Google PR0 Penalty!

Google has been resetting PR values of websites/blogs that display sponsored content / paid content and links with out nofollow tag recently. If you are also one of those bloggers who faced this tragedy!, then you have a solution.

In the perspective of google, paid links certainly alter the search results and as they say they can not provide a quality service due to that.

So what you will have to do is to convert all the paid links to "nofollow"

[a href="" rel="nofollow"] some text [/a]

( [ = < , ] = > )

and then send a reconsideration application to google using google webmaster tools. Then with in few days, your page rank will be restored to the previous value.

Try out this and let me know what happened.

Art on the Street

Recently visited Katharagama. It's a very well known destination for pilgrimage traveling in sri lanka. There are lot and lots of small street shops, where they sell variety of things, from vegetables to small toys. I took this picture because it was very aesthetically appealing to me. It certainly has a great combination of variations of green.

Anti Oxidants

Before talking about antioxidants you should know what are free radical. Free radicals are the molecules or atoms with one or more unpaired electrons. These are highly reactive as the unpaired electron / electrons try to acquire most stable electronic configuration by taking an electron from another molecule or an atom.

In recent years free radicals have become a major health issue. The potential health risks are discussed throughly through out the world.

Genetic Disorders

Genetic disorders can be either inherited or not inherited.

Inherited diseases

A disease inherited from parents (vertical transmission). But all the diseases inherited from parents are not genetic disorders.

Genetic diseases

All the genetic diseases are not unnecessarily inherited. For example the chromosomal disorders are not inherited from generation to generation. They are a result of defects in the formation of gametes. Cancers are also genetic diseases but not inherited.

Cause

- Mutation (Genetic anomalies)

-> inherited
-> spontaneous (de novo)

These mutations have to be able survive in order to be transmitted to the next generation. In other words, the person with the mutation should be able to survive and reproduce.

- Chromosomal anomalies ( Numerical anomalies)

Always not inherited.

Mutations

- Can occur die to errors in DNA replication process.

- or due to UV light, Chemicals, Radiation.

Types of Mutations

Point mutations

Substitution of one nucleotide for another. Only one codon is changed. Outcome can vary. Three possible out comes are idetified

- Silent

Phenotype is the same. But there's a small difference in the base sequence. The change in the base sequence has not been able to make a difference in the Three dimensional structure and function. This results in gene polymorphisms (Slightly different gene, but the result is the same).

- non Sense

The change in the base sequence will add a termination codon infront of the real termination codon. This will result in premature termination of the amino acid sequence synthesis.

- Mis Sense

The change in one codon results in a change in the amino acid sequence (one amino acid). So there's a defective expression that leads to a disease.

ex: sickle cell anemia

Glutamic acid is replaced by a Valine Molecule, resulting in structural defect in the beta globine chain (change in the 6th codon of the beta globine chain).

Frame Shift Mutations

Deletion or an insertion of a nucleotide changing the reading frame.

ex:

AT[G] CGG ATC GAT - reading frame before the mutation

ATC GGA TCG AT - reading frame after the mutation

Below are some example diseases.

1. Some forms of Thalassaemia
2. Duchenne muscular dystrophy
3. polymorphisms in the angiotensine converting enzyme (DI, DD)

Lakshapana Falls

This is the 2nd episode of our journey to Sri Lanka's water falls. This time we had a team of 8 friends (last time it was only two). We traveled by bus to Ginigathhena. Had to wait some time in the ginigathhena bus halt till our friend comes. He had prepared lunch and everything at his place. So went there. It was a very tiresome journey to his place, because it was very rough road. After about 2 hours of traveling, we got to his place.

Spent some time there with his family. Luckily we found a van to give us a ride to the water fall. At about 4.00pm in the evening we got to the water fall.

Finally after descending some few thousand small steps we got to the great lakshapana water fall. It was just amazing. No words to describe. Certainly better and more entertaining than the last water fall at Galaboda. Lakshapana Falls, which at 126 metres are the 7th highest in Sri Lanka, are situated on the Maskeliya Oya.

Ascending those steps was a good exercise. It was dark when we returned to the top. There was a cool hut, in which we stayed until the vehicle comes to pick us up.

We had to wait about two hours for the vehicle. Then we went off to climb Adam's peak (sri padaya kanda).

