September

Can't believe that it's already September. It has been 8 months. While it is an enjoyable session, with lots of praises and new skills learnt, I admit the whole effort lacks focus. Too many parallels going on and I have yet to close any yet. Papers better be churn out fast, cause I'm really running out of time!

Extremely pure DNA extraction.

So our lab was dealing with shit loads of DNA work. I mean like ... err.... 20 terrabyte of DNA sequences? Yup. So when it comes to extracting high quality DNA, skills and experience is really what it takes. So you don't end up with 20TB of rubbish data.

Having work with these DNA extraction over the past few months. I think I should start writing about some basics of DNA extraction here. Specially from animal tissues (different tissues, different methods. Think bone vs muscles), plants, gram-positive bacteria and even random stuffs (think soil, think carpet, think CSI:NEW YORK!)

The most important think is about how you want to manipulate the DNA physically! Yeah not chemically because you just want to make them mix around and then purify them, removing other stuffs that will inhibit your downstream analysis. Also I think I will talk about how to transport DNA. For example, sending DNA from one lab to another to different countries requires special care. After all, remember, you are probably sending only a few drops of preciousness that will give you gigabytes of FASTQ files!

Pocket poor.. Very the poor.

ROAR poor ah poor!!!

Pilling up my warchest

Recently I started adopting a rather "low maintenance" life style and all I can say is I'm beginning to reap those golden seeds now :) Reading investments newsletter didn't really got me into investment, but they taught me very well in financial planning so far. Suffice to say, we are all in the war-chest building phase. Nobody can just jump on with a bucketful of gold, unless you are born with a silver spoon. But then again, those are not the money you earn yourself. You're simply sucking on to your mom and dad's financial teats. Just like a pair of attention freak, well endowed with cash twin brothers I have in my Facebook friend-list. Nothing respectable about those fellow, just admirable. OK enough babbling about jerks and rotten donkey dicks. I had a glorious week albeit a tiring one. Shall just enjoy my weekend, in the lab of course ;)

Days without internet

There's a very exciting conference going on now with live video at genome.gov but fml, no internet at home.

Weird breed

I think I'm one of those weird breed. Well it's good to be weird. After all weird, freak, special, unique, rare and extraordinary points to the same thing but on different points of a positive tonegative  scale-bar, right?