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. Generating more than 4 million data points, it assays over 30,000 coding SNPs, contains content derived from the 1000 genomes project, and has probes covering 11,000 common and rare CNVs. I doubt the information gain will immediately be worth the premium price for this chip, but it will be available next month nonetheless.

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

Ever find yourself trying to remember a series of steps you recently did in Linux? Try typing the command "history" at the command line (without the quotes). You'll see a long list of your most recently used commands.

For those of you writing abstracts that will get you to Hawaii this fall for IGES (due June 1) and ASHG (due June 2), just follow this template from Piled Higher and Deeper. Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

Nature Reviews Genetics just published an excellent paper on interaction analysis by Heather Cordell. This masterfully written review starts by defining interaction, then delving into strategies to statistically model it in human genetics studies.

If you're doing an analysis with variables that naturally vary on a continuous scale, like age or smoking pack-years, NEVER be tempted to categorize individuals into groups - there's nearly always a better approach that utilizes the full distribution of values. It may seem convenient for a particular analysis you're doing but you'll take an enormous hit in power and precision.

AAAS and the Food and Drug Law Institute (FDLI) are holding three 2-day meetings in Washington DC on personalized medicine, addressing the scientific discoveries, business models, and policy changes that are necessary to develop personalized treatments and diagnostics. All three meetings will be available via a free live webcast where viewers can use response technology to interact with speakers and session chairs.

A tip of the hat to Lifehacker for pointing this out. Ever been nailed by a reviewer or a thesis committee for using too many acronyms without defining them well? There's an easy way built into MS Word to find and highlight all the acronyms in a document. It's a nice check after you're done with a first draft, and you might be surprised by how many you find!