This blog post was inspired by two recent events.
First, in response to a NY Times article about the "data deluge" affecting biologists, one of my Facebook friends said something like "stop whining about how hard it is to analyze the data and do some good experiments instead!" I vehemently …
read moreThere are comments.
I'm just on my way back from a JGI workshop on metagenome informatics, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to write up a short review.
The workshop was, frankly, excellent. We saw a bunch of talks on metagenome assembly (my current interest) as well as single-cell sequencing approaches, and …
read moreThere are comments.
As sequencing gets cheaper and cheaper, one would expect the answer for how to best sequence (and assemble!) any given genome would change. Most biologists assume something along these lines: everyone else has achieved some standard coverage (say 10x, or 100x) for their genome, so all we need to do …
read moreThere are comments.
There's been a lot of hooplah in the last year or so about the fact that our ability to generate sequence has scaled faster than Moore's Law over the last few years, and the attendant challenges of scaling analysis capacity; see Figure 1a and 1b, this reddit discussion, and also …
read moreThere are comments.
One of the most important jobs a professor has is to pay it forward: that is, to teach, train, mentor, support, and open up opportunities for their students and postdocs. It's a job that is undervalued by those who focus on the short term -- the administrators and review committees that …
read moreThere are comments.
During our next-gen course, a "student" (really a professor from Australia ;) asked me if I could provide some guidance on what computational infrastructure was necessary to handle next-gen sequencing data. While we used Amazon Web Services during the course, she was interested in finding out if they could use their …
read moreThere are comments.
For anyone who actually wants to know what it is I do, I've updated my lab Web site, http://ged.msu.edu/, to be a bit more representative of what it is we're doing these days. (I wrote it over three years ago, so it's been becoming increasingly dated.) In …
read moreThere are comments.