Russel Smithies (of AgResearch) suggested using Galaxy assisting in setting up a local GBrowse service (fetching UCSC Btau4 data, converting to a format compatible with GBrowse) at work (CIGENE, Centre for Integrative Genetics). Galaxy is a web application that deserves attention! Fetching data, sorting data, combining data sets, alignments, manipulations, fetching other data resulting from [...]
I actually did it. I defended my thesis last week. Believe it or not. I certainly do not. At least not yet. A summary of the thesis can be seen in the above picture (courtesy of Wordle). Now what?
Lately, being part of an academic environment, I have increasingly been aware of the insufficencies we face as human beings. Not that I don’t gape in astonishment of what is being achieved in both medical and technology related research advancements these days. But we have the potential to achieve so much more. And I feel, [...]
Our lab environment is polluted by not only cancer inducing chemicals like ethidium bromide and the neurotoxic polyacrylamide. Even more disturbing is the frequent usuage of the radio. Or, to be more precise, the lack of a radio station that does not suck. Here in Norway we have a couple of commercial nation wide channels [...]
The confocal microscopy wasnt’ the blast I was hoping for. Not because 3D visualization using laser and fluourescence isn’t fun and impressive. But, mostly me having high hopes: Looking at living mammal cells. Manipulated proteins with different stains, interacting, colourful images… Oh well. Instead, we watched a dull image of some cells involved in the [...]
I’m attending a 3 week long course teaching different microscopy techniques. We are 8 people. Yesterday, I fell hopelessly in love. With their brand new scanning electron microscopy! I was kind of suspecting this to happen, having wanted to work on a SEM for along time, but I was really blown away. I definetly need [...]
Initiating a new transformation process this Friday, I spent most of the weekend in the lab. Mostly … waiting. This evening, at 19:30, looking at the result (after restriction enzyme cutting): The transformation was successfull! Nothing to write home about, really… But. After a week of feeling crappy. Lacking results. Nothing going the way you [...]
You have probably heard the phrase functional food. In Norway, the government have quite strict rules of what modifications are allowed to food and beverage. I don’t know the details, but so far I’ve only seen orange juice with artificially added calcium, milk with vitamin D, yoghurt with the probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG (LGG), etc. [...]
That is, lack of successfull transformation. I got my colonies on the LB agar, and was happy, everything going on as planned. But, darn, something wasn’t right. Using restriction enzymes to cut the new plasmids, checking if my genes actually had been incorporated, showed … nothing. I’ve spent the last days trying to find out [...]
I’ve learned a lot these first weeks. And the feeling of being totally lost is gradually fading. Still, talking about green fingers, my head definitely feels green sometimes… Anway. I got the primers. I did PCR. I did gel electrophoresis, isolating the genes I multiplied. Today I started the transformation progress, using the Zero Blunt [...]