Friday 27 May 2016

The witchcraft of knockouts

Making knockouts has a bad rep, but there seems to be a conspiracy afoot to make it feel like a mystic art.


Tuesday 17 May 2016

Restriction cloning nostalgia

Today I was reminded of an invaluable table that was hung on the wall of every lab: the NEB buffer compatibility chart.

My favorite buffer is buffer 4.

Friday 13 May 2016

Gene symbol poetry

A rather angry pathway.
"Regulatory protein for 2-phenylethylamine catabolism · two component sensor histidine kinase,essential for acid-tolerance · nikkomycin biosynthesis protein · galacturonide ABC transporter ATPase".
That is my first (and last) attempt at genetic constrained writing: the genes encoding those protein are feaR actS sanS togA, which is a rubbish sentence that makes somewhat sense.
Constrained writing () is an artistic challenge where one writes with a restricted dictionary, for example, there are no word with the letter e in the book Gadsby. Here I restricted my dictionary to words that are also gene symbols.