(in the best possible way)
I'm scanning through Science when BAM:
He's imaging RNA polymerase as it transcribes DNA .... nucleotide by freakin' nucleotide ... it's sequencing at the individual molecule level.
(To all those thinking about the future of biology and day dreaming of "big biology", this is where it's at ... single molecule enzymology.)
More like this
Part III. Serendipity strikes when we Blink
In which we find an unexpected result when we Blink while looking at the mumps polymerase.
Our lab has a paper called: "Enthalpic Switch-Points and Temperature Dependencies of DNA binding and Nucleotide Incorporation by Pol I DNA Polymerases" that was just published in BBA (Biochimica et Biophysica Acta): Proteins and Pr
It's well understood in science education that students are more engaged when they work on problems that matter. Right now, Zika virus matters. Zika is a very scary problem that matters a great deal to anyone who might want to start a family and greatly concerns my students.
So, previously, I pointed out some of the difficulties involved in getting reagents and other scientific things to a place like Nigeria.
Why you do you always make the big/small biology an either/or debate? You'd be hard pressed to argue that "big biology" projects haven't produced some outstanding results (Human Genome Project anyone?) There's also plenty of evidence that suggests that the two approaches complement each other in all kinds of useful ways.
Why don't we all just get along and focus on the real issue facing science: How to get more funding and get more mileage out of the funding we have?
alright, yeah, that's pretty damn cool. but I don't understand the anti-big biology thing. if that gets scaled up and widely used, it would be "big", no?
and while the future of biology might be in that technology, it might also be in technologies like this one, which is excellent "big biology" (though microarrays as well started "little"). the difference between big and little is smaller than you think.
I guess I hit a nerve. No more gratuitous Big Biology bashing, I promise (and you used a DB paper to bat me down, tsk tsk). Let me paste a comment I left at evolgen: