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If you're searching for the intersection of science, art, and writing, the Science, Art, and Writing (SAW) site is a good place to look. Created in 2004 by Anne Osbourn, awardee of a Dreamtime Fellowship aimed at connecting science with the lives and language of ordinary people, SAW programs in schools bring students, teachers, scientists, communicators, and the local community together using science as a focal point. Working in this way, SAW increases science literacy, advances interest in scientific careers, and reminds everyone that the barriers between science and art aren't all that great. Better yet, by helping young writers to cut their teeth on science reporting, SAW ensures that the efforts are not lost.
Border SecurityIt's a good thing cells don't have to rely on diffusion to obtain their nutrients and signals from the outside world, or life on Earth would be very different (SLOWER!) from what it is today. Fortunately, with transmem-brane proteins acting as importers/exporters and, in some cases, conveyors of information, cells leapfrog “bilayer barriers” in a single bound. Identifying the set of these important polypeptides from genomic sequences is not difficult, especially given the power of modern computational analysis, but keeping track of them can be. Serving as a research repository, the TransportDB relational database organizes membrane transport proteins from organisms whose genomes have been completely sequenced into related families. Basic search functions provide simple and fast retrieval of information.
Mobile GenomesYou would be hard-pressed to identify a bacterial structure that has played a bigger role in modern biotechnology than the plasmid. These extrachromo-somal elements, so ubiquitously found in almost all categories of bacterial cells and the foundations for recombinant DNA, sit in the spotlight at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in the UK. The Plasmid Genome Database, as it is known, collates genomic data from this surprisingly diverse collection of genetic elements. From the smallest member of the set (pRKU1) at 846 base pairs to four plasmids with sizes over 1,000,000 base pairs each, the Plasmid Genome Database informs and educates visitors of these (mostly) circular prokaryotic wonders.
@ www.genomics.ceh.ac.uk/plasmiddb
Pathogenic PathAs images of Giardia, Trichomonas, Plasmodium, Toxoplasma, and Cryptospiridium sit poised to leap off the opening page of the Eukaryotic Pathogens Database Resources (EuPathDB), visitors will thank their lucky stars that these are virtual organisms instead of the real McCoys. A wide-ranging information source for “Biodefense and Emerging/Re-emerging Infectious Diseases,” EuPathDB provides a portal to genomic information on these nasty critters. It specializes in an unusually diverse set of methods for identifying genes of interest and provides access to sequences totaling over a third of a billion base pairs and more than 100,000 genes. Information is the key to the lock these pathogens have on human disease, and EuPathDB is well on its way to unlocking it.
©2008, eupathdb.org/eupathdb Oceanomics
Genomic sequencing is a problem as big as the environment in which target oceanic bacteria live. It may be bigger, in fact, when you consider the difficulty of culturing most microbes of the sea. Thanks to metagenomics, a method addressing the intractability of these organisms towards standard microbiological techniques, however, knowledge of otherwise unknown organisms is increasing. Traditional sequencing methods require clones, but metagenomics bypasses this need completely by expanding the shotgun sequencing technique from cloned cells to mixtures of them, thus negating the need to grow each one separately. Providing a simple interface to genomic sequences obtained from these efforts, as well as downloadable and online software for their analysis, is Megx (Marine Ecological Genomics), a comprehensive offering from Germany with a lot of fans.
