About the author

Dan Rhoads

Dan is a postdoc working at the University of Cyprus in developmental biology. He has a BSc in molecular biology and a PhD pharmacology and biochemistry.

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Three selected articles for your blog-reading pleasure:

The Stimulus – How much is marked for science funding?

Let’s not mess things up this time! The last major increase to the NIH caused major problems years later. Money was simply pumped into new and existing grants, PIs hired many new grad students and postdocs, and the pyramid scheme got a major influx bloating the bottom of the academic edifice. As the bottom rose, many chunks fell of and as one Nobel Lauriate stated, we sacrificed a generation of scientists.

And two useful new tools for the molecular and cellular biologist:

Move over GFP, it’s FlAsH and ReAsH
A brief news item (news to me anyway) on the smallest fluorescent tag available. We all know that GFP is a rather bulky protein tag, but using biarsenical labelling of tetracysteine motifs, you can get a fluorescent tag that’s only 6aa long.

Hot off the Press: Fluorescent timers
By directed evolution of a protein that normally fluoresces in the red, it was possible to generate variants of the protein that had differing maturation rates for the chromophore, as well as a temporal shift in the fluorescence spectrum from blue to red. Different mutants resulted in fast-, medium-, and slow-fluorescent timer molecules.