For the past six decades, HeLa cells have been vital to making groundbreaking research in science. Scientists have made countless passages from them and shipped them worldwide, but did not put much thought into how they originally established. Scientific discovery and faith healing Rebecca Skloot gave the cells a life and a history in her [...]

Today, the 25th of April 2013, marks the 60th anniversary since the groundbreaking publication on DNA structure by James Watson and Francis Crick. In recent years we are witnessing another revolution in biology; epigenetics. And, like figuring out the structure of DNA required the development of X-ray technology, so epigenetics is intimately linked with next generation sequencing. [...]

Accuracy and reproducibility In all fields of science, accuracy and reproducibility are of paramount importance and it’s never been more true than in the case of genomic sequencing where minor errors could lead to real problems further down the line for groups studying hereditary conditions or perhaps oncology. The obvious starting point would be a [...]

“No man is an island” said  John Donne. But if he were, every healthy man or woman would be a lavish, tropical, densely populated island. Recently, I talked to a Knight wants you to help him explore that island. Interested? Confused? Read on… The population of the human island is, of course microbes. Humans have [...]

There is no such thing as “junk” DNA Until recently, vast areas of the genome had been denounced as “junk” DNA, because they do not encode proteins. However, it has become clear that these regions have a large diversity of other functions, from transcriptional and translational regulation to the protection of genes and genome integrity. [...]

The purpose of genetic testing is to find altered genes that could cause disease. Consequently, people could be treated, or prospective parents can make decisions about having children. However, scientists are finding that having a gene which causes disease doesn’t necessarily cause that disease! We are all mutants Researchers at Cambridge and Cardiff universities found that a [...]

Why Metagenomics? The microorganisms that we know and understand today are the ones which either cause human diseases, or are beneficial to human society in some way. From wine and cheese in food industry to the pharmaceutical industry- they are an indispensable part of our lives. Despite making good progress in understanding the microbial world, [...]

RNA sequencing is big news and most of the time you’ll hear people talking about gene expression and splicing analysis, but we should not forget that there are many other RNA molecules in a cell besides mRNA’s and rRNA’s. Non-coding, generally non-adenylated regulatory RNAs have become incredibly important areas of study and include small RNAs [...]

A long, long time ago- before the human genome sequence was announced, a cancer specialist friend wrote a whimsical essay in a university newsletter. He predicted that future patients would drive to a clinical data center, plug a flash drive into a computer and have their genomes scanned for current and potential disease. The reaction [...]

A paradigm shift by the Big Three As we learned last week, the Human Genome Project was accomplished using the improved Sanger method and technology from Applied Biosystems (ABI). Despite the significant technical improvements to this ‘first-generation’ technology, sequencing multiple human genomes was never going to be easy without a paradigm shift. Over the last [...]