Last week I taught a three-hour introduction to R workshop for life scientists at UVA's Health Sciences Library. I broke the workshop into three sections: In the first half hour or so I presented slides giving an overview of R and why R is so awesome. During this session I emphasized reproducible research and gave a demonstration of using knitr + rmarkdown in RStudio to produce a PDF that can easily be recompiled when data updates.

A couple of months ago I posted about how to visualize exome coverage with bedtools and R. But if you're looking to get a basic handle on genome arithmetic, take a look at Aaron Quinlan's bedtools tutorials from the 2013 CSHL course.

Two years ago David Searls published an article in PLoS Comp Bio describing a series of online courses in bioinformatics. Yesterday, the same author published an updated version, "A New Online Computational Biology Curriculum," (PLoS Comput Biol 10(6): e1003662.

If you're doing any kind of scientific computing and not using version control, you're doing it wrong. The git version control system and GitHub, a web-based service for hosting and collaborating on git-controlled projects, have both become wildly popular over the last few years.

I've been asked a few times how to make a so-called volcano plot from gene expression results. A volcano plot typically plots some measure of effect on the x-axis (typically the fold change) and the statistical significance on the y-axis (typically the -log10 of the p-value). Genes that are highly dysregulated are farther to the left and right sides, while highly significant changes appear higher on the plot.

Three years ago I wrote a blog post on how to create manhattan plots in R. After hundreds of comments pointing out bugs and other issues, I've finally cleaned up this code and turned it into an R package.

For a few years now, my EvoSTAR colleague, Bill Langdon, has been exploring the degree to which Mycoplasma bacteria have contaminated experimental systems and even "infected" online databases with the contents of their genomes.

A few weeks ago the 2014 AMIA Translational Bioinformatics Meeting (TBI) was held in beautiful San Francisco.  This meeting is full of great science that spans the divide between molecular and clinical research, but a true highlight of this meeting is the closing keynote, traditionally given by Russ Altman.

I recently found this little gem of a web app that analyzes the clarity of your writing. Hemingway highlights long, complex, and hard to read sentences. It also highlights complex words where a simple one would do, and highlights adverbs, suggesting you use a stronger verb instead. It highlights passive voice (bad!), and tells you the minimum reading grade level necessary to understand your writing.

I'm calling variants from exome sequencing data and I need to evaluate the efficiency of the capture and the coverage along the target regions. This sounds like a great use case for bedtools, your swiss-army knife for genomic arithmetic and interval manipulation.

Software Carpentry is an international collaboration backed by Mozilla and the Sloan Foundation comprising a team of volunteers that teach computational competence and basic programming skills to scientists.