December 24, 2018 Monday
Bedtime Story
CAMERA for Metagenomics
To be able to write everyday without having
to worry about making an income from it is indeed a form of luxury that perhaps
one can truly appreciate if one makes an attempt of making a full time career
in writing.
To be able to sell your writing (or
cartooning or script writing) is perhaps as tough as being a good scientist as
is evident with the presence of so many struggling people in these professions.
It is perhaps equally difficult to be a
recognized scientist as being a well-awarded artist and this is one area at the
very least where something is common to both.
The data collected by the Venter team thus
were the frozen samples of filters that were later DNA sequenced at the two institutes
one on the north-eastern coast and the other on the south-western coast of the
United States.
These DNA sequences did not belong to one
organism but multiple organisms and thus the data of DNA sequences generated
after processing was massive that for their analysis would require a whole new
scheme of technology.
That new computing technology used for
their analysis was the CAMERA that I had mentioned last night.
CAMERA is an online cloud computing service
that is specifically designed for the analysis of metagenomic data.
The term “metagenomics” is a new term for
me and when I labored to find out about it I came to know that it is indeed a
new word that came into existence as recent as in 1998 in a paper titled
“Molecular biological access to the chemistry of unknown soil microbes: A new
frontier for natural products” in the journal ‘Chemistry & Biology’.
What is the principle idea behind
metagenomics?
Well, let me put this way.
The genetic material of an organism is
known as its genome (encoded in its chromosomes which are nothing but tightly
condensed rows of DNA molecules) and the study of it is called genomics.
This tight condensation is itself a miracle
of molecular machinery that is operating non-stop all the time in all the cells
of all the species.
DNA is one of the stiffest natural polymers
that is found in living organisms and at the same time it is also one of the
longest.
As always, to explain life and thereby DNA
condensation you will have to resort to chemistry and then to physics and
finally to mathematics and logic.
In this specific case of DNA condensation
the physical explanation is the phase transition which essentially means
transition between different states of matter such as solid, liquids and
gaseous states.
Phase transition in its turn involves a symmetry
breaking process.
You might have forgotten that the whole
story that we have been going through is eventually on the mathematics of
symmetry and its physical implications.
There is simply no getting away from
mathematics no matter how hard I try.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
Advertisements
Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
No comments:
Post a Comment