Last week I did an interview with James Turner at O'Reilly about my upcoming talk at OSCON. It turns out that James is a bit of a genomics nut and therefore had a lot of insightful questions about the current state of genomics and health. Hopefully my responses were as good as his questions. You can judge for yourself by listening to the interview or reading the transcript: Sequencing a Genome a Week. Update: The... Full Post
U.S. News & World Report has a new article about pioneers in the field of medical research. Included in the list are The Genome Center's very own Elaine Mardis and Rick Wilson. The article discusses our work sequencing the first cancer genome and our plans to sequence 150 more by early next year. Full Post
VarScan, a tool developed at The Genome Center to detect variants in massively parallel sequence data has been published in Bioinformatics. VarScan can process both 454 and Solexa data of individuals or pools. You can find more information about VarScan in a post by Dan Koboldt, one of the paper's and VarScan's authors. Full Post
The major funding announcements for the Human Microbiome Project were made public today. Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis really stands out amongst those awarded grants. As the NIH press release indicates, in addition to the The Genome Center's $16.1M large-scale sequencing grant (the largest of the sequencing grants), Ellen Li, MD, PhD, Greg Storch, MD, and Phil Tarr, MD, each received about $1M demonstration project grants to study Crohn's disease, viruses that... Full Post
Tony Brummet from The Genome Center gave a presentation earlier this week at the St. Louis Perl Mongers meeting on UR. The kind folks at StL.pm have posted the videos for the geographically challenged to enjoy. Part 1 Part 2 You can find a PDF of the slide deck in the Files section of the StL.pm Google Group page. Full Post