We blog about genomics. We also make a platform for open-source analysis of next generation data in the cloud. Hello.
The scientific community is assessing manners, I think, because so many of us are in a better position to comment on those than on the science. There’s more drama in bioinformatics this past month, as Lior Pachter, with his student Nicolas Bray, published a series of blog posts eviscerating, among
One opportunity that comes from working in an infant discipline is that of being able to examine and influence its basic tools. You are more likely to fundamentally improve alignment or assembly than you are to improve the foundations of thermodynamics. And given the state of bioinformatics software, it is
Each sequencing technology comes with a unique and unavoidable error profile due to the chemistry, biology, and hardware involved [1,2,3]. If we want avoid analysis artifacts and arrive safely at the biological reality underlying the data, we must to account for these errors during informatic analysis. Recently, researchers have begun tackling
With less than a week until Super Bowl XLVIII in New Jersey, we’re taking a look at a different meeting of elites. We’re not talking about Peyton Manning, and we’re certainly not talking about Russell Wilson. Instead, we’re focusing our attention on the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting, which took
Our CEO, Deniz Kural, recently joined Jason Tetrault, Architect at AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, for a panel discussion of topics in genomics and pharmaceuticals in an event hosted by MongoDB. Before the panel, Jason gave what he described as a “fairly inaccurate overview of genetics processing” from the sequencer to the
This Monday we went to Microsoft’s beautiful NERD building for Microsoft Research’s 2013 conference in Computational Aspects of Biological Information (CABI). The pastries were good and the presentations were even better. Jim Collins spoke about implementing flip-flops in bacteria, and about the prospects of biocomputation more generally; Pardis Sabeti discussed
This week, a dialogue erupted around the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) Consortium and its methods for analyzing RNA-Seq data. Tracking the debate will take you through Twitter threads, into blog posts, down comments sections, past PubMed entries, and over Nature‘s login wall.
The short read files that Ion Torrent’s sequencing machines give us still contain many homopolymer errors: errors in the number of bases called when a single nucleotide occurs more than once in sequence. This makes alignment harder and drowns real indels in a sea of noise. These homopolymer errors arise
We know that our whole genome is distributed to (almost) every cell of our bodies. This fact can be used both to surprise introductory biology students and to usefully refine a fundamental scientific question. Instead of merely asking how it comes to be that different parts of our bodies have
RNA-Seq is fast becoming the top method for examining the transcriptional activity of genomes. In the five years since the first publications described the technology, RNA-Seq has enabled the discovery of new transcripts in well-studied genomes, challenged our views of imprinting, offered insights into the biology of cancer, and transformed new
