GWAS reviews are a dime a dozen these days, but I found this one in particular that's a good up-to-date review suitable for people relatively new to the field. While this one has a focus on psychiatric genetics, it has a short summary on topics like positional methods, candidate gene studies, common variation, rare variation, CNVs, GWAS design, and issues concerning power and sample size.

The R journal just published its inaugural peer-reviewed journal. Aligned with the open-source mantra, the journal is free and openly accessible. The journal features short articles on topics focused on R, including notes about new add-on packages, hints for R newcomers, application reports detailing examples of data analysis with R, and other news items.

Hi! I'm Julia Wall, the Technical Writer in Vanderbilt's CHGR. Every two weeks or so, I'll be posting citation links to the articles that the students in our Program for Computational Genomics (PCG) Journal Club discuss in their bimonthly meetings.

Google's chief economist was recently quoted as saying "The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians… The ability to take data-to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it-that’s going to be a hugely important skill." I'll leave you for the weekend with this ego-boosting article relating how our skill set as statisticians is a hot commodity in the real world.Dataspora Blog:

The Program in Computational Genomics holds a journal club twice a month. Our technical writer Julia Wall will soon start posting here references to the articles we talked about. Keep an eye out here to see some of the latest research we're discussing!Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

In case you missed the email, Lana Olson here in the CHGR is holding a workshop next Thursday, June 4 at 1:30pm on using Haploview, WASP, PLINK, and STRUCTURE. The workshop will be held in the CHGR conference room, 519 Light Hall.Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

The Vanderbilt Kennedy Center is offering a free (repeat, free) one-day introductory course to the R statistical computing language on June 23, taught by Theresa Scott from the department of Biostatistics. You can find contact/registration info at the link below.Vanderbilt Kennedy Center - An Introduction to the Fundamentals &

Illumina recently announced their latest chip for GWA studies - the HumanOmni1-Quad.

Has anyone ever used Galaxy? I saw their presentation at last year's ASHG. Seems like a great way to do collaborate on and keep a record of analyses in an easy web-GUI interface without having to download any software.

So you have found significant SNPs from a study, and you are investigating the region. Browsing through Ensembl or Entrez-Gene, you find a coding region nearby. Atop this coding region, you see a collection of letters that are commonly used to refer to this gene, lets say "MYLK". So you begin a PubMed search to find publications that describe the function of this gene, searching with "MYLK". Seems reasonable, right?Beware!

Just released last week by the makers of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha is kind of like a search engine, calling itself a "computational knowledge engine," with the lofty goal as a "long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone."From their homepage you can link to a page showing examples of how to use it, but I was interested in seeing how much biology Wolfram Alpha knows, and I've got to say I'm impressed with