Notes
Short write-ups from the lab: papers worth reading, what we are working on, methods explained, and the behind-the-scenes of research.
Preprints vs peer-reviewed papers: what's the difference, and why should you care?
What a preprint is, how peer review works, how many preprints end up in a journal, and whether they count for your career, with a checklist for reading one.
The Human Genome Project: how twenty centres shared one genome
How the public Human Genome Project divided sequencing across countries, and why collaboration mattered more than equal shares.
Before the machines: how DNA sequencing began
Long before anyone read a genome, scientists learned to read a protein — and for twenty years after, sequencing was done almost entirely by hand.
Chromosomes, compressed: the computing race behind the genome
A finished genome is, in the end, a text file. Getting there in 2000 took two of the largest computing efforts biology had ever attempted.
Anatomy of a flow cell: what is actually inside a Nanopore run
A blueprint of the Nanopore flow cell, from the ports you load by hand to the single pore reading a strand of DNA, for students who want to know what they are actually holding.
From mustard gas to Pisa: a short history of environmental mutagenesis
How a chemical weapon, kept secret through two wars, became the starting point for an entire field, and how Italy ended up at its centre.