I am glad I went to college without a cell phone and without AI

They should show healthy people smiling

conflating statistical significance and biological significance is the downfall of many scientists. We have really sensitive assays in 'omics, so be careful about chasing small effect sizes of statistically significant phenomenon.

I would much rather complete a ChIP-seq analysis midterm than grade 16 midterms. Giving everyone their own transcription factor raw data makes it much tougher to grade.

This is a great regional conference that focuses on RNA polymerase: u.osu.edu/mltermmeeting/

but then what will digest the proteinase K?

I love PEG-mediated fractionation of DNA (Lis and Schleif, NAR, 1975!), or so-called AMPure beads, but an alcohol precipitation is the way to go if you are not size selecting.

we just have a bunch of proteins that we want to purify out first. I think EtOH works better than isopropanol for short DNA (<1000bp), but I haven't tested side-by-side (I was told this by a rigorous molecular biologist who trained in the 70s, so I beleive them).

EtOH precipitation, then Illumina library prep. There is very little material.

what do you think is the best way to extract DNA from a protein/DNA binding reaction? I don't really want a size bias, so kits are out.

thanks for the explanation. I have always just had them pour into conical tubes and use tips, but I just learned this empirically by testing it out.

I had noticed 20 years ago that the writing on my serological was melting.

does phenol:chloroform still dissolve serological pipettes?

is this still a concern that my students shoudl have?

digitally signing documents with Adobe is the hardest part of my job. Signatures always disappear, nothing seems reproducible. I can see signatures in Preview, but not Acrobat; I see them on email previews, but not when it is downloaded.

I must be missing something. Is it because I am 40+ now?

during a undergraduate seminar Tom Eisner casually mentioned that the y-axis numbers were all in German, so we probably couldn't read them. The entire class was silent, but I choked laughing.

⏰ Calling all chromatin aficionados!

We we will be joined by @adelmanlab.bsky.social from @harvardmed.bsky.social for our March 27th webinar 📅

Karen will be sharing her groups work on 'Transcription & RNA Quality Control in Health & Disease' 😷🧬

Register here: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Please join Andreas Ladurner and me for the GRC Chromatin Structure and Function conference to be held near Barcelona Spain from May 31-June 5! We accepting abstracts for posters and talks. The meeting is preceded by an awesome GRS. Learn more in our video below and apply www.grc.org/chromatin-st...

Happy Chuck Darwin day!

consistently having smaller incoming PhD class sizes is going to kill labs. I am fortunate to have grants, but with incoming PhD classes at 15 for the entire UConn Health, there is no way I can fill out the 3 student positions I can fund.

when my university communications office wants to highlight/detract from the data, they selectively include zero on the y-axis or not. They also seem to really like default excel graphics

❤️

it really is never the student's fault either. 100% one of the other professors just doesn't respond to the poll.

If I fill out a scheduling poll, it is not safe to assume that I will still be free at those same times over 2 weeks later.

I also rant

Molecular Mechanisms of Transcription Factors with Dual Activator and Repressor Functions Transcription factors (TFs) are traditionally classified as activators or repressors, yet some can perform both roles. We highlight well-supported examples of dual activator/repressor functions and...

this mini-review was fueled by frustration with others who use "context-specific" to describe transcription factors that supposedly can function as repressors or activators: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

you paper was in review for 4 months, then one month of editorial who knows what. YOU HAVE 24 MINUTES TO GET THESE PROOFS BACK TO US!!!!

Is it ok to use "you nerds" as a gender neutral term to refer to the students in class? I cannot get myself to use "y'all" and "you guys" is not neutral.

submitting to a journal who accepts LaTeX submission, but the .bst file is not correct and they cannot send me a correct one. Why bother having editors, copy editors, and production staff?

my 13 year old is learning to code and I told him he should not use chatGPT. I know he listened because the code is crap (but it works!) and all his comments are just commented out print() statements.

hs1

this does not address the core of my question: genetics is great for finding the causal gene. Once known, why is it important to find more causal variants that likely regulate the gene or determine the mechanism by which the variant regulates, as opposed to figuring out how the protein contributes

Chromatin, Epigenetics & Gene Expression Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Meetings & Courses -- a private, non-profit institution with research programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology, genomics, bioinformatics.

GeneX class at CSHL: meetings.cshl.edu/courses.aspx...