GenomeWeb carry coverage of the work by Battelle Memorial Institute, Harvard University, Virginia Tech, and Ginkgo Bioworks who are all developing methods to detect sequences that could “be put to nefarious use”. This suggests a couple of things to me. First and foremost are these companies […]
Last night I watched in amazement as a beating heart was brought into the UK for transplant surgery – the heart was kept alive in the OCS HEART system. The BBC program Heart Transplant: A Chance to Live is outstanding TV and if you can […]
The FDA issued a safety communication today on the risk that biotin supplements “can significantly interfere with certain lab tests and cause incorrect test results”. The FDA communiqué mentions an increase in reported adverse events, and even one death, because of Biotin interference. Biotin interferes with some […]
For readers of this blog who don’t remember The X-files the reference may be lost on you, but the work published in Genome Research today will not. In Whole-genome sequencing of Atacama skeleton shows novel mutations linked with dysplasia Gary Nolan’s group at Stanford report on […]
Last week the first issue of a new journal debuted: The CRISPR Journal. With a massive number of journals out there why should any of us care about a new one? I would not normally read the first issue of a Journal (although I did […]
Anyone who’s run Illumina instruments over the years is likely to have noticed how flowcells can have remarkably similar (and occasionally amusing) names. This can create a real headache when looking for a specific run as a single mismatch can cause you to spend some time […]
In this post I wanted to highlight the wonderful “Excel vs R: A Brief Introduction to R” by Jesse Sadler. This is full of useful and practical advice on using R in place of Excel (or any other spreadsheet) for simple data analysis. I use […]
The news about Harvey Weinstein can hardly have escaped the attention of even the most lab-bound post-doc ro PhD student. The investigative journalism at the The New York Times story has led to the downfall of a movie mogul for sexual harassment, unwanted physical contact and other things most of us […]
I had the very real pleasure of introducing Prof Lucy Raymond at Biotexcel’s Genomic Medicine 2017 in Cambridge last week. She was speaking in a session that included Dr David Bentley (Illumina Inc – Genomes for Medicine), Prof Stephan Beck (UCL Cancer Institute – Towards Personal Epigenomics), and Prof Sadaf Farooqi (University […]
A short article in todays Times quotes William Cowley parchment makers as saying velum provides the only foolproof way for detecting art forgery. Very simply an artist creates their work on vellum and retains a sample for genetic comparison should a suspected forgery come to […]
