Life Science Tools of the Trade

If I were someone else I might recommend a certain Book to hbogerd. But I’m not, so I shan’t. And not just because he’s a prude, either.

As for cloning, I use a hand-held UV lamp (high wavelength/low energy) for cutting out from gels, and have done ever since I discovered that the low wavelength jobbies crosslink Ts. An additional benefit is that the hand-held things (and I’m with Bogey on the ‘Pure blue light? What?’ reaction) don’t give you sun burn.

I have been burned by an ‘old-school’ transilluminator. It was in my previous job, and I was demonstrating to Charlie the machine I’d just revamped and reprogrammed (Charlie = VC = Venture Capitalist. You had to be there). This was a machine that would take 12 x 1.5 ml overnight bugs and prep plasmid DNA from them. The machine itself had launched about a year before I arrived at the company and bombed spectacularly, because it didn’t work. I spent six months working on the manual DNA extraction kit range, making them work and saleable so that the company actually had an income, and because I was successful at that I was put in charge of the refurbishment of the machine, which was the company’s raison d’etre.

So in the middle of the project (I had to re-do the chemistry, and teach myself Turbo Pascal so that I could reprogram the bloody thing) we had Charlie in, and I demonstrated the New! Improved! machine. This naturally involved doing restriction digests of the plasmid DNA from different coli strains, running it all on gels and showing the results to half a dozen suits (They’re wearing black. I see you can fight in the jungle in it and at night put on some pearls and you’re ready for formal wear). We had two full face UV masks and any number of safety glasses. No worries, I thinks – let the suits have the face masks and keep the exposure down.

Wrongo. I looked like a negative racoon by the end of the day. So yeah, I’ll vote for the low energy hand-held gig
everytime.

All that is not what I came here to write about this evening. It’s something to do with that bunch of loserscompany and how if I’d been listened to we’d have been five years ahead of the market. Next time, all right?

PS I could also talk about bioinformaticians who don’t do anything useful and give talks that can be summarized in the phrase ‘proteins have domains’, but that that would be Unhelpful.

I have been trying to learn something about bioinformatics. “Bioinformatics for Dummies” doesn’t appear to be the place to start. Perhaps it should be titled “Dummies for Bioinformatics”. This primer, is too simple for someone with a minimal knowledge of bioinformatics (that would be me) but probably too complicated for a layman or laywoman. I’ve picked up a couple of bioinformatics textbooks and within the first chapter I’m lost in a gobbledegook mess of mathematics/models/statistics/jargon/etc. It all makes you feel kind of stupid until you realize the seminar you just saw was totally theoretical and didn’t contain one piece of actually data. Synteny-blah. Go do some work.