STAT Proves Not Resistant To Antibiotic Tropes

Tuesday's Boston Globe carried a piece originating from STAT news on an interesting natural product antibiotic, pleuromutilin.  A research group recently published a new total synthesis of this fungal terpene, an advance which promises to enable greater medicinal chemistry around the molecule.  That part is cool.  Unfortunately, when it gets to the biology of pleuromutilin the piece by Eric Boodman completely spits the bit, trotting out some horribly inaccurate tropes.

New Life in the Sanger Market

In my bit on "I'm not dead yet" technologies recently, I included large scale Sanger sequencing. That reflects to a large degree my personal experiences and biases.  Targeted Sanger is great for spot checking the occasional junction or misbehaving clone or strain, but I forget that many clinicians still see it as a gold standard.  Apparently there are others who disagree with me, as Thermo Fisher recently launched a new Sanger instrument targeted at small labs, and according to GenomeWeb Promega plans an instrument offering in the same space as well.

Ice Ghosts:A Shortage of Maps

I'm going to step outside the usual topic space here and cover an interesting but frustrating book I read partly on the flight to London Calling (which is about the only connection it has to genomics).  Ice Ghosts, by Paul Watson, covers the searches for the lost Franklin Expedition, a mid-1800s British Navy attempt to find the Northwest Passage.  It's a pretty good book, after all it did win a Pulitzer Prize,  The topic is thrilling: explorers under difficult conditions and a mystery that lasted over a century.  There are lessons for science in general, such as the value in carefully evaluating oral histories that some would discard as unreliable. But what is maddening for me is that in a book for which a central theme is poorly understood geographies and their interpretations, the set of supplied maps fail miserably at assisting in the telling of the story.