bioinformatics

This October (9-11, 2019), I attended the 3rd NIBLSE conference entitled: "Integration of Bioinformatics into Life Science Education: Roadmap for the Future." It was held at " Hot Shops " in Omaha Nebraska, a space for artists to work, sell, and meet.

You might ask what is NIBLSE and why are they making a roadmap for the future?

NIBLSE - Network for Integrating Bioinformatics into Life Sciences Education, is five-year NSF funded Research ... Read more

BCRs (antibodies) and TCRs (T cell receptors) are the recognition molecules of our immune system; the molecules they bind are called antigens. BCRs and TCRs are similar in many ways, but their differences form the core of how self and non-self are recognized.

Immuno-bioinformatics is a fast growing subdiscipline of immuno-biotechnology. New technologies like immune-profiling and targeted cancer therapies are leading to job growth and demands for new skills and knowledge in biomanufacturing, quality systems, informatics, and cancer biology.

"Eew!" Is how high performance computing (HPC) admins react to Docker, according to Dr. Vanessa Saurus when she described the motivation for developing Singularity [1] at the Cyverse Container Camp . Like Docker, Singularity allows one to package programs and their dependencies in ways that they can be run as virtual instances with low overhead. Singularity improves on Docker to make it possible to run containers in HPC environments such as super computers.

Why ... Read more

Containerization technologies like Docker are designed to solve challenges associated with installing and running complex software such as bioinformatics pipelines and web servers. Docker will change the world ... maybe. While clearly powerful and enabling, the magic of Docker can also be an overpromise. To understand why, you need to understand the “ The Law of Leaky Abstractions .”

The technological Singularity is the moment beyond which "technological progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated [1].” Hmmm. That sounds like bioinformatics.

Surviving the Singularity requires reducing complexity. This was the topic of a recent three-day Cyverse Container Camp hosted at the University of Arizona, Tucson AZ. I attended the camp as part of Digital World Biology's ... Read more

A lot of our colleagues are interested in bioinformatics and data science. While it is clear that bioinformatics is important, even essential, in modern biology research, there is the question about the levels of programming and computer skills needed for different jobs. I'm not going to answer that question here. Instead I'm going to focus on one end of the problem, that is, how is a bioinformatician similar to a data scientist? I'll illustrate the kinds of skills that are needed for this role by sharing my recent experience of how we moved the Discovering Biology in a Digital World (DWB ... Read more

This six minute video describes some of the history of bioinformatics. Read more