Interesting links #2

950 words, 5 minutes reading time

While writing my long-form articles, I often stumble across really nice links that I’d like to share more broadly. I like how Construction Physics puts the explicit listing of such links behind a paywall, but keeps the actual synthesis of those links freely available. I’d like to follow the same model, feels very aligned-incentives-y

I’ll separate them into ‘technical’ and ‘causal’ sections. Technical articles are more scientific in nature (usually biology or ML related), while casual articles are ones that require no domain knowledge to understand (usually non-science blog posts, interesting podcasts, or pop-sci videos).

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1. Technical

2. Casual

Technical

Prevalence of errors in lab-made plasmids across the globe

• Comments: Fun paper, great overview of how error-prone plasmids can be to work with in practice. I’ve never worked in a wet lab before, so it was interesting to discover that plasmid errors can come in two forms: design errors and sequence errors. I always knew that sequence errors were a thing; biology is probabilistic, and errors in creating the [thing] you care about will be omnipresent. But design errors are new to me! Plasmids have their own biochemical limitations, and there are ways you can engineer a plasmid that simply don’t work. E.g., encoding for genes that are toxic to e. coli, using CAG promoter in lentiviral vectors, and so on. Knowing this stuff of the top of your head is challenging, so services that can directly point out these errors are helpful (cough, cough, Plasmidsaurus).