Up and blogging

Cold Spring Harbor Labs has a new blog up and running. Check out LabDish here.

What is science?

Lytic cycle vs. lysogenic cycle

This diagram seems to help a lot of people...

From: 
"Lytic cycle: reference." The Full Wiki. Web. 24 March 2011. http://www.thefullwiki.org/Lytic_cycle.

Always save your work!

Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science has a great article about the Miller-Urey experiment that we talked about in class. After the initial 1953 experiment, Stanley Miller redid the experiment again in 1958, but never analyzed his results. He kept the sample results in his lab, meticulously cross-referenced to his notes on the experiment and never looked at them again. When Miller died, he left all of his science stuff to his former student Jeffrey Bada. Bada had one of his students, Adam Johnson, analyze the samples and he found some very surprising results. Ed also discuses the relevance of the Miller-Urey experiment to the history of science. You can read the whole story here.

Our Primate Family Tree

Polina Perelman from the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the National Cancer Institute and her team has sequenced genes from 186 species of primates and tightened up the primate family tree. You can see the tree here and check out Ed Yong's slide show at Not Exactly Rocket Science here. If you're feeling really ambitious, you can read Perelman's paper here.

Askin's Tumor

Earlier this morning, we had the chance to hear Mrs. Rachel Baumgartner Lozano speak about her story of the miraculous cure of her cancer through the intercession of Blessed William Joseph Chaminade. Mrs. Lozano said that she was diagnosed with an Askin's tumor.

So what's an Askin's tumor?

An Askin's tumor falls in the group of sarcomas called the Ewing family and is a peripheral neuralepithelioma (PNET) of the chest wall. The Ewing sarcomas are related because the all share a reciprocal translocation between chromosomes 11 and 22 and similar cellular physiology. The translocation occurs in over 95% of Ewing sarcomas.

The translocation involves moving the Ewing sarcoma gene (EWS) from chromosome 22 and attaching it to the friend leukemia integration 1 transcription factor (FLI1) on chromosome 11. This combination of genes, EWS-FLI1, codes for a protein  that acts as an abnormal transcription factor and it is implicated as a possible cause of Ewing sarcomas.

The Ewing sarcomas are very rare, occurring in only about 3 cases for every million people in the United States with 64% of cases occurring in teenagers.


Reference:
Toretsky, Jeffrey A. "Ewing Sarcoma and Primitive Neuroectodermal Tumors." emedicine. 17 June 2008. web. 10 March 2011. <http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/990378-overview>

Music and the Mind

Continuing the theme of yesterday's performance of the University of Dayton's Jazz Ensemble, watch this episode of NOVA called Musical Minds. Music has a very interesting relationship with the way our brain works. If you think this is interesting, you may also want to check out Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks' book about music and the human mind.


Musical Minds from Jon Meredith on Vimeo.

Obligate collective foraging, nomadism, and highly modified queens

You may be thinking, "What's with the title?" 


Well, it's three of the evolutionary reasons for "army ant syndrome" which may be the cause of the ant death spiral (or less sensationally known as the ant mill). Check out this video. 

It's apparently caused by some wayward ants following a pheromone trail. One follows another and so on until they begin spiraling around a central point. Eventually, either the mill is broken, or all the ants die from exhaustion (check here for a concise description as well as links to primary research).

You may also be interested to read this entry by Frederic Delsuc which has a very interesting explanation about why this behavior hasn't been selected against. It seems that this is the trade off army ants were stuck with. They got collective foraging ability and paid for it with the possibility of one ant causing an entire colony to all skate right to their deaths.

Gel electrophoresis virtual lab

Since we're kind of limited as to what we can show you in the lab, it's probably worth your while to go through this virtual lab from the University of Utah's Genetic Learning Center. It will help you to understand exactly what's going on in the gel and how we can use the information we learn from the process to tell us something about the molecules we ran in the gels.

Check it out here.