GreenGene

Roche and IBM announced today an agreement to develop a nanopore-based technology that will directly read and sequence human DNA quickly and efficiently. The novel technology, developed by IBM Research, offers true single molecule sequencing by decoding molecules of DNA as they are threaded through a nanometer-sized pore in a silicon chip.  The approach holds the promise of significant advantages in cost, throughput, scalability, and speed compared to sequencing technologies currently available or in development.

Celebrate DNA Day!  Go to http://www.genome.gov/DNADay/ and look at the many resources they have available so we can all be better informed.  We live in a KnowledgeEconomy so remember - the more knowledge you have, the better your “economy” will be in the long run.

Many of us dislike the nasty diesel engines in municipal buses, but the next generation of clean tech buses is on its way to fix that problem.  I got to take one of the first tours in a Hydrogen Hybrid Bus and it was quite nice.  I could see taking it to work and back on a regular basis.  Check out their website at www.HydrogenHybridBus.com

I have a GreenGene!

Plant geneticist Pamela Ronald was just tagging along on a kayaking trip with a girlfriend when she met Raoul Adamchak 15 years ago. She spent her days in the lab, trying to figure out how to genetically engineer plants. He was an organic farmer–and genetically engineered crops cannot be organic. They fell in love and got married.

Dr. Pamela Ronald

Despite the giant gap in the public mind between organic farming, which bans artificial pesticides and fertilizers, and gene modification, the couple was never exactly star-crossed. From the beginning, Ronald says, they shared this goal: figuring out how to grow crops in a way that could feed the Earth without destroying the environment. Shortly after she met Adamchak, Ronald began looking for a variety of rice that could resist the floods that annually destroy 4 million tons of crops in India and Bangladesh. She produced one, and in 2009 the rice was released to farmers.  Rest at Forbes.com.

The principle of quantum coherence in pigment molecules involved in photosynthesis has been demonstrated by Gregory Engel in 2007, but only at a frigid -196 C.  Just recently Gregory Scholes at the University of Toronto and his colleagues have demonstrated the same effect at room temperature.  Physicists had believed that this quantum effect could not occur at such a temperature, but Engel and colleagues have reproduced the experiment with essentially the same results.  An article in New Scientist has the links to the source articles.

This is the quote that jumps out at you and slaps you with force: “Today we can sequence a million individuals’ genomes for what it would have cost to sequence one person’s genome five years ago.  Read the rest at Newsweek.

Cytoscape is an open source bioinformatics software platform for visualizing molecular interaction networks and integrating these interactions with gene expression profiles and other state data.   Learn more at Cytoscape.org.

Discovered Biofortified.org this morning.  Need to read more of their stuff.

Check out a recent article in Biotechniques that reports on three recent papers on GFP.  Also, the 11/12/09 UC Berkeley Press Release (commented on in the article but without a link) is available here.