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Rats to the Rescue! From Landmines to Tuberculosis, These Rats Have a Nose to Help

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

treat3A little over a year ago, I wrote about many of the characteristics of the domestic rat that made them an unexpectedly good choice for a family pet. Since I wrote that blog, my family has welcomed three very personable rats into our home.

To my family, rats are funny, playful, treat-stealing companions. However, in other areas of the world, some distant cousins to our mischievous threesome have become real-world heroes. These rats help clear fields of landmines and, as if that were not heroic enough, significantly increase the number of diagnosed tuberculosis infections. Continue reading “Rats to the Rescue! From Landmines to Tuberculosis, These Rats Have a Nose to Help”

Spring! Well, It’s Almost Here….

Posted on by Sarah Dewbre

Spring Cleaning ProductsIt’s Spring! Well, if you’re here in the Midwest, you might think I have lost my mind with temps in the 30’s and low 40’s, but it will be here before we know it! I know that I have Spring on my mind, and with that, I need to clean my house. I don’t know about you, but this winter has been horrible on my family for sicknesses—we can’t seem to get rid of these germs. That’s enough! I’m cleaning the house from top to bottom!

I don’t know about you, but the task of getting it all done seems quite daunting. I live in a average sized home, so it’s not the size, but it still seems like I have a lot of ground to cover. Especially because I want it done in one day.

So, I wanted to share some tips that I have used in the past, and some that I have received from friends and relatives, particularly this year with the amount of illness we have had in our home lately. Continue reading “Spring! Well, It’s Almost Here….”

Protein:protein Interactions: GST Pulldowns

Posted on by Gary Kobs

trypsinGST pull-downs

Pull-down assays probe interactions between a protein of interest that is expressed as a fusion protein (e.g., bait) and the potential interacting partners (prey). In a pull-down assay one protein partner is expressed as a fusion protein (e.g., bait protein) in E. coli and then immobilized using an affinity ligand specific for the fusion tag. The immobilized bait protein can then be incubated with the prey protein. The source of the prey protein can be either from a cell-based or cell-free expression system. After a series of wash steps the entire complex can be eluted from the affinity support using SDS-PAGE loading buffer or by competitive analyte elution, then evaluated by SDS-PAGE.

Continue reading “Protein:protein Interactions: GST Pulldowns”

Sonnets in DNA

Posted on by Isobel Maciver

William ShakespeareFor sixty years now, scientists have studied the role of DNA as a vehicle for the storage and transmission of genetic information from generation to generation. We have marveled at the capacity of DNA to store all the information required to describe a human being using only a 4-letter code, and to pack that information into a space the size of the nucleus of a single cell. A letter published last week in Nature exploits this phenomenal storage capacity of DNA to archive a quite different kind of information. Forget CDs, hard drives and chips, the sum of human knowledge can now be stored in synthetic DNA strands. The Nature letter, authored by scientists from the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK, and Agilent Technologies in California, describes a proof-of-concept experiment where synthetic DNA was used to encode Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a picture of the Bioinformatics Institute, and the original Crick and Watson paper on the double-helical nature of DNA. Continue reading “Sonnets in DNA”

Copper Containing Surfaces and Their Potential for Reducing the Spread of Infection and Antibiotic Resistant Gene Transfer

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

As a scientist and a jewelry artist, there are not that many occasions when my two passions overlap. As a geneticist, I find the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistant microbes to be fascinating in a “this is really cool and utterly terrifying” sort of way. As a jewelry artist, I love experimenting with new and different metals. Some of my current favorites are stainless steel, copper and bronze, which is an alloy of copper and tin. So you might be able to imagine my excitement when I came across an article in mBio discussing the public health implications of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) of antibiotic resistance genes on clinical and public touch surfaces made from copper alloys compared to those made of stainless steel (1).

