I’m giving a talk as part of a forum on blogging for science publishers later this month and have been digging through the usage numbers for this blog. I was surprised at what I found. From my subjective point of view, I would have assumed that the various posts I’ve done on publishing and Web 2.0 were by far the most read on the site, as those are the ones that have spurred nearly all the discussion here and nearly all the incoming links. The numbers tell a different story. While yes, a few Web 2.0 posts have gotten a lot of attention (they rank 2 and 4 in page hits over the history of this blog), the rest of the top 10 are all science and protocol related (one exception–a post on the 25th anniversary of Molecular Cloning). The most read post on this blog is one about Keller explants (are there really that many Xenopus development labs out there?), number 3 is about BLAST and number 5 is about DNA/RNA Delivery. This was both surprising and gratifying–the main reason we created this blog was to help expose our protocol articles and to help researchers find the material they need to get their experiments done. People are using the blog as a discovery tool. Presumably the entries in this blog turn up in Google searches and are leading readers to CSH Protocols.

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The May issue of CSH Protocols is now live, and in it you’ll find featured articles on classic techniques for the analysis of chromosomes. With the leaps and bounds being made in epigenetics these days, knowing your way around chromatin becomes even more valuable. This month’s freely accessible articles give you methods for chromosome analysis in Drosophila and in Mouse.

Mapping Protein Distributions on Polytene Chromosomes by Immunostaining takes advantage of the formidable size and structure of the large polytene chromosomes found in Drosophila salivary glands. These easily dissected chromosomes allow mapping of chromosomal protein distributions at very high resolution. May’s issue also contains a protocol for the Dissection of Larval Salivary Glands and Polytene Chromosome Preparation.

The second featured method for May, Karyotyping Mouse Cells, is drawn from the widely used laboratory manual Manipulating the Mouse Embryo. A karyotype is a visual presentation of a cell’s chromosomes, and can be used as a test for quickly identifying chromosomal abnormalities.

Before April’s issue moves to the archives and we welcome in May, I wanted to highlight one of our featured articles for the month, David Mount’s piece on Choosing a Method for Phylogenetic Prediction (freely available as one of our monthly featured articles). The April issue provides three phylogenetic methods protocols, for the Maximum Parsimony Method, for Distance Methods and for the Maximum Likelihood Approach. The featured article gives a nice overview of the three techniques, and why you would choose one over the other.

John Sack, director of Stanford’s Highwire Press recently speculated that we may be reaching a tipping point in the hype cycle of Web 2.0, where we’re actually starting to see some practical consideration and thoughtful critical analysis of these technologies, rather than the usual constant stream of evangelism and cheerleading. If so, it’s certainly welcome, and a few recent articles back up his viewpoint:

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This month’s issue of CSH Protocols features an article by Andrew Salinger and Monica Justice, detailing a technique for Mouse Mutagenesis Using N-Ethyl-N-Nitrosourea (ENU) (article is freely available as one of our featured protocols). Back in the ancient days of my graduate school work, the idea of doing large scale forward genetics in mouse was unthinkable. Who had the space, let alone the funding and personnel to keep and track all of those cages? It was always one of those reasons we grumbled about the Drosophila labs, and the incredibly cool tools they had at their disposal. Over the years, the techniques were refined, and now, according to Justice, screens like this are an “established as part of a mouse geneticist’s toolkit,” and can be effective even in labs with very limited amounts of mouse space. So it’s nice to see this incredibly productive method readily available for use in mouse. Now if we can just do something about that pesky internal development that’s so limiting to imaging experiments…..

Continuing along in the quest to evaluate Web 2.0 tools for biologists, I came across two recent articles, one by web usability guru Jacob Nielsen and one featuring an interview with him. Some valuable points found within:

He offers some cautionary advice on the actual patterns of user involvement on websites that follow the Web 2.0 dictum of having the users create the content:

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April’s issue of CSH Protocols features a set of articles on the production and use of retroviral vectors for gene transfer from Kenneth Cornetta, Karen Pollok and Dusty Miller. Retroviral Vectors for Gene Transfer provides an overview of the subject, drawing on the more than twenty years of experience researchers have with the use of these vectors. The advantages of retroviral vectors are detailed (efficiency, integration and ease of production) along with the disadvantages (inactivation, a requirement for cell division and possible oncogenic activation). The authors discuss important aspects of vector design and choice of packaging cell lines.

Four protocols are provided, two for production of viral vectors, and two for their use in transducing cells. Detailed methods are offered for Retroviral Vector Production by Transient Transfection, and for the Generation of Stable Vector-Producing Cells. Once vectors are generated, they can easily be used to Transduce Cell Lines which are actively proliferating. However, using retroviral vectors with primitive progenitor or stem cells, which are not continuously dividing, is much less efficient. In Transduction of Primary Hematopoietic Cells by Retroviral Vectors, the authors describe two interventions to improve efficiency of transfer, the use of cytokines and other growth factors to stimulate cell cycling, and the use of matrix proteins to mediate colocalization of target cells and vector.

Ran into a few very interesting (and very different) articles last week, which I wanted to comment on (more posts to follow).

First up is a blog posting on Sciencebase that quotes chemist (and blogger) Joerg Kurt Wegner, with a proposal that the solution for information overload is to do away with editorial oversight and instead rely on social software. Now, obviously, I’m heavily biased here, and I admit that up front. I’m an editor, it’s what I do for a living, and if I didn’t think I made valuable contributions, I would do something else. That said, there are several problems with Wegner’s proposal.
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This is a presentation I gave last weekend at the Southwest Regional Society for Developmental Biology Meeting. It’s an updated version of an earlier talk posted here. It’s kind of a 180 degrees turn from the previous talk, in that the first one was delivered to publishers, and this one was delivered to scientists. Here I’ve tried to include the thoughtful comments and helpful suggestions that readers made on the first talk, and have also tried to point out currently useful tools and interesting future directions. I don’t come at this subject from the point of view of a programmer, that’s not my background. I’m approaching it as 1) a publisher, who wants to build these tools into our journals and online products to make them more useful, and 2) as a former research scientist, with a thought toward what tools would have made my life easier when I was at the bench. The same caveat applies as last time–I work for a biology publisher, and am a former biologist. My comments and analysis of the culture here refer to that culture specifically (and I’ll try to avoid using the generic word “scientist” where it’s inappropriate). Different cultures have different needs. Certain fields of science collect types of data that more obviously fit in with Web 2.0 approaches. These approaches may not apply directly to the world of wet-bench biology, but they do serve as valuable pointers and directions worth watching. I want to be clear that I’m not writing Web 2.0 off as useless. What I’m interested in doing is separating the wheat from the chaff. Much of what is currently being done under this umbrella is useless and doomed. But there are some gems already available and despite many likely failures, aspects of those failures are worth recognizing and incorporating into future efforts.

If you read the first talk, sorry for the redundancies, and sorry for re-using some of the same jokes. I’ll work on new ones for the next presentation.

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Really nice article by Jonah Lehrer on “The Illusion of Streaks” that ties in well both with an earlier post I’d written here, and with an argument I was trying to make in a bar this weekend. The basic premise is that the human brain has evolved in a manner that leads to a distrust of scientific reasoning and a dislike of doing the math in favor of stories. As a species, we tend to impose pattern where there is, in fact, no actual pattern.

Lehrer’s article looks at this year’s NCAA Basketball Tournament, along with several studies on basketball and baseball, and discusses how we perceive players to be having “hot streaks”, when in fact, such things don’t exist. This continues to strike me as a major stumbling block in our scientific educational efforts. Fairy tales and fantasies just seem to work better for the human brain than fact-based reasoning.