A LaTeX goodie (and one or two for biologists as well).

A nice link today:

• Via the Blog on Latex Matters comes a tip about creating margin comments using the \marginpar{…} tag, which is a built-in way to add margin notes to a document as an alternative to using comments in the code.  Very nice!

I was also poking around CTAN and came across a couple of biology-oriented packages:

• BioTeX is a project to help expand the use of LaTeX in the biological sciences by bringing high quality packages to said sciences.  On their webpage you will find two packages which might be of use to the molecular biologists out there:  TeXshade, described as “a comprehensive program for displaying, shading and labeling of nucleotide andprotein alignments”, and TeXtopo, “plotting of shaded membrane protein topology data”.  Since I’m working in behavioural ecology right now, I don’t expect to get much use from these myself, but hopefully someone else will find them useful!
• For those of you with a regular need to typeset biological species names, the Biocon package, available through CTAN, might be of some assistance to you.  It allows you to define commands to refer to each species you reference, giving you the ability to flexibly automate the inclusion of those species names in your document.  For more information on the specifics of how to use this package, take a look at the manual.