Stainless steel: The unexpected, gene-transferring truth

Polishing stainless steelStainless steel is often used in clinical and public settings as work surfaces as well as other surfaces that are touched and cleaned often. Stainless steel is used in these applications for many of the same reasons I like it for jewelry: it is strong, resilient, relatively inexpensive, stain- and corrosion-resistant and will weather regular cleaning/exposure to moisture well. There is something about a gleaming stainless steel work surface that looks, well, sterile. But is it? Continue reading “Copper Containing Surfaces and Their Potential for Reducing the Spread of Infection and Antibiotic Resistant Gene Transfer”

Promega Connections: The Year in Review

Posted on by Promega

Your Promega Connections bloggers had a great time bringing you cool science stories, technical tips and assorted other reading material this year, and we want to say a big “Thank you!”  to all of our readers for your time, your comments, and your reblogs.

Here are some of the highlights from 2012.

I can doodle people!
I can doodle people!
In January Kelly blogged about The Making of a Science App, describing the work to create the Cell Signaling iPad app that we released last year. An update is forthcoming early in 2013 (GPCRs!), and we continue to improve our iPad, iPhone and Android apps as well as our web tools for scientists. If you haven’t played with them, check them out. They are all free. Cats, dogs and their humans have found Kari’s blog post about catnip intriguing as well. Continue reading “Promega Connections: The Year in Review”

Uniquely Buried in a Wisconsin

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

WinterIt is winter in Wisconsin, and it has arrived with a blizzardy vengeance. My family and I are snowed in for the second day, and as I write this I am trying not to think of the twelve plus inches of snow that covers my driveway. I am afraid to measure the height of the drifts.

The world outside my window is beautiful. Tree limbs and fence posts are frosted in white. There is a LOT of snow out there, and that made me stop and think, there is an awful lot of uniqueness out there. IF every snowflake is unique. And according to a local Wisconsin snowflake expert, University of Wisconsin, Madison, meteorology professor Pao Wang, they aren’t. Continue reading “Uniquely Buried in a Wisconsin”

eClutter No More!

Posted on by admin

A nice clean desktop and organized inboxes for the new year...
A nice clean desktop and organized inboxes for the new year…
As each year draws to a close, I find myself making a mental list of everything that I want to change for the new year. I’m going to work out more often, I’m going to eat less starch (goodbye, my dear French bread), I am going to declutter my closets…the list goes on and on.  Unfortunately, my list looks very similar year over year, so I think I’m going to make one, true resolution and stick with it this year. I am going to do a big, fat, clean sweep of my computer. It doesn’t sound like a big task, but I have a veritable electronic war zone in front of me and I am feeling the need to purge.  Having this amount of eClutter is just as disruptive to my productivity as is having a messy house.

I was completely embarrassed a few days ago when I was having some computer issues at work.  The wonderful staff at the help desk logged into my computer remotely and saw the roughly 90 bajillion icons and shortcuts on my desktop. This was, electronically speaking, akin to having your in-laws over for dinner and having them see a pile of laundry laying in the middle of the livingroom floor. There is nothing suspect or devious about the material on there, but the sheer mess of it was embarrassing. My personal email accounts are also a terrifying disaster. I have, over the the years, subscribed to way to many newsletters and newsfeeds. It’s to the point that I have roughly 3000 unread personal email messages that are all old newsletters, promotions, and offers that have long-since expired. I am electronically suffocating under all the mess.

So here’s my plan for 2013:

  1. I am going to clean up my shortcuts and delete all the stuff that I don’t need.
  2. I am going to clean my gmail inbox, and
  3. I am going on a unsubscribe extravaganza.

If I can manage to get all of that cleaned, I just may have time to hit the gym!

Rats Avatars: A New Twist On Virtual Reality

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

Imagine playing a simple game in a virtual-reality setting. You move an avatar around a room trying to entice your opponent’s avatar to move closer to you when you are in certain spot. Meanwhile, 12 km away, cameras track your opponent’s movements around an arena that also contains a robotic representation of you. The cameras are telling your opponent’s avatar where to move in your virtual reality setting based on where they move in their actual setting.

Your goal is to score the most points by moving the virtual you into proximity with your opponent’s avatar while you are both at a certain location within the virtual room. If you succeed, you score a point. If you and your opponent get too close anywhere else in the room, your opponent scores a point. Your opponent, however, is not terribly interested in points; your opponent wants to get close to the robotic you because it has snacks. Your opponent is a rat, Continue reading “Rats Avatars: A New Twist On Virtual Reality”