In the lab we have been doing quite a bit of analysis of cell migration in 2D. Typically RPE1 cells migrating on fibronectin-coated glass. There are quite a few tools out there to track cell movements and to analyse their migration.

I’ve previously written about analysing my iTunes library and about generating Smart Playlists in iTunes. This post takes things a bit further by generating a “perfect playlist” outside of iTunes… it is exclusively for nerds. How can you put together a perfect playlist? What are your favourite songs? How can you tell what they are?

I’m putting this up here in case it is useful for somebody. We capture Z-stacks on a Perkin Elmer Spinning Disk microscope system. I wanted to turn each stack into a single image so that we could quickly compare them. This simple macro does the job.

A couple of years ago, a colleague sent me this picture* to say “who put J Cell Biol on a diet?”. I joked that maybe they publish too many autophagy papers and didn’t think much more of it. Recently, Ron Vale put up this very interesting piece on bioRxiv discussing what it takes to publish […]

A while back I made this little Automator script to convert Microsoft Word doc and docx files to PDF. It’s useful for when you are sent a bunch of Word files for committee work. Opening PDFs in Preview is nice and hassle-free. Struggling with Word is not.

We have a new paper out! You can access it here. Title of the paper: The mesh is a network of microtubule connectors that stabilizes individual kinetochore fibers of the mitotic spindle What’s it about? When a cell divides, the two new cells need to get the right number of chromosomes.

I was searching for the excitation and emission spectra for mNeonGreen. I was able to find an image, but no values for the spectra.

I recently gave a talk at a retreat for new PIs working at QMUL. My talk was focussed on tips for getting started, i.e. the nitty gritty of running an efficient lab. It was a mix of things I’ve been told, worked out for myself or that I’d learned the hard way.

I have just finished reading this excellent book, Statistics done wrong: a woefully complete guide by Alex Reinhart. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in quantitative biology and particularly to PhD students starting out in biomedical science. Statistics is a topic that many people find difficult to grasp.

I put a recent code snippet put up on the IgorExchange. It’s a simple procedure for averaging a set of 1D waves and putting the results in a new wave.

This is a long post about Journal Impact Factors. Thanks to Stephen Curry for encouraging me to post this. tl;dr — I really liked this recent tweet from Stat Fact It’s a great illustration of why reporting means for skewed distributions is a bad idea.