anyone game enough for protein computer game?

Just read about this on Scientific American- an interactive game to help find the correct folding of a protein. You have the freedom to turn and twist and bend and whatever to find the lowest energy for the structure and then viola, you win!

I thought, hmmm... interesting idea. I have yet to set my hand on Foldit. Why don't you try it and see if you can solve the puzzle. Have fun!

Is nano material really safe?

I am sure you have heard of lots of interesting and promising nanotechnology products - shirt that repels water; minute particles that detect cancer cells or deliver drug to the cancer cells and not harming the surrounding normal cells. I too, believe that this field will be 'big'. However I can't help but feeling rather 'insecure' with the 'super small particle'. Is it really safe to human being? Would it one day 'back-fire' us? then I saw this article : Carbon nanotubes: the new asbestos? - report on nanotubes cause precancerous growths in mice. My heart sank.
Even though there is no conclusive finding but it is possible. I guess may be it is a good thing that they found out now than later. Hopefully the experts in the field will design a better way in making a safe nanotube and also to have regulation to ensure that it will not turn into another 'asbestos'.

everything... 2.0

haha... guess what, I just came across this blog - it is about the launch of Medicine 2.0 Congress website and the definition of Medicine 2.0 and Health 2.0. So... everything is in 2.0 now. How about u?

Science 2.0

yes... I am sure you have heard about Web 2.0 but what about Science 2.0? It is about sharing raw information or finding or discovery with the rest of the world; discovering and accessing services that are open and available; presenting information in a more interative mode and more... More importantly, it means you will know what works and what doesn't work (without you going through the experiment again) - that is, of course, if you trust the information.
I think this is a good thing because I have come across so many articles or information that are interesting but because of the subscription issue, I cannot access the finding. Besides that people tend to put only the positive findings and not the negative ones on the research papers and hence we spent a lot of our time repeating the mistakes (but of course, we also learnt a lot from them).
Now...as promising as it is, I guess I will take it with a pinch of salt but nothing beats a good idea.

made to order mouse

I saw a really cute mouse in National Geographic and guess what, it has a name, a well known name in the world of genetic research apparently, black 6 mice. Unfortunately I can't just copy and paste the picture here but I am impressed by what The Jackson lab is doing - they distributed 2.4 million of JAX mice in FY2007 and the mice have been shipped to approximately 16,000 investigators in 53 countries (and the list continues..). p.s.I found another cute one from the website tho but i don't know what is the name for this one. So...if you ever need to order a mouse for whatever reason, hopefully it is for genetic study, check out MGI.

Stem Cell Symposium @ Singapore

did our dear lecturers go for this one? xD

Link

Virtual Human

Just read about this possibility of having a virtual human. I always thought this will be the ultimate goal of systems biology. However I have reservation on the actual use of the 'tool'. I sincerely hope it will be for the betterment of the human beings.

Biofuel... a friend or foe?

I kept coming across articles on biofuel recently. While it 'presented' itself as 'green', sometimes I wonder if it is really helping the environment. Nature news reported that 'biofuels might create more emissions than they save'. I believe there are some good things in biofuel but maybe we should seriously consider other modes -making use of the waste or readily available materials to create fuel than converting native land to agriculture for biofuel. No human can 'rebuild' the native land. Once it is lost, it is gone.

Human Proteinpedia

Finally... a central place for researchers to annotate and share protein information. I just read about the article in Feb 2008 Nature Biotechnology. The long list of authors with the who and who in the proteomics fields should enable Human Proteinpedia to be useful and updated.

Structural DNA Nanotechnology

Few weeks ago, I posted an entry on DNA origami. I thought the idea was neat and creative but little did I know there are already a lot of other stuffs going on in the world.
The field - Structural DNA Nanotechnology (SDN). The person - Paul Rathemund. He has two beautiful smiley faces on his website. Quoted from his Nature paper, "an obvious application of patterned DNA origami would be the creation of a 'nanobreadboard', to which diverse components could be added. The attachment of proteins, for example, might allow novel biological experiments.."
Just few days ago, I come across this exciting news - a group of scientists at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute have developed the world's first gene detection platform made up entirely from self-assembled DNA nanostructures. This 'breakthrough' make possible a water soluble nanoarray which can help to build a more sensitive DNA probes.