It’s the end of the line for one of my favourite bioinformatics resources, the pfam database. I found this out the hard way, as I was preparing to give my usual lecture on transcription factors and DNA binding domains in my course this semester. As part of the motivation for …
Who caught the gingerbread man? Detective Bert P. Snowman is on the case! The suspects appear to be Christmas villains having a holiday party. Who can solve this murder mystery?! Our lab came in 3rd place at the annual CSBGU ginger bread house contest for our clue inspired ginger bread …
We came in second place for the CSBGU Halloween pumpkin contest with our entry titled “8th year grad student”! Inspired by the Tim Burton.
Michelle’s time in the lab is over, so we celebrated the end of the semester. As you can imagine, I was pretty excited to see these cupcakes! Even more surprising is that the logo on top turned out to be edible! Congratulations Michelle and thanks for the cupcakes.
Last week we celebrated Alex’s time in the lab with a little farewell lunch. It’s an understatement to say that he will have a lasting impact on what we do. Hard to believe that when Alex started, no one in the lab had used a GPU! Beyond his work, Alex …
On Friday I had a very interesting chat with Jesse Bloom about his work that showed the mutations the coronavirus can acquire to evade antibodies and, perhaps, ultimately the immune response. Jessie showed that the virus can escape individual antibodies, probably natural immunity and even vaccine-induced immunity (in the worst …
I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of discovery in biology. Perhaps this is the reason why I work with microscopy images as my data of choice. The whole reason we have the word “cell” is because scientists placed corks and plants under microscopes in the 16th century and observed …
I tried to compile some of the important words/concepts we use for scholarly scientific writing. Of course, the positions and meanings of words are not scientific, but I think it gives some idea?
Here’s most of us having our a “pizza” lunch. We are saying farewell to Amy (again) and celebrating Gang and Dina’s projects. Obviously, this semester has been different. Still, I hope we’ve learned. It helped me to put our semester in perspective: Cambridge sent home its students in the 1660s, …
After many years of beautiful experiments, breakthroughs and graphic designs (e.g., here, here and here), Taraneh is leaving us. We commemorated with a lunch in December and we were lucky to have a special guest on hand. It was hard to say good bye, but we at least we got …
