Displaying posts categorized under

Genomics

Open Job: How did the Gulf Oil Spill Affect the Ocean’s Microbiome?

Well, we’re not sure. But if you would like to find out, and you are on the market for an exciting postdoc position, this is the best way to go about it: Postdoctoral Position in Laboratory of Jack A. Gilbert. http://www.bio.anl.gov/PI/gilbert.html http://pondside.uchicago.edu/ecol-evol/people/gilbert.html The Macondo wellhead oil leak, also known as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill […]

Repost: the New Natural History

Today is the last day of the 19th Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics meeting. A great meeting of everything good: science, atmosphere, people and location. Good tweeter coverage too, at #LAMG12 The many genomic characterization talks in the meeting reminded me of a post I wrote three years ago. I decided to repost it, and dedicate […]

ISMB 2012 Vignettes Pt. 3: Swag

Promotional materials are part of any conference. In scientific meetings, the swag usually comes from the booths of product promoters, science publishers, and scientific societies. It was a nice surprise to see a Federal funding agency, the US Department of Energy give away decks of cards. I’m a sucker for cards, so I took a […]

Crowdsourcing Genomics II: Unveiling HINdeR and Phrux

About this time last year, I posted about a new course I was going to teach, Phage Genomics. Briefly: Phage isolation, electron microscopy, DNA sequencing in the first semester, annotation and comparative genomics in the second. And I get to teach the bioinformatics bit: annotation and comparative genomics. Woo-hoo! The great thing about this course, […]

The Inside Poop

It’s pretty much common knowledge that mother’s milk is the healthiest food for infants, and that it bestows health benefits upon mother and baby that formula feeding cannot match. The unique combination of lipids, sugars, proteins and antibodies is not even close to being rivaled by baby formula manufacturers. With few exceptions, such as when […]

It’s a smORF world, after all?

Here is a study that looked for a type of genes that the authors felt was neglected by classic genomic annotation. The research shows how to employed concepts in molecular evolution to validate the existence of these genes. Some background: the first question we ask after assembling a genome is: “where are the genes”? Not […]

Dirty Genomics

Circumcision, preventing fraud, and icky toilets. You know you’re going to read this.

In no particular order or ranking, recent and not-so-recent articles from PLoS-1. The common thread (if any): I thought they were pretty cool in one way or another.   1. Men don’t tell the truth about their penis. No kidding? But this is somewhat more serious. It has been accepted for some time that male […]

So what’s new with humans?

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. — William Hazlitt We like to think that we are the only species capable of emotional self-awareness and therefore the only “animal that laughs […]

The genomics programming language

Genomics is a new and exciting programming language based on Brainfsck. Here are the commands: g Move pointer to the right. e Move pointer to the left. n Increment the cell at the pointer. o Decrement the cell at the pointer. m Jump forward past the matching i if the cell at the current pointer […]

The Friedberg Lab is Recruiting Graduate Students

  The Friedberg Lab is recruiting graduate students, for both Master’s and Ph.D. WE ARE:  A dynamic young lab  interested in gene, gene cluster and genome evolution, understanding microbial communities and microbe-host interactions by metagenomic analyses, developing algorithms for understanding gene cluster evolution, and prediction of protein function from protein sequence and structure. YOU ARE: […]

Crowdsourcing genomics

  Miami University has  joined the National Genomics Research Initiative (NGRI) offered by HHMI Science Education Alliance (SEA) in their Phage Genomics course. The students go directly into the lab, participating in an authentic research experience. In a full-year academic course they: isolate and characterize bacterial viruses from their local soil prepare the viral DNA […]

Why it’s hard to assemble repetitive DNA regions

So here are EssOh and OhOne assembling a rather frustrating puzzle containing cows. The same 5-6 cow “characters” are repeated, which is a perfect way to illustrate low-complexity DNA sequences, and why they are hard to assemble, especially when the pieces are small, like those you get from some second generation sequencers.

The Assemblathon

The Genome Center at University of California Davis and researchers at UC Santa Cruz are  organizing a genome assembly competition which they call The Assemblathon. They have released two simulated genomes  for competing groups to assemble as best they can. Assemblies are due February 6th, 2011. So there is still time, if you would like […]

Strawberries, Chocolate and Open Access Genomics

Nature Genetics seems to have taken a page from the Food Network Magazine by timing two publications to the annual obsession with festive foods among many, NG readership included.  I am talking about the genomes of the Strawberry and of the Cocoa plants.  Both are important crops,  both are components of luxurious eating. Both papers are comprehensive […]