The current Greenpeace campaign attacks German car manufacturer Porsche as building climate killer machines. Porsche responds with large posters – see the online figures – that they (Show me more…)

Following a frequent request, here is a short video how to create your own Pubmed news feed. You simply need the Sage plugin for Firefox; then goto to Pubmed, create your personal RSS feed and import this URL into the bookmark category that Sage is looking for. Here is the show: (Show me more…)

Doping rules are sometimes hard to understand – sleeping in a low pressure chamber and training at high altitudes seem to be allowed but taking epo is not – although net effects may be the same.
This might be a reason why some athletes are now trying to mimick more closely biology. Repoxygen is a viral vector known for some time that includes the human epo gene under control of a hypoxia control element. Clearly this drug has the potential to be used for doping (“Outlaw DNA“). (Show me more…)

I currently hunting some transcripts of unknown function (see below), possibly a RNA gene? while it is difficult to locate any good annotation server. So far I tried RNAz based on a PNAS 2005 paper – another one was RNA Genie. Next step will be the new Gingeras paper that describes even a new class of RNA genes. Finally this may not even be a RNA at all but an alternative leading exon … (Show me more…)