DNA Synthesis, Spider Tanks, and A Search Tip For Biologists

Today I Learned:
1) ...a new technique for synthesizing long stretches of DNA. If you want to make a piece of DNA that's longer than a primer, but you don't want to order a gene block, then you can order several nested sets of primers to build up the piece you want. The innermost set might just be a pair of large overlapping oligos; each subsequent piece out extends the piece. You can even do the whole synthesis in one PCR pot by adding the inner primer parts in low concentration, so that most of what you get at the end is the whole piece.

2) Apparently it's not a good idea to keep large spiders in tanks with high walls (higher than a couple of times the width of the spider's leg-span). They'll try to climb them, and sometimes they fall, break themselves, and bleed out. Also, mesh cage tops can be a problem -- if the spider gets up to it, it will sometimes get stuck in the cage and either fall or hurt itself getting free. As awesome as spiders are, they can be pretty silly sometimes.

3) Sometimes, finding basic biological information is surprisingly hard. Oh, sure, you can find plenty of papers on whole proteome responses to this that and the other, but try to ask google or pubmed a basic question like "what's the sequence of the cI promoter?!?!" and all you get is a bunch of papers mapping regulatory pathways and metabolic responses (and metabolic pathways and regulatory responses). Even wikipedia is reticent to give an actual *sequence*.

Today I learned a helpful trick for finding basic information about stuff like promoters, repressors, terminators, mechanisms of action, structures, and probably more. Just do an image search instead of a text search. Text searches give you back scientific papers. Image searches give you back figures, which invariably have more thought put into conveying important information cleanly than the papers they came from.