Pigs & Flies in the News

Two news items which are not earth shattering, but fun.

In time for the upcoming Year of the Pig a Chinese group has bred GFP-expressing swine. Presumably these are for some clever preclinical imaging studies, but would presumably make for some interesting dishes to eat by candlelight or during power failures. With the multitude of GFP variants around, one could have quite a lively dish!

The Scientist reports (free subscription may be required) that 30K fruit flies were released during a production of the Sarte play 'The Flies' at Brown University. I did a graduate rotation in a fly lab, and 30K flies isn't a tiny quantity (if I remember correctly, a few hundred in a bottle is about the right density, so this is a lot of bottles). I do hope the same group doesn't try to mount a production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros!

Enjoy Your W!

No, this isn't revealing my politics. W is the single letter code for tryptophan, which is reputedly richly found in turkey meat (If you are a vegetarian, what vegetable matter is richest in W?)

Tryptophan is an odd amino acid, and probably the last one added to the code -- after all, in most genomes only a single codon and it is one of the rarest amino acids in proteins. It has a complex ring system (indole), which would also suggest it might have come last.

Why bother? Good question -- one I should know the answer to but don't. When W is conserved, is the chemistry of the indole ring being utilized where nothing else would do? That's my guess, but I'll need to put that on the list of questions to figure out sometime.

But why W? Well, there are 20 amino acids translated into most proteins (plus a few others in special cases) and they were named before anyone thought their shorthand would be very useful. There are clearly mneumonic three letter codes, but for long sequences a single letter works better -- once you are indoctrinated in them, the three letter codes become nice compact representations which can be scanned by eye. Some have even led to names of domains, such as WD40, PEST and RGD.

The first choice is to use the first letter of the name: Alanine, Cysteine, Glycine, Histidine, Isoleucine, Leucine, Methionine, Proline, Serine, Threonine and Valine follow this rule. If multiple amino acids start with the same letter, the smallest amino acid gets to take the letter. Some others are phonetically correct: aRginine, tYrosine, F:Phenylalanine. Others just fill in D:aspartate, E:glutamate, K:lysine, N: asparagine and Q:glutamine.

But Tryptophan? Perhaps it was studied early on by Dr. Fudd
, who gave long lectures about the wonders of tWiptophan.

One Company I'm Not Sending My Resume To

On some site today a Google ad caught my eye -- alas I cannot remember why -- and I found a site for NEXTgencode. However, it doesn't take long to realize that this isn't a real company . The standard links for a real biotech company, such as 'Careers', 'Investors', etc. are missing.

Clicking around what is there leads to a virtual Weekly World News of imaginative fabrications, though some have previously been presented as true by places that should know better, such as the BBC. I think I saw an item on grolars (grizzly-polar bear hybrids) in the press as well. Also thrown in is a reference to the recently published work: "Humans and Chips Interbred Until Recently".

Various ads show products in development. My favorite ad is the one for Perma Puppies, which never grow old or even lose their puppy physique (though their puppy isn't nearly as cute as mine was!). There's also the gene to buy with the HUGO symbol BLSHt.

The giveaway is the last news article, which describes a legal action by the company

Michael Crichton's book "Next" claims to be fiction, but its story line reveals proprietary informaiton of Nextgencode, a gene manipulation company.

Surprise! "Next" will be released at the end of the month.

When I read Andromeda Strain as a kid, I fell hook, line & sinker for a similar ploy in that book -- all of the photos were labeled just like the photos of real spacecraft in books on NASA ("Photo Courtesy of Project SCOOP"). It took some convincing from older & wiser siblings before I caught on.

Going back over the news items with the knowledge of who is behind it was revealing. Crichton has become noted for throwing his lot in with global warming skeptics. "Burn Fuel? Backside Fat Powers Boat" is the tamer of the digs; another item suggests Neanderthals were displaced by the Cro-Magnon due to the Neaderthals environmentalist tendencies.

Well, at least it's a tame fake -- a fake company purely to hawk a book. Sure beats the shameless hucksters who set up companies to peddle fake cures (we have stem cell injections to cure hypochondria!) to desperate patients.