My contribution to the Genomics Law Report's What ELSI is New? series appears today, Personalized medicine, leave U.S. behind. The piece discusses the challenges our current health care system presents to genetic research and proposed reforms that would improve the situation. For the record, while this opinion piece was just published, I did write it before this similar piece appeared. Full Post
I have made some updates to the Next-Generation Sequencing Informatics table. Specifically, I have updated the numbers for 454 Ti, including paired-end information, and added information on the Illumina GA IIx. If anyone that is not employed by AB has real-world numbers for SOLiD 3, I'd appreciate you passing them along to me (I'm looking at you drd). Update: I received some SOLiD 3 number from Nicholas Socci (thanks Nicholas!). Update2: I received a fuller... Full Post
Francis Collins, Director of NIH, was on The Colbert Report last Thursday. Colbert did not give him much time to speak, but he did get to take his glasses off and shake out his hair. The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Francis Collins www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Michael Moore Update: Yesterday the New York Times published an article about Dr. Collins. Full Post
The Genome Data Center has received a Gold LEED Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. This is in addition to the Keystone Award from the St. Louis Association of General Contractors. It is quite an achievement for a power hungry data center to receive a LEED certification, much more a Gold Certification, but the WUSM Design and Construction team along with the architects, engineers, and contractors were able to pull it off. Recently the... Full Post
In the long awaited follow up to Breakin' and Breakin' 2, Ken Chen has released BreakDancer. As described in his Nature Methods article and a recent Genome Technology article, BreakDancer is not so much a movie as it is a bioinformatics program that can detect structural variation (insertions, deletions, inversions, and translocations) in genomes using paired-end read data. It can be used to detect structural variation in individual genomes, pools of genomes (like the low-coverage... Full Post