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I knew that sequencers are getting cheaper all the time but in genome technology this week they're talking with the inventors of the technology that 454 is licencing, discussing future pyro-sequencing updates and how that should lead to very cheap machines. Prospects are that any lab can sequence it's own genome in three years, the technology seems almost ready: Basically a cheaper and smaller version of 454's current machines. If you believe that sequence databases are exploding at the moment, better prepare for a new wave.

I've recently been to a cool workshop called "RegCreative". The idea was to mass-curate papers into a new database. There we have the usual discussion "open" (Oreganno) versus "private" (Transfac) databases and the open one is this case is still far from big enough, but that's not my main point here.
I liked the workshop because we were actually spending a lot of time at the computer and reading papers. There were no big stars, impressive results, great publications and hypothesizes, mainly people that presented their own databases ("I've spent 500 hours to create my database" (flytf), "I read 120 papers) (flyreg), etc...) and then afterwards everyone would get back to their computers, trying to put in one of the papers from the big pile at the entrace. The problem of database curation became very obvious to all participants and they got more tired of reading papers with every day that passed... (Here is a picture from the beginning, when people were still discussing :-)

The full complement of the Human Proteome Organisation (HUPO) Proteomics Standards Initiative (PSI), Minimum Information About a Proteomics Experiment (MIAPE), recommended reporting guidelines are now available for community review on the Nature Biotechnology website.

The manuscripts range from the definition of the MIAPE concept to the individual guidelines themselves which cover, Mass Spectrometry, Mass Spectrometry Informatics, Gel Electrophoresis and Molecular Interaction experiments. A further paper on the PSI protein modification ontology (PSI-MOD) is also listed.

What does DNA do when it's not being transcribed into RNA? It causes DNA mania...

Hi everyone

First post here at nodalpoint. I have been following the site for quite a long time and according to it I am registered for 31 weeks and some change. Anyway, I don't know if this would be the right place to announce, but I created two blogs that will cover some aspects of bioinformatics:

Blind.Scientist - more general, with posts commenting on biology in general, with emphasis on bioinformatics http://blindscientist.genedrift.org

and

Beginning Python for Bioinformatics - which is a comparison between the book about Perl and developing similar applications with Python http://python.genedrift.org

The carnival bug has bitten the postdocs. The first edition is slated to appear at Propter Doc's on the 27th/28th of January, so get posting!

Not waving but drowning?

The 14th annual Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) database issue 2007 has just been published, open-access. This year is the largest yet (again) with 968 molecular biology databases listed, 110 more than the previous one (see figure below). In the world of biological databases, are we waving or drowning?