Category: Biology
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Camouflage and skin responses
It is amazing how camouflage happens instantaneously. There has been a lot of research but the skin responses needs more research into understanding the phenomenon as well as brain processing of complex stimuli. The video below says it all. {youtube}0b4tmbE5jj4{/youtube}
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Complexity and simplicity
Brain achieves a remarkable task to simplify the world and it is important for us to distinguish data from the noise. Take the example of a small piece of forest. This forest has trees, plants and some animals. The trees by themselves have branches, leaves, and other structures that have distinct shapes and sizes. If…
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Neuroscience milestone – Vernon Mountcastle’s discovery of columnar organization of the neurocortex.
Brain neuron organization has been investigated since a long time and it had been very confusing for scientists trying to determine the organization among a mass of neurons. Vernon Mountcastle’s discovery of a column of neuron paved the way for understanding of the brain. In 1957 he made the radical discovery that the columnar pattern…
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Henry Markram’s blue brain project
The human brain project has been recently getting a lot of attention with the US Government carving out funding for the brain mapping project. The interesting thing is that this project has been started by the European Union since 2005. It is called the blue brain project and it is about simulating the human brain.…
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Transfecting Eukaryotic cells by squeezing them
Transferring any protein, DNA or a large molecule through the cell is very difficult. There are two techniques that are very commonly used for this purpose. The one that is used the most in electroporation: in which a defined pulse of current /electricity is passed through the medium to create small holes in the membrane…
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Biological forces, picoNewtons and forces at the microscopic level
It is hard to imagine binding forces as a scientist develops an immune-assay and often times the commonly used antibodies are often thought to be the tightest binders. But these forces are very interesting to measure and compare among different types of interactions. But first what is the measurement unit of the force? The force…
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Biological Science changes – so are you always right?
Learning Biology is an evolving process. The science keeps changing towards a greater understanding and sometimes the conclusions that were drawn are not always right. For example, blood letting or bleeding a person used to be the treatment for some diseases. That was an acceptable form of treatment but now we wonder as to what…
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Primary cells for assays – human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC)
Biological assays are typically done on cell lines. However, many of the cell lines are so different from the cell systems that are encountered in real life, or in vivo that the results can often be flawed. To be perfectly physiological, scientists use primary human cells harvested from patients are cadavers. These are great systems…
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Are all genes required for fitness – C. elegans as a model?
In gene knockout studies, scientists delete or stop expression of one gene and then check to see if that gene is required. In these studies, if a gene is critical – say for cell division then cells do not divide and the gene is termed essential, the mutations in that gene would be termed lethal…
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Parkinson’s disease – towards an understanding of the cause?
In summer 2012, Krainc’s lab published a paper on the biochemical cause for the link between Gaucher’s disease and Parkinson’s. It is known in the literature that Gaucher’s disease families have a higher incidence of Parkinson’s disease, however the reason was unknown. Gaucher’s disease is an inherited disorder caused by the mutations of the GBA…