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Biology

#DNA60

It has not escaped Twitter’s notice that the Watson & Crick paper is 60 years old today . Sorry, too busy to be really creative, so here is a repost from 2009. Think of it as a transposon. Short quiz and a movie for DNA day. 1) We celebrate DNA day because: a) Congress said so […]

Automated Function Prediction: Submit your abstracts by Saturday

You have until Friday Saturday, April 20th to submit your abstracts to the Automated Function Prediction meeting, an ISMB 2013 Special Interest Group and CAFA: Critical Assessment of Function Annotations. Keynote speakers: Patricia Babbitt, University of California, San Francisco. Protein similarity networks: Identification of functional trends from the context of sequence similarity Alex Bateman, European Bioinformatics […]

Terrible advice from a great scientist

I am not inclined to write polemic posts. I generally like to leave that to others, while I take the admittedly easier route of waxing positive over various bits of cool science I find or hear about, and yes, occasionally do myself. But WSJ editorial from E.O. Wilson has irked me so much, I have […]

The power of single-cell genomics: the mysterious SR1 bacteria have a unique genetic code

Thanks to Mitch Balish for calling my attention to this one. SR1 bacteria are not exactly a household name, even among microbiologists. They were first discovered in contaminated aquifers,  and since then they were found to be also in animal and insect guts, as well as in human mouths. They are even suspected of being […]

Announcement: Automated Protein Function Prediction Meeting

The Automated Function Prediction, an ISMB 2013 Special Interest Group meeting and CAFA: Critical Assessment of Function Annotations. July 20, 2013, Berlin Keynote speakers Patricia Babbitt, University of California, San Francisco Alex Bateman, European Bioinformatics Institute Anna Tramontano, “La Sapienza” University, Rome. Key dates: April 20, 2013: Deadline for submitting extended abstracts posters & talks May […]

Some omics words we would like to see

Advertisomics: environmental sequencing aimed at obtaining popular press coverage with little or no scientific value. Samples obtained from an environment otherwise not of microbiological interest. “Hey, did you hear they swabbed  the car wheels in the building’s parking lot and found that the microbes all cluster by tire brand name?” Celebromics: sequencing the genome or […]

Critical Assessment of Genome Interpretation, 2013

From the organizers of CAGI 2013. I have been to the Critical Assessment in 2010 and 2011, and even participated as an assessor. It’s a fun meeting, and if your work involves prediction of phenotypes from genotypes, there is still time (just about) to accept some of the challenges. The Critical Assessment of Genome Interpretation […]

The Black Queen Hypothesis

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.” “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same […]

Life Stands on the shoulders of Giants (Viruses)

Back to ancient life, what exactly defines life, and where does life end and non-life begin. One of my favorite subjects, and one of which I am the least knowledgeable. Doesn’t stop me writing about it though. Viruses are… well… not really life. Or so says common wisdom. They have some elements of life: a […]

A bit more on writing bioinformatic research code

There has been a lot of discussion recently on this blog and others on the need for robust scientific software. Most of the discussion I have been involved in comes from bioinformaticians, because, well, I am one. There has been plenty of talk about code robustness, sharing, and replicability vs. reproduciblity. I do not want […]

Reproducible research software: some more thoughts

So there was a lot written over the blogosphere, twittersphere and what-have-you-sphere about the to publish code in scientific research. The latest volley was fired from a post at biostars.org from “JermDemo” which also mentioned my post on making accountable research software by forming a volunteer “Bioinformatics Testing Consortium”. (My post, not my idea). I won’t […]

Not “Ancient”. Still Cool.

 This commentary appeared in Nature  recently. Title:  Ancient Fungi Found in Deep Sea Mud. Quote: Researchers have found evidence of fungi thriving far below the floor of the Pacific Ocean, in nutrient-starved sediments more than 100 million years old….To follow up on earlier reports of deep-sea fungi, Reese and her colleagues studied sediments pulled up from […]

Nobel Prize Quips at PDBe

I received this email today from Gary Battle at PDBe . Very cool:   Nobel Prize Quips: Explore the structure of B2AR bound to its G-protein. Today, Nobel Laureates Robert J. Lefkowitz and Brian K. Kobilka take center stage in Stockholm where they will receive their Nobel Prize Medals for their studies of G-protein–coupled receptors […]

DIGging into Images and Genomes

Our lab has a new project and website up. The project is BioDIG: Biological Database of Images and Genomes.  BioDIG lets you combine image data and genome data of, well, just about anything which you can make images and have a genome, or partial genomic information. You can upload your image, annotate (tag) parts of […]

Equal pay for equal primates

See what happens when a Capuchin monkey receives unequal pay: The article in Nature (2004): Monkeys reject unequal pay Sarah F. Brosnan & Frans B. M. de Waal