Biophysics of Transcriptional Regulation

I saw a seminar this week by Leonid Mirny, a MIT physicist with a joint appointment in the Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. It was an interesting talk on how biophysical models concerning how regulatory proteins search for their sites on DNA has interesting implications for genome structure.

Architecture of campus …

Courtesy PhD Comics:

I’ve worked in Red Brick Wonderland, Modernist “It cost HOW much?”, Gothic Envyist and Neo-Penal at different times during my career already!

Mighty Piwis

Last year Kathryn O’Donnell and Jef Boeke published a review in Cell on Piwis and their role in maintaining transposon silencing in the germline genome. Together with an additional short review by Seto et. al. on Piwi proteins, a compelling picture of Piwis is just beginning to emerge …

Affinity Propagation

A little over one year ago, Frey and Dueck published a paper in Science where they describe an algorithm called affinity propagation which clusters data points via passing messages between the points. In their paper they first describe the algorithm and then apply it to a few different examples of clustering problems from diverse fields.