The Junk DNA Fight
From yesterday's New York Times Magazine, here's an excellent intro by Carl Zimmer to the Junk DNA Wars. In January, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, made a comment...
View Article23AndMe
Now this is quite a development: 23andMe is the personal genomics company that had a run-in with the FDA and is still trying to come to terms with the agency over the reporting of their customers'...
View ArticleIs Irisin Real?
In 2012, the Spiegelman lab at Harvard reported a new peptide hormone, irisin (derived from a known precursor, FNDC5), that seemed to be involved in (among other things) brown-fat-like energy usage and...
View ArticleHuman Gene Editing
Well, if you needed any more proof about how powerful and easy to use the CRISPR/Cas9 technique is for gene editing, take a look at today's headlines on it: A group of leading biologists on Thursday...
View ArticleA Couple of Ycombinator's Startups
Last year I mentioned reports that the startup incubator Ycombinator was thinking of getting into the biopharma field. Here's a look at the current crop of potential companies. One thing that stands...
View ArticleRotten Rottlerin
Here's one of the problems with the various schemes to do "deep learning" using the published scientific literature: a fair proportion of that literature is junk. This is not news, of course, and to...
View ArticleReview of Reviews
Several papers of interest, in the "catching up with the literature" vein. For you stapled peptide fans, here's a review of their possible therapeutic uses, with what's been accomplished so far. And...
View ArticleCRISPR Gene Editing in Human Embryos: Not So Fast
As you'll have heard, the rumors that CRISPR/Cas9 experiments had been performed on human embryonic tissue have turned out to be true. The recent calls for a temporary moratorium on such work were said...
View ArticleHuman CRISPR
Biocentury has a roundup of reactions to the recent human CRISPR paper: There's no dispute that because the technology is in its infancy, much more work needs to be done to establish its safety....
View ArticleA Young Blood Controversy
The recent revival of interest in the way that the blood from younger animals (and people?) can improve the health of older ones came bundled with a particular protein candidate for the effect, GDF11....
View ArticleCrappy Antibodies: Available Now, and for the Foreseeable Future
I made a brief mention of this article yesterday, but I wanted to highlight it. It's a look, from Nature New, at the broader implications of the antibody problem in research. Antibodies are, of course,...
View ArticleGuess What: Your Peers Are Already Reviewing You
Looks like there are biologists who are getting a chance to figure out what social media can do to communication in their field. Nature News reports on the response to a PNAS paper published late last...
View ArticleInside Moderna (A Little Bit)
Here's a look at Moderna, the mRNA-based company who have been signed so many gigantic deals over the last few years. From the outside, I've always regarded them as enigmatic, and I'm apparently not...
View ArticleArtificial Intelligence For Biology?
A new paper in PLoS Computational Biology is getting a lot of attention (which event, while not trying to be snarky about it, is not something that happens every day). Here's the press release, which I...
View ArticleChemical Probe Compounds: Time to Get Real
There's a new paper on chemical probes out in Nature Chemical Biology, and right off, I have to disclose a conflict of interest. I'm a co-author, and I'm glad to be one. (Here's a comment at Nature...
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