I was just asked for some advice on PhD viva, so have turned the email into a blog post. —————— They often start by asking you to place your work into context of existing literature and summarise your main findings in 5-10 minutes, so have your summary ready. The main prep I did was to…

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many…

TL:DR? Lighter is an excellent sequencing read error correction tool, fast (90 seconds for 700 mb unzippped fastq) and well engineered (install was completely painless) It significantly speeds up assembly – 20% in my quick benchmark using a Salmonella genome It reduces the number of positions that have an AD ratio of <0.9, remember – every…

Exciting news everyone! Lauren Cowley is currently in Sierra Leone, being a Time Person of the Year, but she has still found time to write a blog post on her experiences – see below: ——————– I have been in Port Loko, Sierra Leone for 2 and a half weeks now. I’m working in the diagnostic lab…