YouTube producer/host and genetics researcher Alex Dainis holds one of the tools of her trade.

In this series of articles, Live Science focuses the spotlight on some of YouTube's most popular science channels. Their creators weave together graphics, footage, animation and sound design in videos that can be as whimsical as they are informative, employing a range of techniques and styles. Yet all of them share a general curiosity and enthusiasm for the unexpected and fascinating science stories that exist in the world around us.

If you've ever wanted to peek behind the scenes at the day-to-day activities in a genetics laboratory there's a YouTube channel for that.

Vlogger and doctoral candidate Alex Dainis invites YouTube audiences into her lab at Stanford University, offering an insider's view of her journey as a graduate student training to work in the field of genetics.

Dainis who told Live Science that she loves talking about science "to anyone who will listen" uses her videos to share her affinity for cool science stories, to express her own considerable sense of wonder and excitement about all things related to genetics, to show how experiments are conducted in a lab, and to introduce scientists as real people, presenting "what we do and what our daily lives are like," she said. [The Most Interesting YouTube Science Channels]

Storytelling and science both hold equal fascination for Dainis, who worked in film production before attending graduate school at Stanford. But as much as Dainis enjoyed the moviemaking process, "I missed talking about science," she said. YouTube provided an outlet where she could bring the two together, and in 2012 she began posting short explainer videos describing interesting science stories and "fun facts," she told Live Science.

Her "Bite-Sci-zed" video nuggets of science are short each just a few minutes long and delve into diverse topics such as the spectrum of egg colors, what naked mole rats can teach us about cancer, periodical cicadas and their exoskeletons, and the genetics of seedless watermelons.

However, once Dainis began her graduate studies, she decided to take her YouTube channel in a more personal but still science-infused direction, producing videos that would share her daily experiences in the genetics lab as a doctoral candidate.

In the video series "What Is This Thing?" Dainis acquaints her audience with the common tools of her trade and a few uncommon ones. These laboratory items, which many non-scientist viewers are likely seeing for the first time, are an intrinsic part of genetics research, and Dainis' straightforward descriptions dispel some of the mystery surrounding how scientists sequence DNA and make the science more accessible.

She cheerfully introduces pipettes (syringe-like tools used to measure and move liquids), a hemocytometer (used for counting cells) and ethanol lamps a heating alternative to gas-powered Bunsen burners; Dainis said in the video that using them "makes me feel like I'm doing science on an old-fashioned whaling ship."

Another recent video documented something a little out of the ordinary in the life of a graduate student analyzing DNA with an astronaut, and exploring how NASA scientists can use genetic sequencing to monitor astronauts' health in space, and to search for extraterrestrial life.

"Sometimes it's really exciting and sometimes it's monotonous this is what science is, and I want to show a realistic picture of that," Dainis said.

And sometimes while making the videos, Dainis herself learns a thing or two. The chance discovery that nectarines were actually a type of mutant peach inspired Dainis to take a closer look at the genetics of the two fruits, resulting in "one of the coolest videos I did," Dainis told Live Science.

"Peaches and nectarines are actually the same fruit but with a single recessive allele difference," she said.

"I got to use some techniques in the lab that I use every day, and I got to show something very cool about a fruit that I had never considered before. That was so exciting. I was eating these fruits for years, and I had no idea they were the same thing!"

Her videos attract viewers representing a range of ages and professions, but the common threads running through all of them are fascination with science and curiosity about how it's done.

"I get comments from people all around the world; from middle-schoolers, from people thinking about careers in science, people who've been scientists for decades, and some people who're not in science but are interested in the process. They're in different stages of their careers, different walks of life I think it's very exciting that this community of science nerds has bloomed around these videos," she said.

Got a favorite science channel on YouTube that you think we should feature? Tell us about it in the comments or on Twitterand Facebook!

Original article on Live Science.

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YouTube's Alex Dainis: Blending Filmmaking and Genetics - Live Science

Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ:SGEN) reported solid first-quarter earnings on Thursday, but the potential expansion of Adcetris into treating patients in other cancer settings and the development of the rest of the biotech's pipeline are what investors are mainly focused on.

Metric

Q1 2017

Q1 2016

Year-Over-Year Change

Revenue

$109 million

$111 million

(1.8%)

Income from operations

($59 million)

($21 million)

N/A

Earnings per share

($0.42)

($0.15)

N/A

Data source: Seattle Genetics.

Image source: Getty Images.

