Sigma BioBlogs

We’re excited to announce our sponsorship of Pubget’s new app designed to deliver the ease of finding full text PDFs for any journal, straight to your iPad®. Together with Pubget, we’re bringing life science research to the iPad in a simple and convenient app.

As a research tool, Pubget.com is the search engine for life science PDFs providing content from over 450 institutional libraries. Its 28 million article index includes all of PubMed and more. The article level tools on Pubget.com provide a seamless workflow tailored for scientists’ needs, plus it’s free!

The app provides search and one-click access to any journal available from your school or work’s library. What’s great is the results are full-text PDF’s, not just abstracts.

You’ll log in only once and then have convenient access to any journal. You can easily search all of PubMed and more. Once you’ve found your article of interest, save the full text PDF to take with you and read offline anywhere. Another great feature is you can add notes to any PDF while you’re reading it. You also have the option to share your viewed and saved papers with friends and colleagues by email.

Looking for the perfect Sigma product or gene-related content? Keep an eye out for the DNA helix icon as an indicator that there’s a Sigma product or information source that can assist in your research around the article you’re viewing.

Download the app today and save time with fast search and easy access to the latest papers from your favorite journals. You can now search and take full text PDFs with you wherever you go!

Biomagnifique, Bioprachtvollen, Biomagnificent…

Back by popular demand!  Design the next Bio-shirt and win t-shirts for your lab!  The last winning entry was Biolicious! The next could be YOURS.

We received so many great entries, it was difficult for us to select a winner, so, this time we are will choose 3 bio-shirt designs.   Here is your chance to try again, or for the first time!

Here is how:

1. Nominate a bio-word
2. The Where Bio Begins team will select 5  to be voted upon by the Biounity community via online poll.
3. The top 3 entrants by popular vote will win shirts for their lab (up to 25 t-shirts per winning entry).

We are collecting nominations through January 31, 2011..so hurry!

Voting will run from February 1 – 12, 2011, at wherebiobegins.com/biounity

Bio-shirt contest rules and regulations.
Questions? Contact us at wherebiobegins@sial.com

Curious about the first bioshirt contest?

Our next Bio-shirt design will be Biolicious!

Why is Biology Biolicious?

The contest winner put it best in her entry:
Like your favorite tasty treat inspires the tongue to declare “Delicious!”, biology inspires the active scientific mind to declare a new discovery, technique, or interesting find to be “Biolicious!”

We agreed so we created the shirts and are ready to distribute them!

Our early contest  responders should expect their free T-shirt to arrive soon.
The new Bio-shirt was also included in the booth giveaway at Neuroscience this week.  They went like hotcakes!

There were so many great entries to the Design the Next Bio-shirt Contest that it was tough to make a decision.  That is why we are expanding the contest to include three more winners but we are handing off the decision making process to YOU.  That’s right.  We will narrow down the list to 5 but then we are asking you to vote for your favorite.

Submit your ideas for the next Bio-shirt from now until January 31, 2011 using the entry form at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DCWPNXL

After the entries are collected, we will activate the poll at wherebiobegins.com/biounity to begin the voting process.

Submit your entry today!  The first 25 entries will receive a Bio-shirt!

Bio-Shirt contest rules and regulations
Questions?  Contact us at wherebiobegins@sial.com

Sigma Life Science is passionate about Biology and we have the shirts to prove it.  The best way to say something is on a t-shirt, right?  We started with bioamazing, biogeek, and bioawesome.  It was a fun way to get bioexcited.

Now we want to know what word you associate with your love of Biology.  Do you have a great idea for the next Bio-shirt?

Tell us to receive a free t-shirt and a chance to win shirts for your entire lab!

Nominate a word using the entry form at:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DCWPNXL

The word can be in any language like…
biomagnifique/ bioprachtvollen/ biomagnificent

Our Bio-shirt won’t alert you to over-exertion from long hours spent on an experiment, but you might stir up camaraderie with your matching lab wardrobe.

