What’s this?


Stranger fruit DNA.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 8:22 pm and is filed under Bits and Pieces. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

7 Responses to “What’s this?”

  1. Sean Says:
    August 10, 2006 at 10:51 pm

    Just for fun, I ran “anncoulter.com” through WEB2DNA and got this. I got quite a chuckle when I saw what side all the “genetic markers” landed on.

  2. Friend Fruit Says:
    August 11, 2006 at 10:19 am

    Yes, but is it art?

  3. Bruce Thompson Says:
    August 11, 2006 at 11:05 am

    John, this is not a good sign. Clearly, there are problems with sample preservation or extraction. The degradation of the sample in lane 1 is particularly troublesome. This may be related to the your work with fossil hominids. Isolation of nucleic acids from fossils is notoriously unreliable. If these are PCR products, the clean crisp bands and lack of any shadow bands makes me suspicious of the other lanes. I think you need to run some additional controls and add size standards.
    Perhaps remove different aspects of your Blog, rerun the analysis, and see how this affects the banding pattern. What specific types of information alter the banding pattern and what types of information are causing sample degradation? Does information on fossils affect degradation? Can specific bands be associated with specific information? Only 1 band, but with vastly different abundance, is shared between lanes 2 and 3. Is this a similar sequence?
    There are many unanswered questions about this gel and it merits additional experiments.

  4. somnilista, FCD Says:
    August 11, 2006 at 12:00 pm

    There it is in lane 4: proof positive that you have been using performance-enhancing drugs.

  5. Friend Fruit Says:
    August 11, 2006 at 7:14 pm

    Artist Rabo Karabedian, In Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions:

    “I now give you my word of honor,” he went on, “that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal — the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us — in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”

  6. Sean Says:
    August 12, 2006 at 2:56 am

    I’d make a lousy emperical scientist. I found out after my original post that my results are only repeatable with the Firefox internet browser. So… for those of you with Internet Explorer, you can see what I meant by clicking here.

  7. Bruce Thompson Says:
    August 13, 2006 at 12:40 pm

    Sean
    I have reviewed your results in Internet Explorer and Firefox. I opened both figures from your first post in each browser on a split screen and indeed I see 2 different patterns. In Firefox, the banding is restricted to lane 3 whereas in Internet Explorer bands are in lanes 2 and 3. This browser dependent behavior has several possible explanations.
    It can be attributed to the fact that the mega corporations run the world and they decide on what the public sees. The only problem is they have not decided on what is appropriate viewing.
    Or a biological explanation
    Internet Explorer and Firefox are analogous to 2 different restriction enzymes each recognizing different specific aspects of a site producing different patterns.
    Or you there is the authors explanation
    Notice to Firefox users

    WEB2DNA does not play very well with Firefox, because of some little known bug in how it handles huge chunks very small images and line-height. When the amount of images are low, and especially when they are more than a single pixel in height, Firefox displays the DNA image just as any other browser. But, when you display about 1200 small images next to each other, it goes completely wacky.
    Instead of positioning each image neatly in a grid, it adds 1-2 pixels gabs everywhere. Secondly, WEB2DNA is enhanced using un-supported CSS filter effects. This effect slightly blurs the image, making it look more real – but only in Internet Explorer. This was not done because I prefer any particular browser, but because “I can”.
    So, for the full effect use something else than Firefox (this is art, not a browser war – so don’t comment about it.).

    I haven’t decided which explanation I like best.

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