Around the blogs this week, there are 8 articles out there that caught my attention, below the fold. Also, check out a recent issue of Cell for a few informative reviews of stem cell biology.
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A picture tells a thousand words. So I suppose a movie tells 24,000+ words per second.

Whether you use them for educating, self-study or just for your viewing pleasure, photos and movies of biological concepts and processes are a valuable resource. Here are ten of the best bio flick and pic galleries from around the web. Read more »

I just got done reading Ernst Mayr’s The Growth of Biological Thought, which is on the history and philosophy of biology, from Aristotle to ~1980 (written in 1982). Of particular interest to me was the section on the Modern Synthesis, where the views on evolution of the geneticists and other experimental biologists were reconciled with that of the naturalists. (Or, if you prefer, the Synthesis finally merged Darwin and Mendel.)

What of comparably brilliant books on evolutionary biology, post-Synthesis, from the point of view of genetics, molecular biology, and related disciplines? I won’t pretend to have read every such book out there, but below the fold is a list of some of the more seminal books, IMHO. Please add to them in the comments! Read more »

This is a story that could strike fear into your heart if you use UV light to visualize DNA that you later intend to clone. Read on if you dare.

A while back I was doing a project where I had to make a mutation library of a plasmid. There are a number of ways to do this but I thought I would be smart. UV light is mutagenic - why not just put the plasmid on a transilluminator for a while? That should introduce some mutations and make my library with the minimum of fuss.

Well it was a reasonable idea, but the results were a real eye-opener. Read more »

Continuing in the same frame of mind as my last post, What Comes After Grad School, I was thinking about something that Alex said:

It reminds me of a bit of advice given to a fellow postdoc by Dr. Richard Hynes - try to attend every seminar. I would also add that in my comparatively short science career I have found that conferences are great as well. You meet people, people meet you, you learn, you communicate, and you develop this type of long distance acquaintance.

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How to tell which identical twin is the father of your child, CRISPR arrays helping bacteria fight off phages and patents written on toilet paper. It’s all happening in this week’s look around the blogs… Read more »

For many of us, grad school immerses us so deeply in first-hand laboratory research that we begin to think that that’s all there is, and when faced with either limited opportunities for postdoctoral and (later) faculty research positions, we become blind to our other options. Others simply want to get out of academia and don’t know where to start. Frankly, this is the situation that I’ve found myself in over the last year, and like everyone, I’ve been learning the job market as I go along. Read more »

Whether you need to get your plasmid DNA to a lab on the other side of the world, or a few hundred miles down the road, it’s important to make sure your precious sample gets there, it is not degraded, and you don’t end up in jail. Here’s the Bitesize guide on how to send plasmids in the mail. Read more »

With the recent development of transparent Zebrafish, allowing scientists to directly view its internal organs, and observe processes like tumor metastasis and blood production after bone-marrow transplant, it seems appropriate to describe Zebrafish as a model organism. Read more »

Since I wrote about the wonders of ligation independent cloning a while back, several people have contacted me to say they were confused about how to design primers for this application. It can be a bit confusing, so here I’ll give a quick overview on how to do it. Read more »