all these measuring devices
And at the end of it all, I decided that this series of thoughts was completely off topic.
How many people would be tempted to send their sticky bug thing to a friend in another country just to screw around with the data?
It does strike me that the article initially tries to persuade one that this is a genetic trait, and then sneaks in the possiblity of a learned behavior. I think that this is a little cheap.
And that is why when the post asks me who I am, I am a 57 year old man from Washington DC. 20002 is my favorite made up zipcode.
I think my view of MSRI is coloured a bit by knowing a good chunk of the people involved. There are some pretty crazy stories there ...
I should note that I don't think that MSRI is miserable at all, I just liked the self-deprecating nature of the nickname. I've never been there, but I've heard that it is really lovely.
My (insert close relative here) does minimal surfaces and hangs out with some of these guys. They look far too neatly dressed in the pictures. Anyway, for a good time, you might want to take a look at some of the galleries of images that these crazy minimal surfaces guys do. I remember about ten years ago, one of my (insert close relative)'s colleagues sold a few images to the Grateful Dead for their concerts.
http://www.msri.org/publications/sgp/jim/images/
http://www.gang.umass.edu/
There is another site out at Minnesota but I'm too lazy to look for it today.
I think that anyone who does work in a biology lab who can't cook or at least follow a recipe is probably a bad biologist as well. I was raised to believe that you should make a cake from scratch and that any cookie that comes out of a plastic tube is just plain wrong. (unless you're stoned. which is different. and has very little to do with how I was raised. )
But any food that can be constructed using lab equipment gets super extra double bonus points for coolness. Sprinkling curry powder on those biodegradable foam packing peanuts doesn't count.
I mean, we've got a honking big tank of nitrogen in lab here. And a couple of dewars. And I think I can rummage up the rest of the ingredients at Wawa (regional convenience store chain), but what I really want to know is does this impress men too?
'Cause I refuse to do something that might just break a nail if it won't impress the boys.
Yeah, I'm in west philly, and I'm trying to get some of my friends together to go over there and see what is going on. I wish i had known earlier. I might have skipped work to check things out.
Sometimes I think my undergraduate degree is worth about $19.95. This is why I'm getting another worthless degree now. But at least this time they pay me to go to school.
And of course it has to be on one of those days where I'm stuck at work for 12+ hours. Phooey. The price I pay for being a geek.
I'm a chick. I didn't know about comics or manga or anime when I was younger, and now that I'm older (oh the grey hairs.), few of my friends (or enemies) are interested in these things. I've tried the simple technique of going to different comicbook selling sites and going to the local university library. I've seen a lot of Moore, and Miller and Gaiman, but I haven't been able to branch out further than that. The university library has an interesting selection of French comics - Baru and so on. I've been able to get all nostalgic about tintin and asterix, but I know I'm missing out of this whole crazy world out there.
So, after a long spew of babble, I just wanted to say that I'm happy to see this particular string talking about places to find good stuff. Thanks guys.
I am aware that people have differences of opinion on the concept of filtering in schools and libraries, but I don't think that there is a difference of opinion on the idea of phone companies paying back the loans and subsidies that the government gave them year ago by giving reduced rates to educational facilities.
He spoke at Berkeley and many faculty members walked out on his talk because it was simultaneously offensive and had no data. A piece on this in the Chronicle mentioned this walkout and the faculty members who admitted to walking out received hate mail from people who read it.
Go to pubmed and look at Crick's publication record and then Watson's. See for yourself.
Oh, I've worked in labs where people smoked pot in the fume hoods. But I like the sage idea. Yerba buena, I think that's another name for it.
My boss is so superstitious that he made us throw out a whole set of pipettors because this one guy he really didn't like had used them. He insisted that they were bad luck.