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last updated: April 2, 2020
Laura holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Dundee. She has worked several different roles in scientific publishing and now works as a Managing editor at Bitesize Bio.
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The Irish Famine (or ‘Great Potato Famine’ if you live outside the Emerald Isle) killed one million people and forced another million to leave the country between 1845 and 1852. It was caused by a blight on the country’s main food stock- the Irish ‘Lumper’ potato. Now, researchers have identified the genome of the blight…
DNA sequencing (PCR, Sanger or next-generation sequencing (NGS)) is a now familiar part of any molecular biology lab. But ‘RNA-seq’, the so-called “Cinderella of genetics”, is now becoming the belle of the ball, providing new insights into this most central molecule of the ‘central dogma’. The many flavors of RNA Whilst genomic DNA is the…
The importance of epigenetics in biology is increasingly acknowledged (if you’re not convinced yet, read my crash course). One commonly studied epigenetic mark is CpG methylation: cytosines that are directly followed by a guanine nucleotide (indicated by CpG), can be methylated, unlike non-CpG Cs. Since attachment of a methyl group to a cytosine can affect…
The “sequencing-by-synthesis” technology now used by Illumina was originally developed by Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman at the University of Cambridge. They founded the company Solexa in 1998 to commercialize their sequencing method. Illumina went on to purchase Solexa in 2007 and has built upon, and rapidly improved the original technology. Millions of reactions and…
The Human Genome Project was successful, but hard work. The major improvements to the technology were the increases in parallelization and automation. In 2003, just as the HGP completion papers were published in Nature and Science, ABI launched the‘3730XL’. It could run 24 96-well plates per day and generate around 2 MB of sequence. Some…
The epigenome has been in the research spotlight, and for good reason. Not only has it been associated with the developmental stages of an organism, but epigenetic alterations lead to disorders and have been linked to many human diseases. So, the question stands: what exactly is an epigenome? What Is the Epigenome? Simply put, the…
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