Amazing nature!

Yesterday one of my friends came to my place and we were thinking of any productive way of spending the day. So we decided to go hiking. To be really honest we didn't even know where we are heading to. Just got on to the badulla train. there was a big delay of about 3 hours due to some accident.


Got off the train near a very remote area. Pleople in that area said that there's a very beautiful water fall near by. So we went looking for that water fall. To add up to the excitement we decided to skip the regular road and go upstream along the water way.

Finally we got to the water fall and it was so amazing. The height of the water fall was about 50m. Since there was no one to stop, we went into the base of the water fall. It was really very hard to stay at the base of the water fall more than 1 - 2 minutes due to momentum of the water falling from 50m - 60m height.


Spent about 1 - 2 hours admiring the beauty of this great creation of nature and returned to the train station. We were really lucky to find a train back to kandy. Finally it was a great day. It is so amazing how things work out pretty well when we are not planing it at all.

Bioinformatics

It is said that bioinformatics is the marriage between biology and information technology.

the basics and the anatomy of information technology / computer science and biology / life sciences are completely different. But their combination has given the humans a new tool to explore the hidden mysteries of science.

Bio informatics has domains in biology, computer science, statistics, genetics, maths and various other fields.

The applications of bio informatics can range from

- accessing the internet to read literature
- manuscript preparation
- DNA sequence analysis
- protein modelling
- Using virtual reality experiments
- Running biological simulations

It's worth considering why such a field came into existence.

First nucleotide sequencing directly from DNA was performed in 1973. In late 1970s some on e could get a PHD by just sequencing any gene. By 1982 this became a very straight forward task.

Then accumulation of sequence data increased so rapidly with the Human Genome project which was started around 1990.

for example,

in 1999, 1.5Mb of human genomic sequences were deposited in genebank monthly. In 2001 15 billion bases of sequence information were deposited. So there's a very rapid growth curve of sequence information. It became virtually impossible to handle these information manually by humans or by simple computations. So there was need of extensive integration information technology with biological information handling. Bio informatics is a result of this integration.

Bioinformatics can be divided into two broad categories.

1. computational biology
2. analytical bio informatics

Computational biology uses formal algorithms and testable hypotheses if biology, then encode them into various programmes. Mainly considering the mathematics of biology. For example the development of tools like BLAST, FASTA are results of computational biology. So in this sense, computational biology is making tools.

Analytical bio informatics is using these tools.

ex: sequence retrieval from gene bank.

analysis of various regression using local statistical software.

With the expansion of internet and world wide web the tools and data became available to almost any one in the world. So using these resources is not a feat in any sense.

So what really matters is internet research skills to find where information is and to retrieve right kind of information for your purpose.

Once you retrieved your data, the researcher should be able to manipulate these data as he/she wish. There are large amount of pre-built tools to do what you need to do. But to truely exploit the capacity of data analysis tools, a researcher need to be able to at least use a scripting language and databases properly.

Quantifying DNA

Yesterday We finished Extracting DNA from Both Plant and Animal tissues. So now it's time to quantify our DNA samples and see how successful we were in extracting DNA.

We can quantify our DNA sample to measure the purity of the sample and to measure the amount of DNA present in our sample.

We added 50 - 100 ul of TE buffer to the dried DNA pallet.

TE buffer contains,

1M tris - 1ml
0.5M EDTA - 200ul
Distilled water up to - 100ml

Then the solution was homogenized by pipetting in and out about 30 times.

DNA Extraction

All most all the animal tissue contain DNA. We used mammalian blood for this practical. Only white blood cells in the mammalian blood contain nuclei. As RBC contain no nuclei, we have to remove the RBC first.

We destroyed RBC by a freez shock. For this we stored our blood samples at -20C over night. This freezing process destroys the RBC cell membrane.

Then before the practicle we thawed the blood samples at room temperature. After that 700ul of blood sample was transferred to an eppendorf tube.

For more information goto : www.biotechworld.org

disclosure policy

This policy is valid from 22 January 2008


This blog is a sponsored blog created or supported by a company, organization or group of organizations. For questions about this blog, please contact me@pulasthi.info.


This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content.

The owner(s) of this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers' own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.

This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest.