I’m trying to download some data from the Sequence Read Archive but it seems to be behaving quite unusually. Just writing a post to summarise this and see if anyone has seen it before. If I get an answer from the SRA helpdesk, I will post it in the comments/an edit. I’m interested in ERR024630, or…

Ok, overly provocative title perhaps? My point is that, the milkman* doesn’t ask for £20 with the promise that he will deliver milk in 20 years time. The normal state of transactions is that, you pay for something, you get something in return. Not for one second am I saying that I don’t think academic…

tl;dr? Science is Vital! Write George Osbourne a postcard, telling him why you think science is vital. Write to your MP! Last night I went to the Science is Vital rally (Science: as vital as ever). I have to express my admiration for all the organisers and presenters, who I thought did a tremendous job…

Notes for GenomeTrakr 2015 meeting Context These notes were taken during the FDA GenomeTrakr Meeting held at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington DC, USA from 23-24 September 2015. The notes are intended to be as objective as possible. Personal opinions or speculation are prefixed by the author’s initials below: Contributors to this document PA…

tl;dr wow, this article on The Conversation is annoying! I mean seriously, soooo annoying! conflict of interest – I’m a massive Stuart Brand fan boy. skip halfway down for take down of crappy article. An article on The Conversation really got under my skin for the almost willful misunderstanding of Stewart Brand followed closely by a…

There is a certain amount of snootiness amongst bioinformaticians when it comes to Excel. If a graph with the default excel colour scheme is showed at a conference there may be sideways glances and sniggers amongst the technorati. However, excel remains the most commonly used tool for bioinformatics (citation needed). When lab staff first join our…

Posted on behalf of Lauren ————————————————– Since the 2nd of June I have been in Guinea contributing to the Ebola response by sequencing the new cases on the MinION. Many of you will be familiar with the project going on and will have heard about Josh Quick coming out to Conakry to set it up.…

Mike Schatz has posted an interesting paper on Biorxiv on ‘The next 20 years of genome research‘. In it, he argues that in future ‘it will become less and less practical to transfer data into these [NCBI/EBI] archives as they exist today’ and that ‘In its place, we will see the rise of federated approaches…

TL;DR CLIMB is fricking awesome Last weekend, the MRC CLIMB initiative hosted a hackathon, with the broad aim of using the CLIMB resource to do some cool stuff, which Nick Loman has recently got up and running at Birmingham. There was lots of pizza, beer and bbq, as well as hacking. One of the things we…

TL;DR There are at least 3 big genomics of foodborne pathogens/outbreak detection/analysis platforms/projects. If you know of any others/feel I have grossly misrepresented your project, get in touch. I hope that there is some co-ordination between these, possibly via the GMI initiative, to make the most of the funding devoted to this area. It’s a…