Geek week, or Weak geek?
For those who can appreciate some nerd humor (see right):And for those proud un-nerds, 'touch' is actually a command in linux, and since your geek streak was probably left somewhere in the bottom drawer of your childhood dresser, I won't bother explaining what it does. And on the geek wagon we have this little comment made today by our robot tech regarding the control of liquid handling robots: "it requires a lot more programming to feed bogus information to the robot and make it work", I'm not sure if that needs any explanation.
Today I was pleased to find that some old grade-school level [benign] hacking tricks enabled me to deconvolute a list of Genbank Accession numbers and the usefull gene transcripts they were supposed to represent. Its nice to feel clever every now and then. Oh, and I figured that for those friend-(and family)-folk who don't really know what I do now that I'm not a pipette jocky (or a lab-monkey), I should point you to two of the web sites I frequent from several times a week to several times an hour so you can get a feel for what I do (I point you hear because they have good intros geared for folks not in field):
NCBI: This is the National Center for Biotechnology Information, an incredible example of what can be accomplished with tax dollars if done correctly. The NCBI is an indespensable resource for getting anything done in this field.
UCSC Bioinformatics: Especially, their Genome Browser. Ever wonder what one does with the human genome now that its done? See following example:
Here's your chance to look at one somewhat simple representation of a gene we should all know and love: Alcohol Dehydrogenase (it's what allows you to drink whisky or beer without pickling your liver after the first shot).
1) go to Genome Browser, and in the box labeled "position or search term" type: ADH1A (alcohol dehydrogenase 1A) and click submit.
2) Go ahead and click the link under "known genese" and you should see a nice little applet that looks like:
2) If it doesn't look this busy, click the "default tracks" button below this graphic.
Top half: What you are looking at is a cartoon, if you will, of the section of the human genome (thin lines) that contains the guts (the thick parts along the thin lines) that actually code for the alcohol dehydrogenase protein. On the bottom half, there are comparisons between different genomes (armadillos, mice, rat, frog, elaphant, chicken etc) that indicate which areas along the same gene in these organisms are most conserved, (the degree to which the sequence has remained the same through evelutionary distance between them and us). As you might expect, the chicken and frog are less similar to us than are rats (I think chimp might not be on here by default because for some genes like this, they are basically the same.... ;-)
Oklay, so thats enought nerd crap for the day. If your really bored, try playing around with the zoom tools... you can zoom all the way down to the now all-so-pop-culture-referenced A's,C's,G's and T's.
enjoy, Fellow Geeksters!
Today's Random Google Query: opened high caught
DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism Security
Columbine High School massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Isaiah 24:18 It will happen that he who flees from the noise
Today I was pleased to find that some old grade-school level [benign] hacking tricks enabled me to deconvolute a list of Genbank Accession numbers and the usefull gene transcripts they were supposed to represent. Its nice to feel clever every now and then. Oh, and I figured that for those friend-(and family)-folk who don't really know what I do now that I'm not a pipette jocky (or a lab-monkey), I should point you to two of the web sites I frequent from several times a week to several times an hour so you can get a feel for what I do (I point you hear because they have good intros geared for folks not in field):
NCBI: This is the National Center for Biotechnology Information, an incredible example of what can be accomplished with tax dollars if done correctly. The NCBI is an indespensable resource for getting anything done in this field.
UCSC Bioinformatics: Especially, their Genome Browser. Ever wonder what one does with the human genome now that its done? See following example:
Here's your chance to look at one somewhat simple representation of a gene we should all know and love: Alcohol Dehydrogenase (it's what allows you to drink whisky or beer without pickling your liver after the first shot).
1) go to Genome Browser, and in the box labeled "position or search term" type: ADH1A (alcohol dehydrogenase 1A) and click submit.
2) Go ahead and click the link under "known genese" and you should see a nice little applet that looks like:
2) If it doesn't look this busy, click the "default tracks" button below this graphic.
Top half: What you are looking at is a cartoon, if you will, of the section of the human genome (thin lines) that contains the guts (the thick parts along the thin lines) that actually code for the alcohol dehydrogenase protein. On the bottom half, there are comparisons between different genomes (armadillos, mice, rat, frog, elaphant, chicken etc) that indicate which areas along the same gene in these organisms are most conserved, (the degree to which the sequence has remained the same through evelutionary distance between them and us). As you might expect, the chicken and frog are less similar to us than are rats (I think chimp might not be on here by default because for some genes like this, they are basically the same.... ;-)
Oklay, so thats enought nerd crap for the day. If your really bored, try playing around with the zoom tools... you can zoom all the way down to the now all-so-pop-culture-referenced A's,C's,G's and T's.
enjoy, Fellow Geeksters!
Today's Random Google Query: opened high caught
DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism Security
Columbine High School massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Isaiah 24:18 It will happen that he who flees from the noise
posted by Tadpole2monkey @ 6:13 PM
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