Clay Siegall, Seattle Genetics' chairman, CEO, and president, explained why the company delayed filing for approval of Adcetris in patients with cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL) using the ALCANZA trial:

And then we changed our guidance at our last conference call to mid-year, and that was because of our discussions with the FDA based on other data that we've had from investigator-sponsored trials, specifically two of them, which showed strong activity in CTCL with patients that were below the histology cutoff that we used in our ALCANZAtrial, and with patients that were in other subtypes of CTCL.

In other words, the added data could result in more CTCL patients approved to take Adcetris, producing more sales in the long term that should more than make up for the short-term lost sales from the delayed approval.

Adcetris has gotten more competition for patients with refractory Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) after the recent approvals of Bristol-Myers Squibb's (NYSE:BMY) Opdivo and Merck's (NYSE:MRK) Keytruda, but Darren Cline, Seattle Genetics' EVP of commercial, doesn't see the new drugs as a threat:

Despite the recent FDA approval of a second PD-1 inhibitor in [the] relapsed Hodgkin lymphoma setting, we have seen no erosion in share in our existing relapsed-HL business. Most prescribers have indicated they view the checkpoint inhibitor agents as interchangeable and would use both in post-Adcetris later lines of therapy or palliative setting[s], if necessary.

Seattle Genetics has a lot of potential, but investors are going to have to be patient this year, with most of the value-driving events happening in the latter half of the year.

The application to treat CTCL patients with Adcetris won't come until the middle of this year, so an approval probably won't arrive until late 2017 or possibly even next year. The ECHELON-1 phase 3 trial in frontline Hodgkin lymphoma is supposed to wrap up this year, but management hasn't given any more specifics on timing -- suggesting that it's likely to come in the latter half of the year.

Two pipeline drugs -- vadastuximab talirine and enfortumab vedotin -- are progressing nicely toward potential approvals. But vadastuximab talirine is still enrolling the phase 3 trial required to gain regulatory approval, and the registration trial for enfortumab vedotin won't start until the second half of this year.

Brian Orelli has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Seattle Genetics. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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Seattle Genetics, Inc. Earnings: Solid Quarter, but Investors Wait - Motley Fool

Nandadevi Cortes Rodriguez, Ithaca College postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Department of Biology, has dedicated much of her research to studying genetics and evolution. Recently, Rodriguez won the award for Best Paper of Year in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology for her work researching speciation in birds.

Opinion Editor Celisa Calacal spoke to Rodriguez about her research, the findings of her paper and the importance of studying evolution.

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Q&A: Teaching fellow wins award for genetics research - The Ithacan

May 1, 2017 Golden orb-weaver spider (Nephila clavipes). Credit: Matjaz Kuntner, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Spider silks, the stuff of spider webs, are a materials engineer's dream: they can be stronger than steel at a mere fraction of weight, and also can be tougher and more flexible. Spider silks also tend not to provoke the human immune system. Some even inhibit bacteria and fungi, making them potentially ideal for surgery and medical device applications. Exploitation of these natural marvels has been slow, due in part to the challenges involved in identifying and characterizing spider silk genes, but researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have now made a major advance with the largest-ever study of spider silk genes.

As they report today in an advance online paper in Nature Genetics, Penn scientists and their collaborators sequenced the full genome of the golden orb-weaver spider (Nephila clavipes), a prolific silk-spinner that turns out to produce 28 varieties of silk proteins. In addition to cataloguing new spider silk genes, the researchers discovered novel patterns within the genes that may help to explain the unique properties of different types of silk.

"There were so many surprises that emerged from our study: new silk genes, new DNA sequences that presumably confer strength, toughness, stretchiness and other properties to silk proteins; and even a silk protein made in venom glands rather than silk glands," said senior author Benjamin F. Voight, PhD, an associate professor in the departments of Genetics and Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics. "All this new information should greatly advance our efforts to capture the extraordinary properties of these silks in man-made materials."

Even though spider silks have been studied for more than 50 years, earlier foundational work had identified only a comparative handful of spider silk genes. Even recent work from species with smaller silk repertoires than the golden orb-weaver's were incomplete. To find all of the silk genes hidden across the golden orb-weaver's genomethe veritable "lab rat" of spider silk sciencerequired the construction of the entire genome, a daunting task in itself.

In the new study, Voight and his colleagues began with the herculean task of sequencing and reassembling the genome of the golden orb-weaver: a task comparable to solving a multimillion-piece jigsaw puzzle, with few clues as to how these pieces fit together.

