May 19 2011
Here you can see our interview with Dr. Martin Coetzee, Researcher at Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI) and Dr. Arshad Ismail, GS Technology Platform Manager at Inqaba Biotec.
Jun 08 2010
A lot of very interesting research is going on everywhere around the world, and it’s hard to keep up with all the exciting things going on, so here’s a glimpse of some of it.
Recently we stopped by our friends at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, Patrick Gaffney, MD, and Graham Wiley, PhD, to learn more about their sequence capture approach to identifying novel genes that are linked to Lupus erythematosus. Check out the video below to learn more!
Jan 07 2009
In the new issue of Biotechniques, a paper by Maricic and Pääbo (login may be required) describes how a change to the standard 454 sequencing protocol can dramatically increase the size of the library of DNA that goes into the actual sequencing reaction.
The trick used is to replace the last step in the library preparation where single stranded DNA is released from streptavidin beads. The original 454 protocol employes NaOH denaturation for this step, but the researchers found that this procedure results in a loss of over 99% of the DNA. However, When they replaced the NaOH denaturation with a heat denaturation by incubation recovery increased to 98%.
These authors are coming from the ancient DNA community and have an obvious motivation for optimizing the DNA retrieval from scarce ancient biological material. However, these findings are equally important to other applications aimed at sequencing small volumes of biological material such as tumors and within-host sub-populations of pathogens.
Nov 20 2008
An international team of scientists has reconstructed about two-thirds of the genome of the woolly mammoth using DNA extracted from balls of hair, the first time this has been accomplished for an extinct species.
Read more at Washington Post and in Nature’s Darwin special issue.
Nov 18 2008
Yesterday, Australian researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Kangaroo Genomics (KanGO) announced that they have built a framework to assemble the genome of a model kangaroo, the tammar wallaby.
KanGO Director Prof. Jenny Graves stated:
A good map is crucial for finding our way around a new genome. It enables us to explore how the genome of mammals - including humans - is organized, how it functions, and how it evolved. Now the world can use information on kangaroo genes and sequences to explore how mammals develop and function.