The winner will be selected Friday, October 22, 2010 at noon (CST).
T-shirts will be available while supplies last

Submit your entry today!

Bio-Shirt contest rules and regulations
Questions?  Contact us at wherebiobegins@sial.com

Sarah Wyatt and I have something in common.  Everyone from our sleepy  little towns  thought we were smart enough to be a doctor or a nurse.  Now they just shake their heads, as she is a gravitational biologist who has studied plants for NASA, and I get to interview her and then post it to “the internets”.

Sarah grew up a farm girl in Western Kentucky.  She always loved nature, climbing trees and pitching in to help run the family farm (Here’s where our stories diverge..  I did the cooking, fed the family and the cuter animals)

While in college she met Joe Kuc, who was studying signal transduction in plants. Impressed with his approach, she adopted some of his philosophies into her own teaching style.  This includes the allocation of her time as follows:

1. 20% Outreach to the community
2. 40% Research
3. 40% Teaching

After receiving her PhD, she did a post-doc with with NASA researchers at  NC State as part of NSCORT The NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training. There she studied the effect of gravity on plant growth, and has been studying it ever since. For Sarah, the real fascination lies with the fact that  plant life has intelligence independent of a nervous system used to relay external signals from the environment..

She believes that plants might be the highest life form on earth…if you challenge that point she will let you know about totipotency…the plant cell’s ability to differentiate…then undifferentiate, assuming an entirely new role.

This post brought to you by Sigma Life Science Plant biotech products

AACR is over 100 years old, with a membership of 30,000+.  The membership is quite inclusive, with a mixture of people from basic science research, clinical research, and also physicians, patients, survivors, and patient advocates all intent on studying and learning more about how to stop cancer.

We got the chance to meet many of them, and a few answered the question “Where does your bio begin? (You can still enter your video too!).

Communication, collaboration, research and education are all a part of AACR’s mission, with 6 Cancer journals for the thousands of scientist who are members, and also CR magazine, to provide information directly relevant for cancer patients, survivors, and patient advocates.

For AACR 2010, the volcanic ash prevented many European presenters from attending, so AACR shifted and met the need by patching the speakers through via video and teleconference.  Some of the recorded talks are here.

Plus an amazing twitter feed which is still active 4 days post-meeting as bloggers sift through their notes and communicate the information that they gathered during the meeting.

The science has come a long way too.  Many traditional topics were under exploration, such as studies around Ras and p53,  there  were also discussions about newer technologies for  such as microRNAs, using biomarkers for early detection,  nanotechnology, and systems biology.

Some blogs of note:

Sally Church’s blog. This lady knows the cancer community.  I got the chance to have coffee with her and she knew half the researchers walking in and out of the conference hall.

Nature writer Brian Maher has a series of short blogs about the sessions he attended.

Another look at Bert Vogelstein’s talk…

This AACR video details some fascinating statistics on cancer research

It’s with great pride that we tell you Sigma Life Science is Where bio Begins.

To quote our VP of Marketing, Dr. Helge Bastian…“We want to help life science researchers address their research challenges and are committed, more than ever to support them on their way to new and revolutionary discoveries.”

Over the past decade, Sigma Life Science has built a repertoire of products and technologies to support the biological researcher. Part of our commitment to biology is to share our knowledge and resources with you.

If you’ve been following us over the last 30+ days, you have noticed that we are using social media as a means to get to know the biological community at a whole new level. We’ll continue this trend here. As we go forward look to sigmabioblogs.com for the skinny on new techniques, improving old techniques, exciting applications, war stories from technical services, and information about scientists from all over the bio community.

Here is a video of our President, Dave Smoller, to tell you the details.

Watch the video and then check out our great tools and techniques listed below.

• Targeted Genome editing
• Knock out research models
• Custom oligo services
• Biomolecules including antibodies and small molecules
• Reprogramming tools for stem cell research
• siRNA and shRNA’s for gene knockdown
• Biological search tool

Thanks for talking to us. We are having fun and hope you are too.

Welcome to Sigma Life Science. This is Where Bio Begins.