The OpenHelix Blog

If you haven’t noticed, we’ve started adding our tips of the week to SciVee and using the embed to embed them here. This allows you to view the video and share it on your web site or with friends. We’ve also created a “community” over at SciVee we’ve called “Genome Resource Training” where we will be gathering all these video tutorial tips along with any other video tutorials we find over at SciVee that train or introduce researchers on some of the huge amount of resources out there (click the “SciVee” icon above to visit the community). We’ve got about 8 tips over there now and another 8 or so videos from other sources. This community will only grow! So, come check it out, join SciVee and join our community! Of course you will _always_ find our tips here and much more on this blog, so keep us in your feeds and bookmarks and don’t forget to get some in-depth training with our tutorials! We are looking forward to a longterm and expanding work with SciVee.

We also now have a Facebook page, where we will be posting these tips weekly with an occasional ‘general-interest’ genomics link or two. So, please.. follow us there if you are on Facebook and ’share with friends!

Usually, we do our own tips for the week (in fact, up till today, always) and today I was going to do one on the Firefox Biobar, an excellent Firefox addon that allows you to search and retrieve data from dozens of databases and resources at one time right on your browser bar. I just rediscovered the biobar since I’ve been using a different browser (not Firefox) for a long while and recently returned to Firefox for most of my browsing. I remember why I liked Biobar. Nice quick way to search a lot of databases from PubMed to Wormbase. Well, I was going to do a tutorial, but in my search about the BioBar, I see user Simont from Scivee already did an great tutorial on installing and using Biobar, so I’m linking to that here! Ok, so it saves me time, but why duplicate efforts? He did a fine job. Check it out.

I’ve been surfing the web a lot the last couple days for genomics stuff, so here is another short post on something I found (probably the other OH bloggers know this already, but it’s knew to me .

The Rat Genome Database has a disease portal. These portals offer disease-specific data and right now include cardiovascular, neurological and obesity/metabolic syndrome disease portals. There’s a cancer disease portal coming.  If you go to the link, you’ll see they also have a short tutorial they added last month on the portal that has also been uploaded to SciVee (if you haven’t seen it already, SciVee is a community of pubcasts, or video casts of publications. Check it out).