Journal Club

Hi folks,

Journal Clubs, where technical and scientific papers are read and discussed, have a long tradition in science, going back to the 1800's. In this club, we'll read about three papers every two weeks or so, depending on how much interest there is. Each time one paper will be a non-technical article for people who are new to the field and the other two will be current research. Reading scientific papers is the only way to keep up with developments in the field and reading them together, we can discuss whether the research methods were sound, if the research is something we could replicate in a DIY lab, and what impact the research might have on future experiments.
I'll try to post as many papers as I can, some will be harder to get to because of paywall issues. If you have any papers you'd like to share, or have any topics you'd like to explore, let me know and I'll put them on the list.
For our next event we'll be reviewing the following papers:

Chorella reduces cholesterol levels

A paper on reducing cholesterol levels by eating Chorella algae supplements. Biofuels are important, but nutritional supplements made from algae are where the money is at the moment and it's important to know why people think eating algae is good for them.

http://www.nutritionj.com/content/13/1/57

New letters for life’s alphabet

If you haven't heard, new nucleotides have been created artificially that go beyond the ATCGU base pairs we're familiar with. Unfortunately the paper itself is behind a paywall, so if anyone can bring a copy to the club to discuss, that would be great.

Here is an article on the paper in Synthetic Biology News (https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=forums&srcid=MDAyNjQ0NzMyMDA3Mzk2OTI2MDQBMTM4NjA5MTQ5OTExOTc4OTM4NDMBbl9ueGxhUGZQNndKATAuMQEBdjI)

Here is the paper itself in Nature (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v509/n7500/full/nature13314.html#tables) (paywall)

Rainbow colored Algae

Using fluorescent proteins make things glow is useful tool in identifying proteins and structures of interest used throughout biotech. Stephen Mayfield's group at UCSD describe creating algae tagged with fluorescent proteins in this paper. Is this something we could try to replicate in the Wet Lab? The paper is available in our google groups Articles and journals section