After a long hiatus SciView is back with a new interview with Dr Roderic Page from the University of Glasgow. Dr Page is the current Editor in Chief of Syatematic Biology and developer of TreeView(X), the beloved phylogenetic tree visualization software. He was also the editor of the Current Protocols in Bioinformatics.
As usual here is the link.
Enjoy.
Two of my favourite things and the subject of a 3-article feature in Nature this week, presumably for the festive season. The first of these is a fascinating look at the evolution of ADH genes.
I'm not sure "how scared we should be" - rather less than the commercial news networks would have us believe, I suspect. If you're looking to inform yourself about avian influenza (aka 'bird flu'), Flu Wiki is a good place to start.
Update: I just can't resist The Onion's Nation's Leading Alarmists Excited About Bird Flu.
Let's celebrate our return with one of our anachronistic "papers of the month". My pick this time around is The net of life: reconstructing the microbial phylogenetic network, in Genome Research 15: 954-959, by Kunin et al.
I'm now in the main hall for the final keynote presentation. The hall is packed with people, currently there is a promotional video for Brazil, which is where ISMB2006 will be held. I'm definitely requesting travel funds for that, but then again, I'll have to travel with the boss... We have the governer of Michigan here apparently, Jennifer Granholm, will appere ? She's here, she talked, we discovered that Michigan is shaped like a hand.
Pavel Pevzner's key note has just started. He's talking on the topic of genome rearrangements
Hello World.
I Have a question for the fine people here, and I am a rank amateur, so please excuse my lack of proper vocabulary.
I've been trying to find the whole story on a case which I read about several years ago- I think it was possibly in John L. Casti's "Paradigms Lost", or possibly Stephen Pinker's "The Language Instinct".
In any case, the example refers to a "famous experiment" which is often referred to as "[so-and-so's] Monster", in which, a microorganism is placed in an extremely hospitible environment and allowed to thrive there with no enemies or inhibition. After many generations of reproduction in this safe environment, the organism was found to have a markedly less-complex genetic structure.
Not exactly bioinformatics-related, but I'm excited by the news of methane on Mars. Check out my additions to ArchaeaWeb on this topic.
On a side note, the BBC article originally stated that bacteria are methanogens. I wrote to point out the error and they corrected it and replied personally! Now that's public service.
A nice example of how blog technology is being used in education. See, I told you it works...
