If you have computers in the lab that you would like to access from home, this might be for you.
LogMeIn.com offers a free remote desktop service that allows you to take control of a remote computer. Perfect if, while relaxing after dinner, you remember that you forgot to turn off the HPLC at work (yes, I did that tonight). Read more »
I finally signed up for Google Reader last week after reading Bala’s great post last week on Google Reader for Academics.
Setting this up brought my attention to iGoogle, another very useful Google service.
iGoogle allows the user to create a personalised start page. One of it’s main features is the ability to add all sorts of useful gadgets written by Google and independent developers. Here are the top 10 molecular and cell biology-related iGoogle gadgets: Read more »
If you regularly use online DNA sequence manipulation programs, your life might be about to get just a little easier.
At Bitesize Bio, we were becoming tired of jumping from site to site to get the sequence manipulation tools we needed. One site for reverse complementation, another for translation and yet another for restriction analysis… it was all just a bit irritating. Read more »
If you’re like me (before I wised up to the search power of PubMed) you probably just type in your topic of interest and press Go. And then you get back about 8 billion results, which—this is just a guess—is far more than you’re likely to read.
Here are a few basic tips to help you get the most out of your PubMed searches without wasting a lot of time slogging through pages of results, thus getting you back to the bench ASAP. Unless, of course, you’re avoiding the wet lab…not that I’ve ever used literature searches and background reading as an excuse to step away from the PCR machine… Read more »
Google reader is one the weapons available in an academic’s arsenal to combat information overload in the Internet era.
Part of research involves keeping oneself informed of the development happening in one’s own field as well as other closely related. It should not come as a surprise that these avenues of information are diverse, but nevertheless rich when it comes to the Internet.
Part of your research schedule may involve tracking literature, most probably using Pubmed. Still, most use journal eTOCs (electronic Table of Contents) that pop into your email inbox whenever an issue is published. Granted these methods get the job done, but there is more a efficient way of doing this routine. This opinion is not only echoed by techies but by several others in academia as well. I wrote a post on the same topic, albeit a very brief one, which attracted emails from several academics and is why I thought of making a detailed post at Bitesize Bio. Read more »
In fields describable as functional or experimental biology, one tool that could be both useful and beautiful is a digital atlas of gene expression patterns in a representative mammal during development.
That’s just what GenePaint represents. In studying any individual gene product, its global function in the whole organism needs to be addressed. Clearly we can’t easily do this with an adult mouse, but we can with a mouse embryo. Take the image shown for instance, of focal adhesion kinase (which I chose arbitrarily, as something I’m familiar with), at day 14.5 of gestation (relatively late in development). Darker color indicates some expression of this protein. Now, some understanding of histology helps to understand what the image shows, but it is informative nonetheless. And, it’s beautiful, in a geeky sort of way. Read more »
To (hopefully) make the life of molecular biologists everywhere a little easier, I have put together a Molecular Biologist’s tool-bar for Firefox/IE, which you can download here.
It’s main feature is the multi-search box from which you can search Google, Pubmed, Scirus, Wikipedia, SwissProt and others directly, saving you from navigating to the individual sites every time you want to make a search.
It also contains drop-down menus with links to commonly used sequence manipulation and analysis tools, bio-databases, literature tools and some other stuff I hope you will find useful.
This is the only the first version of the toolbar and I intend to add more features over time so I’d love to hear your input into which tools and features you would like to see added (or removed!). Please leave your suggestions either in a comment, by e-mail or by hitting the “suggest” button on the toolbar itself.
If you are looking for some free plasmid manipulation and analysis software, then you need look no further than PlasMa DNA. It’s packed with features, user friendly and looks great. Best of all, it is a cross-platform application - it works on both PC and Mac, and the files produced on one operating system can be opened and used on the other. Read more »
I recently caught wind of Openlearn, at Open University, which is a UK university that is dedicated to distance learning. Apparently started in 1969, and hosting part-time students who will received real degrees, the OU’s teaching quality was listed as the fifth best in the UK. “Now anyone can access free online learning,” and “the insidious link between exclusivity and excellence” has been broken, they say.
I don’t know whether this is an accredited learning resource, thus it should not substitute actual higher ed, but it does look to be an excellent resource. It has the beginnings of a good biology department, with a small handful of comprehensive classroom-like units. Most of them take 8-12 hours to complete a tutorial, which is a heck of a lot better than most short articles available on the web.
For the molecular and cellular biology scene, the lesson on Meiosis and mitosis appears pretty thorough. It covers chromosome segregation, recombination, and subsequent patterns of inheritance; concepts that are all important for any understanding of reproduction. And it offers open-learners a chance to discuss and rate topics in forums afterwards, to facilitate improvement on both the courses’ and students’ sides. Read more »
Mind mapping is an extremely useful technique for note-taking, brainstorming and learning. In the past I often tried to use mind-mapping but the neat-freak in me was never satisfied with the messy maps I would create. However, now there is an alternative to scribbling out mind maps on paper with the availability FreeMind, a great piece of free, cross-platform mind mapping software, allowing even the most artistically-challenged to create neat, functional mind-maps.
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