and what is the volume of the sea? This sounds a bit like the beginning of a poem but it's really the answer to the question we posed last week on a Digital Biology Friday. We can see, in the sequence window, that two strands are both labeled 5' on ...
What do you do when base-callers disagree? Okay DNA sequencing community, I want your help with this one. One of these sequences was called by phred and the other by the ABI KB base calling program. Which one should I believe? tags: Sometimes I open up files and do short ...
A long standing debate in my field is whether or not biologists, who work with computers, need to learn how to program. I usually say "no." Let the programmers program, the biologists interpret the results, and let everyone can benefit from each other's expertise. Well, I've changed my mind in ...
Razib inspired me to share some of the story behind why white people are considered derivatives. No red herrings, here! Lamason et. al. found a single gene that controls human skin color while studying pigmentation in zebra fish (1). These zebra fish had an unusual golden color that turned out ...
Lots of bloggers in the DNA network have been busy these past few days writing about Google's co-founder Sergey Brin, his blog, his wife's company ( 23andme), and his mutation in the LRRK2 gene. I was a little surprised to see that while other bloggers ( here, here, here, and ...
We'll have a blast, I promise! But there's one little thing we need to discuss first... I want to explain why I'm going to use nucleotide sequences for the blast search. (I used protein the other day). It's not just because someone told me too, there is a solid rational ...
Sometimes asking a question can be a mistake. Especially when your question leads to more questions and having to question things that you didn't want to question, and pretty soon you begin to regret ever opening the file and looking at the data and asking the question in the first ...
