Knowledge Management and the future of Clinical Pathology
Posted 3rd October 2016 by Jane Williams
Clinical pathology has reached a critical cross-roads. Where the pathology service operates within a competitive funding arrangement, such as in Australia, consolidation proceeds apace. In large part this consolidation is driven by both revenue and cost pressures. This results in a highly efficient factory-and-logistics model for laboratory operations – but with inevitable consequences for professionals and consumers alike.
A materials world
Posted 30th September 2016 by Jane Williams
What happens between a surface and a fluid stream can lead to foul play. That’s why I’m a materials girl. The complex physics and chemistry of surfaces is an important consideration in any product development, and is particularly important for microfluidic systems where the high surface area to volume ‘concentrates’ the effect of the surface.
What can Atomic Force Microscopy do for me?
Posted 30th September 2016 by Jane Williams
Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a high-resolution imaging technique that uses a small probe to scan surfaces of materials to provide 3D height information – a landscape.
Computational Imaging and Precision Medicine
Posted 30th September 2016 by Jane Williams
The digitization of tissue glass slides is clearly opening up exciting opportunities as well as challenges to the world of computational imaging scientists. It is clear that while computational imaging can clearly play a role in better quantitative characterization of disease and precision medicine, there still remain a number of substantial technical and computational challenges that need to be overcome before computer assisted image analysis of digital pathology can become part of the routine clinical diagnostic workflow.
Using Digital PCR to improve our water
Posted 30th September 2016 by Jane Williams
A career in water quality can be incredibly varied and diverse, spanning from work with drinking water, to oceans, rivers, estuaries, or even storm water and wastewater. Due to the incredibly varied and unpredictable nature of water, it can be a very difficult substance to work with.
Understanding DNA Motif Distribution: A Learning-by-Building Approach
Posted 30th September 2016 by Jane Williams
Torsten Waldminghaus spoke to us about his thoughts on the work of the Craig Venter Group and Jeff Boeke, the stigma attached to synthetic biology and his own work building synthetic secondary chromosomes.
Advances in Agricultural Biologicals
Posted 30th September 2016 by Jane Williams
The most exciting advances in agricultural biologicals research relate to the use of “systems biology” (or “omics”) approaches to discovery and development of new active ingredients for crop biostimulants. It is a new wave of very deep research that parallels natural products discovery programs for new drugs or lifestyle products that is happening in the Pharmaceutical industry.
Where our food really comes from
Posted 30th September 2016 by Jane Williams
The question of where our food comes from is a refrain heard frequently these days. It is a very good one to ask, but it goes far beyond knowing where the nearest farm-to-table restaurant or CSA pick-up location is. To truly know where one’s food comes from, one needs to have an appreciation of the origin of agriculture. The plants growing in our fields today did not spring fully formed from some primordial ooze but are rather the result of natural and human forces over the course of millennia.