Human Microbiome Project will map the genetic sequences of bacterial world hidden in our bodies! If you recall the biology course in the college, the average human being is a collection of about 10 trillion eukaryotic cells – each with a nucleus storing 23 chromosome pairs of nucleic DNA, and a collection of membrane-bound organelles [...]
Extremophile bacteria suggests new possible life systems?! Life (as we know it!) is mostly composed of 6 elements – carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus. These six elements make up all the viable organic compounds in the organisms – nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids – the bulk of living matter. In theory it is [...]
I was quite lucky today! My day started with interactive exploring the Universe with the interactive media “Scale of the Universe” developed by Cary Huang at htwins. You can start Exploring the Universe from the “quantum foam” – the first physical sense. Continue through neutrinos, quarks and moving to the chemical world of atoms and [...]
Which species has the largest genome? Humans? No… Ahhh, I remember the polyploidy was a process observed in higher plants. Then, well it could be a plant? OK, here is the answer – the largest genome belongs to Paris japonica, a rare Japanese flower. The flower has the unbelievable 149 billion base pairs, which is [...]
It was very hard to select my first “Bio Celebrity”. At the end my choice is – The Spliceosome! The spliceosome is the component that makes possible the “maturation” of the mRNAs (removing the introns from the transcribed pre-mRNAs) and which was more important for my choice, the spliceosome determines the genetic diversity in eukaryotes [...]
Learning by playing game is well known to be the best cognitive approach used in the education. Today I have found a very intriguing interactive cell flash game developed by Kongregate Games, called CellCraft. Well the game covers just some basic cell biology processes, but describes them in a very easily understandable way. The processes [...]
OpenPCR project – Open Source and Hackable PCR Machine Recently I came up to a cool project – OpenPCR, which aims to develop an “open design” of a PCR machine. The project goal is to get a working prototype (and free schematics) of a computer controlled PCR machine that uses normal PCR tubes and is [...]