Plant denizens get the big-science treatment

Big science, little science.

In the USA, where I live and work, it is well known that I have little love for structural genomics—the attempt to determine the structures of most or all of the proteins in an organism by some combination of high-throughput X-ray crystallo graphy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and homology modelling. My reasons are a matter of public record: structural genomics is based on an assumpt...

Some bog denizens

The phytotronist and the phenotype: plant physiology, Big Science, and a Cold War biology of the whole plant.

This paper describes how, from the early twentieth century, and especially in the early Cold War era, the plant physiologists considered their discipline ideally suited among all the plant sciences to study and explain biological functions and processes, and ranked their discipline among the dominant forms of the biological sciences. At their apex in the late-1960s, the plant physiologists laid...

Big Data Science Needs Big Data Middleware

There has been a “Cambrian explosion” of big data systems proposed and evaluated in the last eight years, but relatively little understanding of how these systems or the ideas they represent compare and complement one another. In enterprise and science situations, “one size is unlikely to fit all”: we see analytics teams running multiple systems simultaneously. However, the highest level of abs...

Small brain, big science

The mouse is a surprising model system to study vision in. It mainly navigates by smell and touch, and doesn’t actually see all that well. It doesn’t have a fovea — the high performance central area of our visual field that we tend to point in the direction of the things that we are consciously looking at — and the resolution of its retinal image across the visual field resembles our peripheral...