THE MINIPREP CHALLENGE

Everything is more fun when it's a mean-spirited competition, so we decided to have a little miniprep challenge in lab (minipreps are ways to isolate circular pieces of DNA from bacterial cells). Everything is even more fun when it is culturally insensitive, so we decided to compete against all the German (and Austrian) students in our lab. Unicorns (and USA) vs. Germans, in all-out plasmid prep battle...CAN...YOU...HANDLE...IT!!!?!??!?!!!



We decided that we couldn't just compete on time, because cutting corners can reduce the DNA yield. Our final measure was nanograms of DNA isolated over seconds of miniprep time. If you think you can beat the Unicorns, we did eight five milliliter minipreps of the pCDF-Duet vector, a low copy plasmid from Novagen. Try just beating us on time though, I dare ya.

Final Scores:

Respond to the video on youtube or comment on this post if you think your lab is awesomer (ha!), or if you are a Qiagen representative and want to give us free stuff/a lucrative sponsorship.

For First-Year Grad Students

Synthetic Biology v.0.1

Before there were genomes, DNA, or confocal microscopes, there were dudes doing synthetic biology in France. Despite what almost every single paper on synthetic biology says, the term was actually coined in the early 20th century by Stéphane Leduc, who spent all of his time mixing together various salts and chemicals and seeing how osmosis (left) could mimic the properties of "real life" (right). Maybe in 100 years when everyone knows better they will ignore our treatises as well.

Unicorns Endorsement

We talked it over and the official animal of the Hydrocalypse will be the Slow Loris. We love you Slow Loris. Who's a good Slow Loris? You are!

We considered endorsing the Unicorn, but that seemed a little incestuous.

Who's got three thumbs and love electrophoresis?


These Unicorns.

Best Picture

No, this isn't another post about Star Trek. This is about my new favorite photo, chock full of famous synthetic biologists. I'm hoping it is the first in a series of us posing with celebrity scientists.


Special thanks to David Jeruzalmi for taking this marvelous photo, Craig Venter for having a good sense of humor, and George Church for making that crazy face off to the side.

Star Trek: (Pon Farr)^(Pon Farr)

I'm feeling like I was born on the wrong planet. Just feast your eyes people. Feast. Your. Eyes.