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Gene Screen [17 Apr 2009|10:59am] cheez_ball I thought you all might find this amusing....or might have an idea to submit something to this film festival. :-) I, however, am too bad at telling jokes to even consider it. Source: BioTechniques 2 comments|post comment

A hearing question [10 Apr 2009|01:47am] lizardphunk Hi! My father is almost deaf. He hears some deep sounds, but hardly anything on the "speech range". All my life I've heard that the reason is that he was born early (many weeks, not sure how many) and almost died at birth. The damage is in his brain and his ears are completely ok. Recently, I've wondered if it's likely that this damage is due to being born early, or lack of oxygen. Here's why I wonder: - he has no cogntive defects - does the neural areas for hearing develop that late in the fetus?  - the damage is bilateral (almost same hearing loss on both ears), but no PET or MRI has ever been performed I'm wondering if this could be a genetic fault, and if so, what genes are implicated in this sort of thing? : )  It's not a touchy subject, and we're pretty curious about this. Hoping you guys have some input! 6 comments|post comment

[19 Dec 2008|08:02pm] firebird72 Hello all, I've always loved studying genetics but have yet to nail down knowledge of some of the finer points. I tried to look up the answer before giving it up to you guys. I know red hair is a recessive gene and so is blonde, so if someone with blonde hair and someone with red hair gets together, what are the odds of the different colors of the offspring? It would be 50/50, wouldn't it? Because if they had any other color in their genes then they wouldn't be the color they were to begin with. Right? Thanks for any help.  :) 7 comments|post comment

a curious noob question [09 Nov 2008|07:51pm] por_que_no Hi! So I'm not a geneticist or even a scientist, but I was discussing something with a friend and thought I would ask if you think this has any validity! My friend never really thought about it but seems to agree with my observations and wants to know more as well. It sounds interesting and I know there must be a reason behind it, but anyway: Is there some kind of known correlation between birth order and parental resemblance? Just from observing and seeing my friends...I think there must be. Here's what I've observed...and it applies to the order in which you were conceived. ( yada yada yada ) Has anyone actually studied this, or has anyone really noticed this either? I wonder what the mechanism is that allows this to happen, if it actually does? Genetics in general is really interesting to me...if I weren't so miserably bad at science and (even worse at) math, I might have pursued it a bit more in college just to satisfy my curiosities! 7 comments|post comment

Blood anyone? [18 Aug 2008|02:17pm] lurker_of_note Hey. I'm going to be working with blood samples, trying to find more efficient ways to store them and whatnot. Finding alternatives to anti-coagluants like EDTA is pretty much my aim. Can anyone refer me to any articles that may be of some use? Thanks in advance post comment

developmental genetics help [07 May 2008|01:25pm] disasterology I'm having a hard time understanding the process of genetic screens in studying the developmental genetics of Drosophila(Heidelberg screens). Does anyone have a dumbed-down resource I can look into? Specifically, I'm having trouble with understanding the different genetic markers used and how they actualled helped track chromosomes. Additionally, I don't quite understand exactly how a balancer chromosome represses recombination. Do all flies with recombined DNA just die, so they can assume that the living ones have no recombined DNA? x-posted to biology 10 comments|post comment

Confused after 30 months... [21 Apr 2008|03:46pm] samcurt Who in here thinks it's an handicap in unable to do independent research because of research issues? It's an extension of something I pondered more than 2 years ago-- things have changed a lot, but the core problem on bioinformaticians and their place in the the lab persisted. The problem started like this: in my school the genetics program have a standard track and a computational track-- the difference is: in the latter you have more required classes (18 vs 24 semester units)-- 6 extra in CS, and no more biological electives in the latter since you've to take all 4 bioinformatics classes provided by Biology you are required to have 2 supervisors, one biological and one in CS. When I entered I thought I was in the computational track, but lately the program director wanted to talk me out of it since my background was too "biological," and they consider the track was for people who are interested in algorithm design rather than data analysis per se. OK, in my current rotation what I mainly did, quite happily, is the analysis of affy, and, later, qPCR expression data, kinda-simple things that algorithms already exist. The previous rotation is partly sequencing and partly transcoding a published algorithm into another language-- things that I also did happily with. Not very computational, I guess. Although I'm fine by analysing existing data, but I have that fear: nobody would be able to work independently by doing data mining. My asking with some collegues also confirmed that "there is a bias against data miners given their importance in the lab-- this is why you also have to do wet lab." Hm, je suis confused about what way to go... 1 comment|post comment

ICGEB ppl out there? [25 Mar 2008|07:55pm] lurker_of_note [ mood | geeky ] Hi guys. I'm a third year BSc genetics major located in South Africa and as most of you should know, the third ICGEB component was opened in Cape Town. Out of curiousity, does anyone out there work at any of the three ICGEB facilities- the research seriously interests me. Thanks! post comment

