Gen-enchiladas anyone?

There have been some interesting articles on GM recently and I couldn’t help but see the opportunity for a genetics-sounding recipe idea; hence the Gen-enchilada! This brings together two of my favourite things; food and genomics (sort of) so here’s a recipe first and some links to GM projects that might appear in your shopping basket soon.

A better way to analysis of tumour heterogenity

Ben Raphael's lab at Brown University have just published THetA for tumour heterogeneity analysis; it's a great paper so download it and have a look yourselves.

Solid tumours have been shown to be highly heterogeneous and that this can underlie drug resistance and eventual relapse in patients. Individual tumours are admixtures of different tumour-cell sub-populations and NGS data come from this mix. The THetA paper introduces a method to infer the starting population of distinct tumour-cells.

Clive Brown and MinIon spotted at the cinema

So the drama is finally over and now we can expect great things from the company developing the worlds best nanopore sequencer, Illumina's Jat Flatley confirms they have one in development!

And at the same time MinIon is about to make it's comeback in the latest sequel from Universal...

5hmC on Illumina 450k's: analysis without breaking the bank?

Epigenetics is one of the most exciting areas of research and promises to impact all sorts of biological systems. DNA methylation has recently been shown to come in methylcytosine (mC) and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) flavours. Usually analysis of mC is carried out using bisulfite conversion or enzymatic digestion. The gold standard is probably bisulfite sequncing and a few groups have made significant advances using Bis-seq methods on Human genomes.

23and Meow

Consumer genomics is becoming easier and easier to access and a colleague recently contacted me about my experiences as some friends were planning to get tested. When I got "23andMe'd" I learnt some new stuff about me and my DNA, and I'd like to learn more about the genealogical side but have not attempted to get my data into one of the better sites for this.

But how far might we go with consumer genomics? Believe it or not there is a company offering a service to identify which pet crapped on your lawn!

DNA barcoding for cnidarians with Oxford Nanopore

I read an interesting post over at boingboing.net on the use of DNA barcodes and the possible appearance of Dr Spocks Tricorder.

Mouse models of Crohn's Disease

At the Illumina Scientific Summit in Berlin last month Prof. Philip Rosenstiel from the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel spoke about his work on inflammatory bowel disorder (IBD). He presented a fabulous series of experiments where mouse-models of the disease were used to show the impact of maternal phenotype on litter genotype.

Where are all the "hot" female scientists

Science Watch have published their list of "Hot" scientists. Their website front page has 21 researchers on the hot-list from the "Genomics and Biomedicine" section and 8 of the 21 hottest scientific researchers are involved in Genomics. However only two of these are female.