Scientific Curator – Bioinformatics Interested individuals should apply on-line at www.jax.org/careers, referring to job posting #3256. Contact Jeannine Ross at ext. 6045 with questions. The incumbent in this position plays a critical role in data annotation and curation for the Gene Ontology (GO) and Protein Ontology (PRO) programs at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor [...]
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, [...]
This tweet from Neil Degrasse Tyson jolted me from a pleasant rest before tomorrow’s race: …which led to the (in)famous Scopes Trial. On May 5, 1925 John Scopes was charged and subsequently tried, found guilty, and fined $100 for teaching Evolution, a violation of Tennessee’s Butler Act. The trial became a battleground for science [...]
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 [...]
Great meeting: Biocuration 2012, Georgetown University, DC. When I leave a meeting with my head exploding with new ideas and a need to try them all out at once, I know I got my money’s worth, and then some. Even a three hour flight delay followed by discovering my car with a dead battery [...]
NSF grant funded, woohoo! Now I am hiring a programmer. So if you want to be part of a dynamic, growing lab, do lots of interesting stuff and upgrade yourself from just a great bioinformatician to a super-bioinformatician, this job’s for you. You’ll be working primarily on microbial genome evolution, including setting up a kick-butt [...]
(Originally published March 14, 2009) Happy Pi (π) Day! Americans write dates in the MM/DD/YYYY format instead of the DD/MM/YYYY format used by the rest of the world. Usually a rather painful and confusing format if you did not grow up with it, causing checks to bounce and leases to expire for those who recently [...]
A quick post for
We have some really talented students in our department. And I don’t just mean the science. I am honored to present the colorful and hilarious microbial artwork of Amber Beckett. Created between gel runs at Natosha Finley’s lab:
Continuing with rather philosophical musings about life, Ed Trifonov has recently suggested a new approach to defining life: let’s just vote on the definition. So how does that work? And why should it work in the first place? Note that I am diving straight into the subject, and not prefacing this post with a review [...]
I just received an email from Julian Gough , one of last year’s CAFA participants. He started a Wikipedia initiative on protein function prediction, which are barely stubs at the moment. EDIT: He alerted me to the fact that protein function prediction has virtually no presence on Wikipedia. So all you protein function predictors out there, please contribute. Yes, [...]
In Chapter 3 of The House at Pooh Corner, Rabbit organizes a search for Small, “One of my friends and relations.” Like a good manager (or scientist) Pooh lays out a program: As soon as Rabbit was out of sight, Pooh remembered that he had forgotten to ask who Small was, and whether he was the [...]
Prepared by daughter. Not to scale. Species not yet identified. Delicious.
