Monthly Archives: June 2014

Word of caution: a new method to study RNA-seq biases

Shaury Nash CC BY-SA

As next generation sequencing methods quickly become ubiquitous tools of genomics, more and more effort is directed to understand what are the limitations of these approaches. These limitations present themselves quite often in the form of coverage biases. Last year Genome Biology published a study from David Jaffe and colleagues that looked at coverage biases… Read more »

Biology
2

Can you show us that again please?

Drosophila

For almost thirty years, David Stern has been obsessed with the fact that male fruit flies ‘sing’ to females. His work on this problem, published today in BMC Biology, has got him thinking about reproducibility in science. In this guest post, he sets out his prescription to help scientists check whether research results are reliable… Read more »

Biology
4

How to disarm a superbug – a story told by forensic genomics

bmc biol

Inexplicably absent from the current fad for Scandi-dramas is a mystery thriller set among the geysers, glaciers and Guðmundsdóttirs of Iceland. One compelling candidate for filling this void is Prof Karl Gústaf Kristinsson, a medical microbiologist at Reykjavík's Landspitali University Hospital, and his quest to tell the story of the superbug PMEN2. The pneumococcal detective… Read more »

Biology Medicine
1

Make your mealtimes more tasteful

1b Wassily Kandinsky – 'painting #201' FOOD VERSION

Research published today in our journal Flavour shows that food arranged to resemble famous artworks tastes better than food in a traditional or neat presentation. So we thought we’d get everyone to improve their meals with an art-inspired presentation. Tweet your examples of art-inspired food presentation using the hashtag #ArtisticTaste, and let us know whether it’s… Read more »

Biology

Weaving a web of knowledge about silk and venom

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To create new materials that mimic the strength and flexibility of black widow spider silk and drugs based on its potent venom, we need a full list of the proteins involved and what they do. Two BMC Genomics papers published today make a start on this task. In this guest post, Jessica Garb, an author… Read more »

Biology

The devil is in the DEETails

Aedes_aegypti_biting_human

An article published today in the journal Parasites and Vectors reviews the evidence on whether DEET is unsafe. In this guest post Dr James Logan, one of the authors and Senior Lecturer in Medical Entomology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, as well as Director of arctic, tells us about how we assess… Read more »

Biology