(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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
(For those who don’t get it.)
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 […]
We like to think of ourselves as the better results of evolution. We humans are particularly proud of our ability to communicate, having invented cell phones, the Internet, and extended forelimb digits as sophisticated means of communication not found anywhere else in nature. Not true. Where there is life, there is communication. Vocal, visual, chemical. […]
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 […]
Should DNA be subject to copyright law, rather than patent law? Section 101 of Title 35 U.S.C. sets out the subject matter that can be patented: Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the […]
A new paper from my lab and Patsy Babbitt’s lab in UCSF has recently been published in PLoS Computational Biology. It is something of a cautionary tale for quantitative biologists, especially bioinformaticians and system biologists. Genomics has ushered biology into the data rich sciences. Bioinformatics, developing alongside genomics, provided the tools necessary to decipher genomic […]
Great bit of research showing the amazing adaptation of bat tongues to nectar feeding. Harper, C., Swartz, S., & Brainerd, E. (2013). Specialized bat tongue is a hemodynamic nectar mop Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1222726110
