We have a new paper out! This post is to explain what it’s about. Cancer cells often have gene fusions. This happens because the DNA in cancer cells is really messed up. Sometimes, chromosomes can break and get reattached to a different one in a strange way. This means you get a fusion between one […]
Category: science
Parallel lines: new paper on modelling mitotic microtubules in 3D
We have a new paper out! You can access it here. The people This paper really was a team effort. Faye Nixon and Tom Honnor are joint-first authors. Faye did most of the experimental work in the final months of her PhD and Tom came up with the idea for the mathematical modelling and helped to […]
Notes To The Future
Previously I wrote about our move to electronic lab notebooks (ELNs). This post contains the technical details to understand how it works for us. You can even replicate our setup if you want to take the plunge. Why go electronic? Many reasons: I wanted to be able to quickly find information in our lab books. […]
The Soft Bulletin: Electronic Lab Notebooks
We finally took the plunge and adopted electronic lab notebook (ELNs) for the lab. This short post describes our choice of software. I will write another post about how it’s going, how I set it up and other technical details. tl;dr we are using WordPress as our ELN. First, so you can understand my wishlist of requirements […]
The Soft Bulletin: PDF organisation
I recently asked on Twitter for any recommendations for software to organise my PDFs. I got several replies, but nothing really fitted the bill. This is a brief summary. My situation I have quite a lot of books, textbooks, cheat sheets, manuals, protocols etc. in PDF format and I need a way to organise them. I […]
Meeting in the Aisle
Lab meetings: love them or loathe them, they’re an important part of lab-life. There’s many different formats and ways to do a lab meeting. Sometimes it feels like we’ve tried them all! I’m going to describe our current format and then discuss some other things to try. Our current lab meeting format is: Weekly. For one hour […]
Tips from the blog XI: Overleaf
I was recently an external examiner for a PhD viva in Cambridge. As we were wrapping up, I asked “if you were to do it all again, what would you do differently?”. It’s one of my stock questions and normally the candidate says “oh I’d do it so much quicker!” or something similar. However, this time I […]
Reaching Out
Outreach means trying to engage the public with what we are doing in our research group. For me, this mainly means talking to non-specialists about our work and showing them around the lab. These non-specialists are typically interested members of the public and mainly supporters of the charity that funds work in my lab (Cancer Research […]
Come To California
I’ve returned from the American Society for Cell Biology 2016 meeting in San Francisco. Despite being a cell biologist and people from my lab attending this meeting numerous times, this was my first ASCB meeting. The conference was amazing, so much excellent science and so many opportunities to meet up with people. For the areas that […]
Blind To The Truth
Molecular Biology of The Cell, the official journal of the American Society for Cell Biology, recently joined a number of other periodicals in issuing guidelines for manuscripts, concerning statistics and reproducibility. I discussed these guidelines with the lab and we felt that there are two areas where we can improve: blind analysis power calculations A post about power […]