Some notes from day one of the first ChEBI workshop, 19th May 2008. There were four talks from Colin Batchelor (Royal Society of Chemistry), Ulrike Witting (EML Research GmbH Hiedelberg), Giles Weaver (Unilever) and Paula de Matos (EBI). Christoph Steinbeck has already written some ChEBI notes, these just add a little more detail.

Chemical Entitites of Biological Interest, ChEBI, is a freely available dictionary [1] of molecular entities, especially small chemical compounds. Like all big dictionaries and ontologies, it has its own unique challenges. Fortunately, those nice people at the EBI are holding a workshop to discuss future developments in ChEBI.

Twenty one years ago this month, in May 1987, Irish rockers U2 released their classic Joshua Tree single, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.

Veteran broadcaster Humphrey Lyttelton sadly passed away last week. He was probably best known for hosting the BBC Radio 4 show I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. To commemorate, over at Nature Network, Bob O’Hara kicked off a game of Cheddar Gorge.

The seventeenth international World Wide Web conference (WWW2008.org) is currently finishing in Beijing, China. There are some interesting papers this year. Thankfully, the Great Firewall of China doesn’t prevent these papers reaching the rest of the world. It’s One World, One Web (allegedly). Here are some brief highlights from the conference.

The Ensembl Weblog provides news, views and announcements about the Ensembl Genome Browser. The blog has been going for a few years now, but I have only just become aware of it thanks to a recent Ensembl Genome Browser Tutorial by Bert Overduin.

Michael Ashburner at the University of Cambridge once famously quipped that “Biologists would rather share their toothbrush than share a gene name” [1]. And so we have many different colourful and imaginative names for genes. The same mis-naming rule applies the reactants and products (input and output) of metabolism.

With apologies to Jonathan Swift: So what happened was, Carole Goble asked on the myExperiment mailing list, “is there a list of scientist social networking sites”? Here is first attempt at such a list ( not comprehensive), you’ll have to decide for yourself which are the great, greater, little and lesser sites. For simplicity, I’ll break social software down into social networking, data sharing, blogging, ranking and video.

Back in 2003 The Human Genome cost approximately $500 million, years of work and huge international effort to produce. How much does a genome cost now, and what might it cost in the future? Using the same technology today (2008), some people have estimated it would be 5 times cheaper, around $100 million.

Genomes to Systems is a biannual conference held in Manchester covering the latest post-genome developments. The final programme for Genomes to Systems 2008 is available here. To supplement this with a little more information, the following briefly overviews sessions during the three days of the 2008 conference.

Genomes to Systems is a biannual conference held in Manchester covering the latest post-genome developments. Here are some brief and incomplete notes on some of the speakers and topics from the third and final day of the 2008 conference.