Byte Size Biology

It is fun chairing the program committee of a new meeting: you get all this cutting edge research getting thrown your way.  Scientists will submit their latest to meetings, True, it is usually incomplete work and very rough around the edges. But it’s great being one of the first to know what’s cooking in other labs.  So we get a lot of 75% -baked ideas which are really fascinating.

The Metagenomics Metadata and Metaanalysis  (M3) meeting which I am involved with is about organizing, tagging, and generally distilling information from the flood of genomic and metagenomic data, and associated metadata. Can we associate chronic bowel diseases with the human microbiome? Can we attribute coral death to viruses? What are the differences between bacteria in the ocean sediment and  in the ocean water? All these are scientific questions that require robust statistical and computational tools to be answered. The Genomics Standards Consortium, of which I am happy to be a member, has been dealing with these kind of challenges for a few years now. This year we are going to meet at Stockholm, June 27 2009 to discuss the latest in the field of large scale genomic data processing.

Just for kicks, I made a word cloud from the all the abstracts submitted. The names were removed to protect the guilty., but if you look closely, you see that the famous authors “et” and “al” are still there. Other than that, expect a good day of discussing microbial genomics, community genomics, environmental data, metadata and above all (as you can see) DATA. Because there are lots of those.