Procrastination level = Legendary

[GeneticJen]

I had work to do, so I procrastinated. But when I procrastinate I'm always productive... just not doing the thing I'm supposed to be doing. Sometimes I learn a language, do some coding, learn more chess openings, write a blog etc. On Wednesday I decided I'd tweet a genome, because why the hell not?

I tweeted the entire HIV-1 genome on Thursday (Guinness World Records are currently looking at). It took approximately 2 hours and 70 tweets. Later that night I started tweeting the first prokaryote genome to Twitter, E. coli (K12 MG1655). It will take over a month and 30,000+ tweets.

If it sounds pointless, then you can read about why I did it here: GenomeTweet
If you're curious about how I'm actually doing it then you can read about it here: GenomeTweet - how it works

It's already got quite a lot of attention. Various big labs are following it, which was unexpected as it wasn't made for biologists. It's just a fun way to visualise how much data is in a genome. And only people who use Twitter will really appreciate that.

My favourite responses so far:

1. "It's irresponsible, terrorists could use it."

2. "It's an interesting idea but useless, it's all written in code."

3. Some people are playing the genome on instruments, using the nucleotide bases as notes. T = rest.

4. Despite repeated warnings, about 70 people are actually following the accounts. They're willingly choosing to have countless nucleotides appear on their timelines every 90 seconds.

5. People have been retweeting some of the tweets, which I find bizarre. Even stranger, some tweets have proven to be more popular than others. Yesterday I noticed one had been retweeted over 10 times (which might not sound like a lot, but we're talking about a tweet full of nucleotides, and one tweet from several hundred).

6. Some people have called for yet another sequence file format. The TWASTA file.

[Clinton Huxley]

Number 5. Funny

[Clinton Huxley]

Twenomes......

[mistermack]

This could be catching.

It might even go viral.

[Audley Strange]

I've read worse poetry on twitter.

[Sean Hayden]

[PsychoSerenity]

This is genius!

[GeneticJen]

I've read worse poetry on twitter.

I've read better poetry in my blog statistics

http://endlessforms.net/2013/10/18/a-se ... ults-poem/

[rachelbean]

I've read worse poetry on twitter.

I've read better poetry in my blog statistics

http://endlessforms.net/2013/10/18/a-se ... ults-poem/

Some of those are just confoundingly strange

[GeneticJen]

Fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) started last night: @GenomeTweetFly.

[Clinton Huxley]

Paging Seth Brundle...