Archive by category | There and Back Again

Nature Protocols at the 23rd MASAMB annual workshop

With the advent of technologies that have made large-scale genome sequencing projects possible and since a stream of high-throughput biological assays have been developed to collect, for instance, data on proteomics, metabolomics and gene expression, the need for ever more advanced, powerful and sophisticated bioinformatics tools has become an increasingly stringent fixture of today’s molecular biology research.  Read more

Notes from the Single Cell Analysis Europe conference

Notes from the Single Cell Analysis Europe conference

At the end of March, Dot and I spent two days in Edinburgh at the Select Biosciences meetings held at the Edinburgh Conference Centre on the Herriot-Watt campus, about 6 miles outside the city centre. The weather was record-breakingly hot for March (and Scotland!) – here is some evidence of the spring sunshine:  … Read more

Single Cell Analysis Europe

Next week, Dot and I will be heading to Edinburgh to attend the Select Biosciences Single Cell Analysis Europe conference.  These days, the analysis of single cells is being increasingly applied to get to the bottom of experimental questions in biology, and is a rapidly expanding discipline, rich in methodological advances.  We are really looking forward to hearing about the techniques currently being used, as well as discovering new methods that are now being developed.  Read more

Impressions from the Mass Spectrometry Technologies for Structural Biology conference

Impressions from the Mass Spectrometry Technologies for Structural Biology conference

Those of us who did a few months of mass spectrometry lectures somewhere in an undergraduate course sometime in the last century, and have had our eyes elsewhere since then, might find that this field is completely unrecognisable. Perhaps, like me, you did some GC-MS of organic compounds extracted from some matrix or used MS as one of the analytical tools to characterise a compound you synthesised. The extension of these ideas to metabolomics-type experiments, and even proteomics is not conceptually challenging (though I admit that the finer points are rather complicated), but the idea that you could use mass spectrometry to get information about the secondary or tertiary structure of a protein or a protein complex might seem far-fetched.  Read more

Destination Florida: Mass Spec for Structural Biology conference

I am very excited about going to Florida for the Mass Spectrometry Technologies for Structural Biology Conference organised by the American Society for Mass Spectrometry. To celebrate, five of our related protocols will be free for a few weeks.  Read more

Bronwen is off to Cambridge for a Synthesis in Organic Chemistry symposium

Today, I am in a good mood, because I know that next week I am going to a conference! As much as I love looking at manuscripts and browsing through the literature for commissioning ideas, it will be good to be out of the office and listening to scientists talking about their work. Hopefully, I will get to meet and chat to a few as well! I will be staying in a little bed-and-breakfast in the evenings, and during the day I will attend talks by eminent chemists at the 22nd International Symposium: Synthesis in Organic Chemistry in Cambridge.  Read more