So, I wrote about defunding resources and briefly mentioned a paper in Database about funding (or ‘re’funding) databases and resources. I’d like to discuss this a bit further. The paper, by Chandras et. al, discusses how databases and, to use their term, Biological Resource Centers (BRCs) are to maintain financial viability. Let me state first, [...]
From Deepak Singh: Scientists spend years collecting and generating increasing amounts data. The data ranges from raw instrument data, “finished” data (e.g. a genome sequence which is constructed after aligning all the short reads from a next-gen sequencer), and annotated data, which has been marked up to add additional information. We have repositories where a [...]
There is plenty of buzz out there for the big data biology projects–but usually the focus is the human data (with a few token model organisms thrown in). But this week plant researchers renewed the call for big plant data. I’m totally on board with that. The 1000 Genomes project to obtain more human variation [...]
Speaking of Genbank’s 25th, a few weeks ago Science had a news piece “Proposal to ‘Wikify’ Genbank Meets Stiff Resistance.” Apparently, those in the Mycology research community have found many inaccuracies in the Genbank records and wish to see a change that would allow annotations to be made by the community: a scheme like those [...]
I was looking over the Eurekalert announcements and came across one that I have been percolating about now for some time. It is an effort I fully support and encourage. But I worry about a few aspects of it. The alert is entitled: Controlling a sea of information. The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) has partnered [...]
I finally got around to reading last month’s Nature paper on the genomic sequence of 12 Drosophila species. In addition to being genomics research (which is my field now , it is also looking at 12 of the couple dozen species I studied for my Ph.D. (though I was only looking at the evolution of [...]
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