The new year finds me working through the summary for the RECOMBsat/DREAM conference last month in Cambridge, MA (more than 10,000 words on over 20 separate subjects), so daily blogging will have to wait until the week of January 11.
Check back then--upcoming posts will include molecular transistors, the 25th anniversary of one of my first scientific papers, issues raised by the "climategate" emails, a series on evolutionary biology inspired by the book, The Plausibility of Life, new stories I've written, and more.
In the meantime, check out this video (Click the "Technology" tab) explaining how modern "deep sequencing" technology (here from Illumina) can simultaneously determine the base sequences for something like a million short snippets of DNA simultaneously. In contrast to the "traditional" (decade-old) microarray method of matching to preselected targets, this method allows new sequences to be quickly found, for example in the human gut or other natural environments. In addition, by matching these sequences to previously mapped genomes, this technology has revolutionized the identification of short regulatory RNAs, alternative splicing of proteins, DNA changes in cancer, DNA binding sites for transcription factors, fractal DNA structure, and many other areas of biology.
And it's just beginning.
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