The power of science blogging
Hats off to Jonathan Eisen for hosting this activity on his blog. (I’ll keep mine on, thank you. It’s raining cats and dogs here right now).
A couple of weeks ago I posted a discussion about two papers that challenged the ortholog conjecture. Briefly, both papers stated that orthologs may not be such great predictors for molecular function. One study from Indiana University by has shown that paralogs may be better predictors than orthologs for molecular function. Or, at the very least, paralogs should not be excluded as predictors. This paper has generated quite a bit of interest and controversy. Consequently, Eisen has invited Matthew Hahn, the lead author to write about “the story behind the story” in Eisen’s well-read blog. The post is a great read, and has generated an animated discussion in the comments area. You do need to clear quite a bit of time to go through both Hahn’s guest post and the comment thread: the topic is a rather complex one, and as explained in the comments thread, one problem is that the ‘ortholog conjecture’ itself seems to be not well-defined.
I kept checking in to Eisen’s blog to read the elongating comment thread. It seems that now a special session on the topic may be in the works for the 2012 annual meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution following this discussion. So great to see such an involved community getting together.
Comments are closed.
