nodalpoint.org

In a recent Science magazine article, Löytynoja-Goldman showed that all current Multiple Sequence Alignment algorithms – the bread-and-butter algorithm for biologists studying similarities in genes across different species – completely fail to detect independent insertions in the alignment of sequences, and thus, erroneously mismatches regions of evolutionary volatility. In their improved MSA algorithm, PRANK, they use history itself to improve the performance of this basic algorithm. [more...]

The NIH has published, in 2000, a definition of bioinformatics which is supposed to be the 'official' one:
- http://www.bisti.nih.gov/CompuBioDef.pdf

I partly disagree with that!! Or at least, I think it is incomplete.

Bioinformatics is not only providing services and tools for scientists and for analyzing data.
It is also a scientific discipline, in which you make an hypothesis, you write down your assumptions, you manage to find a way to demonstrate it, and then you share your results with other scientists and confront with them.

I'm not much of an evolutionary biologist, but Jonathan Eisen asked for help and I can't resist. So, in the name of Science, and via the goodness of nodalpoint, here is some deserved Google Juice for various Trees of Life on the Web.

• Jonathan Eisen's "Tree of Life" blog
• Tree of Life Web Project
• Tree of life (science) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Green Tree of Life at Berkeley
• Fungal Tree of Life Project
• Beetle Tree of Life project
• Fly Tree of Life project
• Mammal Tree of Life project
• Cypriniformes Tree of Life project
• Liverwort Tree of Life Project
• Early Bird Tree of Life project
• Angiosperm Tree of Life project
• Cnidaria Tree of Life Project
• Decapoda Tree of Life Project

There, I've done my bit for Science, now it's your turn. Spread the ❤ link love ❤,and since we will soon be celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, why not marvel at the coral / shrub / lungs of life too?

(CC-licensed Tree of Life picture by Phitar)