Last week involved two external visits. The first and short one was to Oxford Nanopore Technology (ONT) on the Oxford Science Park. ONT has a very exciting core technology, based on the work of Hagan Bayley at Oxford University, for sequencing DNA by studying the electrical changes accompanying the passage of DNA bases through a nm-sized (mainly, but not exclusively, biologically based) hole (a nanopore). DNA Sequencing is a highly competitive area, but one advantage of this particularly technology is that it can be (and has been) applied to a variety of other assays. [...]

We arguably recognise three main approaches to generating new knowledge: experimental and theoretical research are classically the first two, while more recently computer simulations of natural phenomena (and of engineering artefacts) have contributed a third. Now Bell, Hey and Szalay have proposed a fourth – data-intensive science. [...]

One of the fruits of the systematic sequencing of the human genome was the recognition (by bioinformatic sequence gazing) that there were a great many membrane-located receptors that had previously been unrecognized, and whose ‘natural’ roles and ligands were therefore unknown. These were and are known as orphan receptors (and G-protein-coupled receptors – GPCRs – represent a particularly rich class of such molecules, with several hundred members). Classically, receptors are recognized on the basis of binding studies (often of potent antagonists discovered in the natural world), and of physiological responses to candidate ligands. Clearly, with thousands of candidate endogenous small (metabolite) molecules (many probably as yet unknown, and some, possibly including DMT, derived from exogenous substances) it is not easy to test them all experimentally. How then to make progress? [...]