Round Up #6

Unlike its predecessors, this round up doesn’t feature on a Friday. It features on a day when I’ve struggled to concentrate ever since I got in to work. I don’t want to launch into a full length blog when I’m not achieving anything else (what can I say, my Mum never let me go to Brownies if I hadn’t been at school either…) but equally having all of these tabs open is probably preventing me from achieving anything else.

So, without further ado and in no particular order:

• Tamsin Edwards writes a thoughtful piece in the Guardian about whether scientists should air their political viewpoints
• Scientists at Bristol University discover that the four kinds of virus causing Dengue Fever may be quite different to one another
• Six Turkish academics have been charged with terrorism after what appears to amount to nothing more than secularism
• Scientists from the United Arab Emirates have identified a mutation that gives plants reduced susceptibility to two fungal pathogens, Botrytis cinerea and Alternaria brassicicola.
• In case you missed it, scientists produced the world’s first synthetically grown beef burger this week. New Scientist unpacks the story.
• Groups in Australia and New Zealand have identified a potential new insectide, produced by bacteria. Along the way they showed that the bacteria keep this toxin in a special vesicle, allowing it to build up to high levels without damaging the micro-organism.

Tales from the Teaching Lab: Early misconceptions in genetics

When I started this blog, it was supposed to be a news blog: me getting to grips with and explaining new papers that I found interesting. Recently I’ve been thoroughly uninspired, but trying not to resort to writing more opinion pieces about how to survive Grad school (even if that does seem to be what I do best).

Nevertheless, it’s been over 2 weeks since my last post, and while demonstrating yesterday, a familiar itch beginning to niggle. Whereas in previous years I’ve done a more-than-normal amount of tutoring and demonstrating, this year I’ve only covering a small handful of lab classes, one of which is Introductory Genetics. The class is pretty simple. Students are given a variety of mutant Arabidopsis that they have to phenotype, in addition to the F1 and F2 of back crosses to the wild type and crosses between mutants. They are trying to find out whether the mutations are single gene traits; dominants or recessive; and whether multiple mutants are caused by mutations in the same or different lines.

This is the third year I have demonstrated for this class, and the previous year I marked the open book exam that students take at the end, without having demonstrated for the practical, so I’m probably more familiar with the class than anybody except for the professor teaching it. Along the way I have had to do a fair amount of mental gymnastics, but I’ve also picked up on a few of the most common misconceptions that students hold. I actually clearly remember as a first year undergraduate being confused by the term “wild type” because nobody had explained to me that this was a technological term for the working copy of a gene: I thought it meant the type of gene that animals had in the wild. Which is fine, until you start thinking about mouse or Drosophila genetics!