… but a very cool scaffolding/molecular shortcut for protein folding. Complicated proteins just couldn’t flop together the right way without zinc fingers. Nature’s pretty darned clever that way. Plus, we can’t stop saying it… Zinc finger. Zinc finger. Zinc finger. And if it’s not a band, it should be. “Dude, I was totally up on the stage with Zinc Finger…”

The Critical Art Ensemble is doing a great job of tapping into the collective anxiety around GMOs. They had the idea, it seems, of trying to remove the psychological tension around transgenic organisms by creating “a participatory theater project that would get people hands-on involved in the production of these transgenic organisms.” All fine and good. Kinda fun, actually.

Then the US government (we’d say idiotic government, but in the era of the Bush administration it’s an oxymoron…) caught wind. CAE founder Stephen Kurtz was subpoenaed under the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act, then indicted for mail fraud by a federal jury in 2004. Wow! Totally reminiscent of responses to Warhol’s silk screens or Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring! Who knew biotech could be so… edgy? So threatening to the powers-that-be?

Happily, charges against Kurtz were recently dropped. But not after serious harassment and, undoubtedly, huge legal fees. Artists’ media may change over time, but apparently the suffering-for-art part hasn’t.

NPR ran an interesting story about MIT Bioengineering whiz-kids the other day. The really noteworthy angle was that some students didn’t like the smell of their subject, E. coli — too much like, well, poo (duh; they live in our guts and digest our food for us…) So they rather casually cooked up their own transgenic version that smelled like wintergreen — just to make life in the lab more pleasant. An even more interesting wrinkle was their second transgenic mod — to change the smell to bananas when the E. Coli matured.

Turns out our DNA is keeping better records than historians. Among the many interesting historical events DNA reveals about humans is a reduction of the worldwide human population to about 2,000 individuals around 70,000 years ago.

The findings come from the Genographic Project, launched in 2005 to study anthropology using gene sequencing and bioinformatics. The DNA record coincides with geological records strongly suggesting a correlation with extreme drought during the era of near-extinction. Genographic Project Paleontologist Meave Leakey: “Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction?”

Okay, this is unspeakably cool. As a hedge against the loss of genetic diversity in the world’s agricultural crops, the Norwegian government, along with the Global Crop Diversity Trust and Bill&Melinda Gates, has established a super-stable, super-secure, super-remote storage facility for seed stocks. 

The first seeds arrived in January 2008. The variety and volume of seeds stored will depend on the number of countries participating, but the facility has a capacity to conserve 4.5 million samples.

Plus, doesn’t the entrance have the same sphinx-like quality as the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey? 

Here’s an interesting GMO crop angle: Transgenic corn that expresses very specific proteins toxic to borer worms. Bonus: no broader impact on soil microorganisms. It’s getting harder to be a pest these days.

… you get a Groovy DNA Happening.

Gawd. Some brilliant YouTube’er posted this hysterical/disturbing 60’s-vintage film of some tripped-out college professor’s idea of a good time: Protein synthesis re-imagined as a love-in/interpretive dance piece/performance art project… complete with flutes, tambourines, bongo drums, a Doors-wannabe rock band and a spoken-word biochemical perversion of Lewish Carroll’s Jabberwocky. And it happened at Stanford… hey, wait a minute… this is what would have happened if Ken Kesey had gone for a BioChem degree instead. This couldn’t be funnier. Or more of a historical cliché. Inadvertent genius!

Bioinformaticians and Proteomics nerds rejoice. A team from Russia is working to create a comprehensive cell modeling environment to simulate cell dynamics on a variety of levels.

“The MathCell project integrates existing individual knowledge—including mathematical models, bioinformatics resources and computational facilities—into a system that will simulate cell processes at many different levels: from microscopic to macroscopic scales, and from picoseconds to the lifetime of a cell.”

The UCSC Genome Browser is free and fun. Drop in and surf a couple of chromosomes, even if you don’t know your SNiPs from your mRNAs. Still curious? Open Helix will come to your company and give you a three-hour UCSC Genome Browser seminar for free. How groovy is that?

In Aminopop’s peregrinations we stumbled across this Livejournal entry by a guy named Nick Black, a young hot-rod programmer/careerist in the throes of deciding between Ph.D programs in Bioinformatics or Computer Science. Highly entertaining. We wish he would blog for us. 

Quote: 

“In any case, I must select my dance-off partner: Bioinformatics or Computer Science? Bioinformatics is always smartly dressed and knows where all the phat parties are, but Computer Science drives me wild when she adjusts her glasses and calmly tells those damn emo kids exactly where Derrida can deconstruct it. Of more critical importance, Bioinformatics seems full of immediate opportunity — my Weltanschauung produces as a WFF that I can outcode any biologist PLUS his three bitches PLUS his bitch boat EVEN if I’m restricted to an arbitrary selection-without-replacement of five keywords and a vowel. Computer Science, though, is my likely Ph.D. field, and I mean really. Biology? C’mon. It’s like… alphabetizing really quickly or… cataloging Hangul glyphs for Unicode 6.0 (I’m convinced Hangul doesn’t actually exist as anything save an exploitation vector in transcoding routines IPv4wide and a grantwriting scheme perpetrated by lexicographers gone bad). Once we’re building eukaryotes to order, though, I definitely want to be in on it before Congress takes ‘em like they took our assault weapons in that darkest day of 1994. Like Ray Wylie Hubbard implied: me and my eukaryotes, we gonna wait ’til it gets dark, then we’re gonna have us a time.”