In the golden orb-weaver's genomewhich turns out to be about as large as the human genomethe researchers identified more than 14,000 likely genes, including 28 that appear to encode spider silk proteins, known as spidroins.

Spidroins have been classified into seven categories according to their protein sequences and functions; these categories include aciniform silk for wrapping prey (and tying down partners for mating); and the super-strong major ampullate silk from which spiders (and Spider-Man) swing while at work. However, some of the newly discovered spidroins have sequences that do not fit neatly into any of these categories, suggesting that the encoded silk proteins may have novel functions, or that the existing categories need to be redefined.

An extensive computational analysis of the orb-weaver's spidroin genes revealed nearly 400 short sequencesmany never before describedthat appear repeatedly in these genes with small variations and in different combinations. These repetitive spidroin "motifs" are of great interest to biologists and engineers because they are likely to confer the key properties of a given spider silk, such as high-tensile strength, flexibility, or stickiness. The analysis also revealed novel, higher-order organizations of these motifs into groups of motifs ("cassettes") and groups of groups ("ensembles").

Voight's team also examined gene transcripts from different orb-weaver silk glands and in each case found transcripts belonging to more than one spidroin class, suggesting that these glands are not strictly specialized for producing one type of silk. "We found significantly more complexity in silk production than we expected," Voight said.

The biggest surprise was the discovery that one of the orb-weaver's spidroinsFLAG-b, a novel discovery by the groupappears to be produced primarily in the orb-weaver's venom gland rather than in any silk gland, hinting at intriguing new functions for silk connected to prey capture, immobilization, or preservation.

In their analyses of the genome data, Voight and colleagues also identified 649 likely genes that are not spidroin genes but are highly expressed in silk glands, and thus probably have roles in converting the liquid silk from spider cells into solid, spinnable threadsa tricky process that biotech engineers are just beginning to achieve outside of spiders.

Voight and his team are now following up with a genome-sequencing study of Darwin's bark spider, which makes the strongest known silks, and has been known to span rivers with them.

The scientists are also at work on technology for the rapid production of silks in the lab starting from their spidroin DNA sequences, to better understand how these sequences and their motifs encode silks' biological and physical properties.

"When I say that we'd like to build a 'web-shooter' like Spider-Man's in the lab, I'm only half joking" Voight said.

Explore further: 3-D printing spiders

More information: The Nephila clavipes genome highlights the diversity of spider silk genes and their complex expression, Nature Genetics (2017). nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/ng.3852

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So it sounds like, in the future, people who have surgery to repair brain damage may literally be said to have "cobwebs in the attic".

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Genetic selection for taste seems to outweigh other onfarm factors such as breed, lamb gender or fat cover in the eating quality of lamb, says Grant Howie, general manager sales, Silver Fern Farms.

SFF says this in a report on research into lamb eating quality under the FarmIQ Primary Growth Partnership Programme. Based on at least 3200 consumer taste tests in New Zealand and the US in 2016, the results confirm earlier research that consumers view NZ lamb as a consistently high-quality eating product.

Howie says they had absolutely confirmed that consumers see lamb as a good quality product, so it gives us confidence that the product the farmers are producing is meeting consumer taste expectations.

Interestingly for farmers, the research did not find a significant or consistent effect on lamb eating quality from breed, lamb gender, pasture, growth rates, fat cover and marbling, butt conformation or locality, he says.

Several of these factors had minor effects, but all were outweighed by the right cut and correct ageing, he says.

This wasnt just a one-off study; there were several studies over that time. We were getting more and more information the more we tested, Howie told Rural News.

I think early on we were expecting, for example, a ram lamb effect; there is a lot of talk in the industry about that. But the more we tested it and the more thoroughly we looked at those sorts of things we couldnt see any ram lamb effect and it wasnt just a one-off study; we did several studies on that.

There is more variation in the genetics within a breed than there is one breed versus another.

AgResearch and FarmIQ have invested a lot of money in the last few years developing a SNP chip which helps identify different gene markers that can identify the markers for tenderness, low pH and marbling in lamb.

The same technology has been used in the beef industry.

Ram breeders can now use that technology to improve the genetic make-up of lambs or of rams and passed on to lambs obviously for tenderness, pH and marbling.

All the studies have confirmed that farmers are on track, and they can ensure we remain on track if the breeders use the genetic technology of the SNP chip and keep our lamb eating as good as it is now.

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Genetics key to lamb taste - Rural News Group