personal genomics controversy

Image via Wikipedia There are a number of companies (23andMe, deCODEme, Navigenics) that offer a service of scanning your genome, using microarray technology, for numerous (500,000 – 1,000,000) single nucleotide polymorphims (SNPs). SNPs, (snips), are one (not the only) source of variation in our genomes that make us all unique individuals, and offers us some…

Whole body hacks ?

An example of how it is hard to hack a hacked system follows. Previously I mentioned a quote from Francis Crick (1962 Nobel prize winner for the co-discovery of the structure of DNA (1953)) that biology is a hacked together system rather than engineered from the ground up. This general idea makes sense at an…

How to keep your stem cells young

Berkeley Campus:Image via Wikipedia Irina Conboy’s lab, from University of California – Berkeley, has just published a new paper in Nature. If you don’t have full access here is an outline of the paper. When muscles are damaged in young animals they are repaired by stem (satellite) cells. However, older animals are not efficiently repaired,…

Does smelling coffee wake you up?

Image by DavidErickson via Flickr Monday morning and many of us are consuming coffee to wake up, the interesting question is smelling (over 900 volatile compounds) the coffee a part of the waking up procedure we experience? A study reported in new scientist indicate that rats that were deprived of sleep for 24 hours had…

Friday Friends

One of the reasons I started a blog was that I was inspired by a number of different blogs. Two of these which I will discuss today are fellow scientist, Chris Patil and Attila Csordás. I believe they both have common interest in stem cells and aging. I hope it is obvious how these two…

How would you hack metabolism ?

On the subject of general hacking. Look at the complexity of metabolism (via sigmaaldrich.com) metabolicpathways_updated_02_072 Not so easy to hack a system so complex. Now the reason this system looks so complex is that it has been well studied (and because it is relatively easy to study). Our brain is likely several orders of magnitude…

Brain: is a hacked system hackable

Image via Wikipedia I guess I better define the word hack – in the 21st century: (via urbandictionary.com) 1. To program a computer in a clever, virtuosic, and wizardly manner. Ordinary computer jockeys merely write programs; hacking is the domain of digital poets. Hacking is a subtle and arguably mystical art, equal parts wit and…