PCR for Complete Noobs [18 Jan 2008|06:51pm] aciel Hey folks, new here. I'm working on my Ph.D. in cell and molecular biology, but my bachelor's degree is in computer science. As a result, I'm ignorant of most basic lab techniques. Does anyone know of a sort of "PCR for Dummies" (or computer scientists) guide anywhere? I've run a couple of reactions, and they sort of work but not as well as I'd like; I'm interested in finding something that will help me optimize and tell me all the do's and don't's. Yeah, so basically I want to shortcut two years of lab experience with a couple of weeks of reading. (I don't have much choice. It's figure it out fast, or forever be confined to computational biology.) Thanks! John EDIT: Oh, incidentally, I'm not concerned about DNA extraction at the moment. I've got plenty of my template plasmid (I've figured out how to miniprep!) and a relatively large amount of most of my primers. So it's just PCR optimization I'm looking to master. 15 comments|post comment

Chromatogram Editing [12 Nov 2007|02:23pm] nucleotide_boy This is for any DNA-meisters out there. Is there any software that lets you actually delete the ends off your sequencing trace files? Everything seems to just let you delete the overlaid sequence but not the raw data itself. [x-posted] 8 comments|post comment

College [11 May 2007|04:49pm] twitchhtp About 10 minutes ago, I was notified of my acceptance at James Madison University (where I had been on the waitlist). Sure this is great, except for the fact that I've already committed at George Mason University. The reason I'm asking you guys is because I want your opinions. I'm planning on majoring in biology if I go to Mason, and biotechnology if I go to James Madison, and was wondering which one would be the better choice (in terms of college, major, or both), since I still have time to change (losing the deposit money however...). Thanks everyone, I really appreciate it. X Posted a crap load of other places 4 comments|post comment

[30 Nov 2006|04:24pm] nucleotide_boy Nrrrgh. I have three categories of epilepsy data for each of my samples. They are seizure type, seizure frequency, and seizures in a cluster. I have attached numeric values to each of these categories. I want to plot all three values for every sample onto a 3D scatter graph or something similar. However Excel doesn't seem to have that option and I can't seem to find anything useful on the internet. Has anyone here got any ideas? Cheers. x-posted. post comment

[28 Nov 2006|08:18am] dark_daughter I posted to the Biology community with a similar question, but I just want a little more feedback. I'm am looking to go into genetic research. I'm at the University of Regina (Canada). It offers an undergrad in "biology", where there are many other schools which offer a degree in "genetics" (such as UofAlberta, UBC, UofManitoba for a few). Will having a degree in biology, rather than genetics, impact my chances at getting into grad school? 9 comments|post comment

drug addiction studies [16 Oct 2006|10:22pm] monekey I'm an undergrad doing research and in my lab we are studying the Alcoholism and Compulsive behaviors using a rat model. This project is new, and so we don't even have candidate genes yet. We just finished one behavioral test using theh elevated plus maze; soon we will do autoshaping and look for early responders to alcoholism. I was just wondering if anyone in this community has experience with drug addiction studies. Did you find out anything interesting? What behavioral tests did you use? post comment

[02 Oct 2006|12:14pm] nucleotide_boy Hi all, I was wondering if someone can recommend a decent stats book for genetic analysis. Preferably aimed at the kind of scientist who has a deep-rooted hatred of stats! Cheers. x-posted 1 comment|post comment

"Real" Bioinformatics? [16 Aug 2006|01:47am] samcurt I wonder, if one has only been trained to use BLAST, PHYLIP, ClustalX and VISTA, can it be said he hasn't really learnt anything really bioinformatical? Can a lab mainly using these tools be said as "hardly bioinformatical"? 7 comments|post comment

Genetics/Genomics/Bioinformatics Conventions in 2006 [05 Aug 2006|12:47am] samcurt Who has a list of the Genetics/Genomics/Bioinformatics-related conventions this year, perferably with some likes as to where to get the articles announced then? Thanks! 6 comments|post comment

Publication [31 Jul 2006|03:01am] samcurt If I found the same CRISPRs with another method (ie alignment programs, in this case), is that publishable, without a strong math background (that I can't really read the probability models used by such programs, etc)? 6 comments|post comment

RACE [28 Jun 2006|06:28pm] dragonzuela RACE stands for Rapid Amplification of cDNA Ends. I'd like to put forward a motion to rename it PACE for Problematic Amplification of cDNA Ends. In my experience there has been nothing rapid about it. I've finally gotten it working, but man has it taken awhile. ;) 3 comments|post comment

Primer dimers and secondary products. [16 Jun 2006|12:00pm] nucleotide_boy Hi all. I was wondering if anyone can recommend any good web-based programs for checking for primer dimers and secondary products? I have been using Primer3 for my primer design but had a few problems with primer dimers. When I checked the recommended primers from Primer3 in the Mac based Amplify program it detected loads of problems. However, our Mac is on the otherside of the building so I'd love to be able to do my primer design and problem checking at my desk! Thanks. (x-posted) 10 comments|post comment

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