I got rather a shock yesterday when a new Rat in the lab (who has a reasonable amount of experience) asked me how to find homologous DNA sequences. I said "BLAST" (yes, I can speak in HTML. Shut up) and was a tad surprised to learn he'd not heard of it. A couple of weeks back I overheard one of the new Scatter Brains asking where he could find protein sequences—I was equally surprised then.
What do they teach kids these days?
Slightly more sophisticatedly, one of our graduate Rats wanted to know how to calculate identity and similarity scores for a pair of homologous proteins. It turned out to be easier to get her to email me the sequences and run Needle and Water from my (command-line) installation of EMBOSS than to search for an online tool.
Then I lent her my book, which explains the score calculations in nauseating detail.
"She was never seen again".
Comments
I wish I had a book like that.
Posted by: Bob O'H | October 29, 2008 05:43 AM
Buy it, then :)
Posted by: bk | October 29, 2008 10:18 AM
I got a book like that...I make grad students read it...B-)
And I am amazed too by the utter lack of insight many new grad students have when it comes to finding out things like how to do sequence alignments, construct dendrograms (and why)...for that matter, I am apalled by the abysmal ignorance of all but a few when it comes to how Coomassie staining works, or even electrophoresis.
No first principles anymore, is what I tell myself.
And them.
And COMMAND LINE?? Why would anyone use a comand line in a windowing enviroment-rich environment??? B-)
Posted by: Ed Rybicki | October 30, 2008 11:59 PM
You young folk, you have no idea, do you?
Posted by: bk | October 31, 2008 05:24 PM
I have Eddie Van Halen's copy of that.
Posted by: Nige | February 25, 2009 10:40 PM