Here is a small collection of explainers, articles and discussions I have written on some topics. Most of these relate to microbiology because it’s always on my mind 🦠 💚.

Articles

What were Prototaxites? - A wee article on the mysterious organism Prototaxites, a possible hero of all life as we know it.

Help, I’m a Frog! - A one pager on endangered froggies and who is hanging around to rescue them (spoiler alert: it’s bacteria).

Explainers & Research articles

News & Views article: Yeast-based synthetic genomics brewing up a storm against COVID-19

Nature publishes articles called “News and Views” where researchers summarise recently published papers to a more general science crowd. I wrote my own about a microbial genetics paper published by Thi Nhu Thao et al. (2020) in which they developed a method to reconstruct a viruses (like COVID-19) in yeast to enable research on pathogens without having to risk catching the virus themselves. Here is a link to the draft.

Primer: A brief overview of how to set up evolutionary experiments

A Primer is a short explanation of sparkly new techniques within a field to give other researchers the opportunity to use these in their own research. Inspired by Richard Lenski’s research, the worlds’ longest-running evolution experiment (since 1988!), my primer describes different techniques to set up an evolutionary experiment. Have a read here , and if you liked it maybe you’d like to follow the references in the sources and read up some more.

TLDR: Assembling a genome with the help of de Bruijn graphs

In this article I explain how the computer assembles genomes after we sequence them in the lab. This article assumes general knowledge of genetic lab techniques.

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Yet to come!!!! <3

Research Article: The composition and structure of the termite gut microbiome (5 pages of super intense examination)

Summaries / Discussions

covid 19 paper discussions
shipwreck paper discussion
broad bean paper review

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