VICC's retreat this year is Tuesday, May 11, 2010. The theme of the retreat looks interesting: "Genomic Approaches for Personalized Medicine." You can register free here. VICC retreat: Genomic Approaches for Personalized MedicineGetting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

Hadley Wickham, creator of ggplot2, has posted a 2 hour video on data visualization using R. You can find links to the videos and slides over at Revolutions Blog. Check back here soon. I am working with Hadley to arrange a day-long ggplot2 short course here at Vanderbilt this summer.

*** Update April 25, 2011: This code has gone through a major revision. Please see the updated code and tutorial here. *** A few months ago I showed you in this post how to use some code I wrote to produce manhattan plots in R using ggplot2. The qqman() function I described in the previous post actually calls another function, manhattan(), which has a few options you can set.

Just caught this on the OpenHelix Blog. In an interview with Charlie Rose, NIH director Francis Collins said Computational biologists will be the "breakthrough" artists of the future. Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

While reading through an article on job hunting success on Bitesize Bio I stumbled upon another piece there that's definitely in the spirit of "getting things done" in genetics research. I had always halfway considered going into business manufacturing lab supplies. Take a $10 Easy-Bake Oven and add a little bit tighter temperature regulation, call it a hybridization oven, and sell it for thousands.

Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center, Institute for Medicine and Public Health presents: "Pathway-based analysis for genome-wide association studies" Steven Chen Ph.D Assistant Professor of Biostatistics Tuesday, March 16, 2010 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM 2525 West End Avenue 6th Floor BoardroomGetting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

Here are the papers we talked about in yesterday's Journal Club: Genome Biol. 2009; 10(11): R134 Searching for SNPs with cloud computing. Langmead B, Schatz MC, Lin J, Pop M, Salzberg SL. Table of Contents, Nature Methods, Visualization Supplement. Am J Hum Genet. 2010 Feb 12; 86(2): 113-25 Functional gene group analysis reveals a role of synaptic heterotrimeric G proteins in cognitive ability.

This Thursday's discovery lecture looks interesting. In case you missed last week's Nobel laureate, you can watch the recording from Cech's talk or any of the previous lectures in the discovery series here.

Check out this month's table of contents in  Nature Methods. It contains a series of five commissioned Reviews discuss the challenges of visualizing biological data and the visualization tools available to biologists working with genomes, alignments and phylogenies, macromolecular structures, images and systems biology data.

Suppose you have billions of reads from a hot new sequencing machine and you want to simultaneously align these reads and call SNPs very quickly on the cheap. Check out an open source tool called Crossbow and the recent paper in Genome Biology.

In a previous tutorial I showed you how to create plots faceted by the level of a third variable using ggplot2. A commenter asked about using faceted plots and viewports and reminded me of this function I found in the ggplot2 Google group. The arrange function below is similar to using par(mfrow=c(r,c)) in base graphics to put more than one plot in the same image window.