Hailing the arrival of Spring appears to have been a tad premature, what with the whole cold and rainy vibe that has been going on ever since. I have made excellent use of my time since Sunday by watching the entire second series of Life on Mars. Without wishing to spoil it for anyone else, the ending is somewhat disappointing.
Trawling through ukbouldering in an attempt to stay sane in this god forsaken, flat, rain-soaked hell (I may be exaggerating), I found an interesting podcast. Craig Venter, who some may remember as the guy behind Celera (the private company involved in the "race" to sequence the human genome), has some interesting things to say about metagenomics, synthetic genomics and the future of biotechnology in general here (right click save as). Also of interest is the Science paper that outlines the chemical synthesis of an entire genome-sized chunk of DNA. Badass.
It's stuff like this, and some of the stuff being done by the synthetic biology cats that make you realise there is some fucking cool research being done. Mind you, a lot of the stuff being done here is pretty damn cool too.
On a completely different note, we heard back from Gregor (the mass spec guy), and he was very confident that we'd be able to do what we want to do with our lipid analysis with the equipment available. Score! So if anyone knows where I can get some ergosterol heptadecanoate, I would be most appreciative.
EDIT: you may or may not be as excited as I am about the fact that, should you want to, you can obtain a 25kg drum of cholesterol from China.
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