Well travelled flies

I had a gig to attend work-related fly retrieval mission yesterday for a student in the lab. My old lab had a mutant he needs, so I selflessly decided to go and get them for him.

The chances of anything coming from Mars are 0.70 (or 0.59) they said

Sorry to those of you without access to the BBC but i'm sure it's accessible elsewhere on the net but this list of "Planets most likely to have or sustain life" was pretty interesting. The actual paper is in the journal of Astrobiology but it's a subscription journal (boo) but i will see if my uni has access to it as i'd like to read the actual paper. Anyway it comes up with two criteria; the Earth Similarity Index and the Planet habitability Index.

Place your bets please!

A big part of my new project is to generate a null mutant of two genes in Drosophila to see what effect they have. My hope is that it kills them or has some nice developmental phenotype I can then dissect further- we have proteomics, from human cells, suggesting this should be the case.

So the reason we make a mutant is fairly straight-forward. If you take a gene away and something goes wrong then you can claim that gene is required to prevent those things going wrong or more accurately you can infer what the gene is required for in a normal situation. There are basically 3 ways you can make a mutant in flies.

Name the Biologist - Week 12

This week i'm doing a few mug shots as they are all connected. You can guess the connection and if you're really smart name them too. So here we go

A) this guy had the hypothesis;

B) And these two helped prove it by finding a key component;

As for last week's answer it was no other than Hans Adolf Krebs of "the Krebs Cycle" fame. I told you he was someone most high school Biology students will have encountered or cursed at some point in their lives. Although once memorised, that was a gift of an exam question.

Clone Wars

Part of the reason I took the new postdoc position was because I knew my general cloning skills and biochemistry were a weak point. I think Achilles heel wouldn't be an exaggeration of late!

Name the Biologist - week 11

This week I'm putting up a mug shot that anyone who tackled higher biology at school will have no doubt encountered. Anyone who's done an "A level" or a biology degree will have had to memorise something because of this guy!

As for last week's mystery biologist, not even "anonymous" got it which means it was either difficult or he/she couldn't be bothered this week. It was Edwin Summer - inventor of the Southern blot and inspiration of its compass based spin-offs.

Freezer-gate

A colleague of mine discovered one of the freezer doors in the lab was open on Saturday and everything had defrosted. It's the freezer right next to me so I instantly felt guilty because it's right next to me and I use it a lot. It is however a communal freezer and I left quite early on Friday so live in the hope it wasn't me. That said, I was in work today, determined to be extra vigilant of the freezer not being shut properly, partly so I could tell if I was the culprit or not. So I opened the freezer and was surprised when the door came off its hinges.