DNA Twister: One of the Dorkier Things I’ve Done
ISB faculty playing DNA Twister
I was working at the Institute for Systems Biology when the 50th anniversary of Watson & Crick‘s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA rolled around. I had the great luck of working right next to Rich Bonneau, a brilliant scientist who made sure to interject into every — every — talk or meeting that we should really be focusing more on putting kangaroo tails on humans. Rich was, and I assume still is, all kinds of awesome.
DNA Twister mat
Anyway, to mark the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA’s structure, Rich and I got a Twister mat and marked each of the four colors on it as one of the four bases that make up the structure of DNA: Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine. We used the spinner to assign which hand or foot was in play, but we used an actual bit of DNA to tell the players where to stick it. I don’t remember what the DNA sequence was from — I think it was one of the genes on human chromosome 14. The ISB faculty joined in, and it was so! funny! when we hit a repeat sequence! HA HA HA HA! HA HA HA HA!
I guess you had to be there.
This reminds me of an automated Twister Spinner program I wrote that would automatically “spin the spinner and call the shot” so that everyone could join in on the fun! How dorky is that?!
posted on March 10th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Is that Comic Sans you used to label the Twister mat with?
posted on March 10th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
NO! It’s Font on a Stick.
posted on March 10th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
[...] like to put your computer to use, take a look at the World Community Grid (my former co-worker and Twister buddy Rich Bonneau has worked with the World Community Grid on protein folding) and Folding@Home [...]
posted on March 19th, 2007 at 3:48 pm