My first publication discovered

I’ve been poking around in the long-tail of my publications as gathered by Google Scholar. Within this I found the following little publication:

 

Five glycyl tRNA genes within the noc gene complex of Drosophila melanogaster.

YB Meng, RD Stevens, W Chia, S McGill, M Ashburner

Nucleic acids research 16 (14), 7189-7189 1988

 

And this must be me. I did my undergraduate biochemistry project with bill Chia and I sequenced, by hand, some tRNA genes in drosophila. This is the first I’ve known of this publication and it has made me happy – that my sausage like fingers clumsily squirting stuff around willy nilly in bill’s lab actually earnt me a name on the paper; it is a lovely thing to find.

 

This should be my opportunity to drone on about pouring polyacrylamide gels, doing dideoxy reactions, running gels, exposing autoradiograms, reading gels, etc etc., but that’s enough of that. I should also perhaps say that using the lab’s BBC microcomputer to run a programme over-night to find tRNA genes was the start of my interest in bioinformatics – but it wasn’t. It was, however,a continuation of an interest in what was then known as molecular biology; ultimately bioinformatics has been a way of carrying on that interest.