Paid-members only Start-Upomics The 23andMe board tells Anne Wojcicki to do better in her attempt to take 23andMe private after a rocky 3 years as a public company
Genetics If only Ponce de Leon had known about IL-11 Who knew that the fountain of youth was as simple as blocking inflammatory signaling through IL-11?
Genomics Why short-read sequencing can't ever get us a 'whole genome' Short-reads miss things, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the long-read.
Genomic Sequencing Frederick Sanger sequenced the first DNA genome, he didn't use 'Sanger Sequencing' to do it Frederick Sanger invented a famous DNA sequencing method. It's not the one pictured below (which he also invented).
Therapeutics How does the brain cause headaches if it can't feel pain? Do you suffer from migraines? We might have some new clues about how they happen.
Genomic Sequencing Counting the things short-reads are good for What's the point of short-reads if long-reads do basically everything in genomics better? There are five, FIVE, *thunderclap*, applications where short reads excel, ah, ah, ah!
Proteins Green Fluorescent Protein was first discovered in Jellyfish in 1960 In 1994, an obscure jellyfish protein was stuck into a worm. It has enlightened biology and medicine ever since.
Paid-members only Protein Sequencing There are a lot of companies working on protein sequencing, so who is in the lead?
Protein Sequencing Reverse Translation doesn't exist in nature, but that's not stopping us from trying to do it! There are few things deserving of the superlative ‘holy grail,’ but Reverse Translation is one of them.
Diagnostics Assay failures are common in the clinical lab, here are 5 of my favorites. Troubleshooting assay failures is a second full-time job in R&D. Here are my top 5 'favorite' root causes!
DNA The Lac Operon: Everyone's heard of it, but do you know how it was discovered? 'If gene expression determines the function of a cell, it must be important to control that process?' Yes, very! Let me tell you about the PaJaMo experiment.
Diagnostics Parkinson's Disease gets a new risk factor A recent survey of 2,000 families with Parkinson’s Disease has turned up a new risk factor: a variant in RAB32
Genomic Sequencing Sequencing libraries and strategies for doing quality control You can't do sequencing without libraries. But you don't know if you have libraries unless you look at them.
Breakthroughs Defenders from the sea: Our bloody history with horseshoe crabs Horseshoe crab blood is our first line of defense against endotoxin contamination of surgical tools and medical devices. Seriously.
Paid-members only Omics One of the most underappreciated techniques in Omics is Hi-C. That needs to change
RNA Bridge RNAs are here to take CRISPR's crown Move over CRISPR, bridge RNAs are here to make the precision genome edits that you can't.
Fecal Matters The messiest part of Omics? Dealing with all the different sample types The good, the bad, the...uhhh: Everything you ever wanted to know about all the different Omics sample types!
High-Throughput Sequencing In 2009, high throughput sequencing gave us our first glimpse of the 3-D organization of the DNA in our nuclei While chromosomes are usually depicted as X's, they actually spend most of their time jumbled up like a giant ball of yarn.
