Displaying posts categorized under

Bioinformatics

Predicting protein function: what’s new?

(New: the paper was recently published in Genome Biology!) Long time readers of this blog (hi mom!) know that I am working with many other people in an effort called CAFA: the Critical Assessment of protein Function Annotation. This is a challenge that many research groups participate in, and its goal is to determine how […]

On cross-disciplinary ambiguity and conference comfort zones

I recently attended a conference which was unusual for me as most of the speakers come from a computer science culture, rather than a biology one. Somewhat outside my comfort zone. The science that was discussed was quite different from the more biological bioinformatics meetings: the reason being the motivation of the scientists, and what […]

I’m Moving and Hiring

Starting June 1, 2015, my lab is moving to Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, and I’m very excited about this. I’ll be joining a growing cohort of researchers as part of a presidential “big data” hire the university has started a year ago. The research environment is superb, and there are some great bioinformaticians and genomics […]

Why scripting is not as simple as… scripting

If you haven’t read the transcript of Sean Eddy‘s recent talk “On High Throughput Sequencing for Neuroscience“, go ahead and read it. It’s full of many observations and insights into the relationships between computational and “wet” biology, and it is very well-written. I agree with many of his points, for example, that sequencing is not […]

Estimating how much we don’t know

Or: “Estimating how much we don’t know, and how much it can hurt us”. This post is about a paper I published recently with Predrag Radivojac’s group at Indiana University, who lead the study. One of the main activities I’m involved with is CAFA,* the critical assessment of function annotations.   The general idea of CAFA […]

Top 5 in Bioinformatics

I recently applied for a Moore Foundation grant in Data Science for the biological sciences. As part of the pre-application, I was asked to choose the top 5 works in data science in my field. Not so sure about data science, so I picked what I think are the most influential works in Bioinformatics, which […]

BOSC 2014 Guess the Keynote Competition

(From Peter Cock, via the OBF News Blog)   We’re pleased to officially confirm that one of the two keynote speakers for the 15th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2014) will be C. Titus Brown, as he announced on Twitter recently: Titus Brown (@ctitusbrown): Excited to be a keynote speaker at BOSC 2014! My […]

PhD position in Statistical Protein Structure Prediction, Copenhagen, Denmark

One of the major unsolved problems in bioinformatics is the protein folding problem: given an amino acid sequence, predict the overall three-dimensional structure of the corresponding protein. It has been known since the seminal work of Christian B. Anfinsen in the early seventies that the sequence of a protein encodes its structure, but the exact […]

The 2014 International Biocuration Conference

Hi all, I’m happy to say that the 2014 International Biocuration Conference is off to a good start. I have attended this excellent meeting twice before, and this year I am honored to be on the organizing committee. There was a lot of work behind the scenes, and we have agreed on five session topics.  […]

Quit smoking, more bacteria will like you

As an ex-smoker I can attest to this: quitting is  hard.  It can also make you fat. I gained quite a few kilos when I quit, and those took a long time to lose. Happily, these days I am spending money on running marathons rather than on cigarettes. Weight gain after smoking cessation is fairly […]

Postdoctoral Position in Computational Bioengineering (Rice University)

The Kavraki group at Rice University is looking to hire an enthusiastic postdoctoral researcher to enhance their research efforts in computational structural biology, drug design, and computational bioengineering. The group has significant expertise in the development of methods for motion planning for complex systems in robotics. Their Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL, http://ompl.kavrakilab.org) is now […]

Announcement: WikiProject Computational Biology Competition

WikiProject Computational Biology/ISCB competition announcement 2013 The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) announces an international competition to improve the coverage on Wikipedia of any aspect of computational biology. A key component of the ISCB’s mission to further the scientific understanding of living systems through computation is to communicate this knowledge to the public at […]

The Bio* projects: a history in graphs

Yesterday I received an email from Kristjan Liiva, a student at  RWTH Aachen University Germany. Kristjan has developed a really cool dashboard to analyze and visualize the development of collaborative OSS projects by mining their mailing lists and software repositories.  (If the link doesn’t work, try again later; the project is heavily under development). The […]

The Second Critical Assessment of protein Function Annotations

Announcing CAFA 2: The Second Critical Assessment of protein Function Annotations Friends and Colleagues, We are pleased to announce the Second Critical Assessment of protein Function Annotation (CAFA) challenge. In CAFA 2, we would like to evaluate the performance of protein function prediction tools/methods (in old and new scenarios) and also expand the challenge to […]

Squeezing DNA

The state of biology today:   Our main problem is turning these DNA data into useful information. Finding genes and other functional genomic element, characterizing them, understanding their function and their impact on Life – all these are challenges that will remain with us for a long time, and which have revolutionized biology into the […]