Vanderbilt Center for Human Genetics Research faculty candidate Goncalo Abecasis will be interviewing for a faculty position here this week. Come check out his seminar - "Sequencing Thousands of Human Genomes" - Friday June 11th, 2-3pm in 512 Light Hall.Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

I've covered a few topics in the past including the plyr package, which is kind of like "GROUP BY" for R, and the merge function for merging datasets. I only recently found the sqldf package for R, and it's already one of the most useful packages I've ever installed. The main function in the package is sqldf(), which takes a quoted string as an argument. You can treat data frames as tables as if they were in a relational database.

Found this tutorial by Emily Mankin on how to do principal components analysis (PCA) using R. Has a nice example with R code and several good references. The example starts by doing the PCA manually, then uses R's built in prcomp() function to do the same PCA. Principle Components Analysis: A How-To Manual for R Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

Previously mentioned LocusZoom has undergone some major updates over the last few months. Many of the bugs mentioned in my previous post are now fixed, and now there's a good bit of documentation available. There are also a few new features, including the ability to add an extra column to your results file to change the plotting symbol to reflect your own custom annotation (i.e. whether the SNP was imputed or genotyped, or the SNP's function).

Several readers emailed me or left a comment on my previous announcement of Frank Harrell's workshop on using Sweave for reproducible research asking if we could record the seminar. Unfortunately we couldn't record audio or video, but take a look at the Sweave/Latex page on the Biostatistics Dept Wiki.

Our lab is looking for a postdoc. See the ad here, reproduced below. POST-DOCTORAL POSITION VANDERBILT CENTER FOR HUMAN GENETICS RESEARCH PROGRAM IN COMPUTATIONAL GENOMICS The Program in Computational Genomics in the CHGR at Vanderbilt University has an immediate opening for a post-doctoral fellow to pursue new and exciting research in human genetics.

Frank Harrell, chair of the Biostatistics department here at Vanderbilt, is giving a seminar entitled "Sweave for Reproducible Research and Beautiful Statistical Reports" tomorrow, Wednesday, May 12, 1:30-2:30pm, in the MRBIII Conference Room 1220.

If you attended Frank Harrell's Regression Modeling Strategies course a few weeks ago, you got a chance to see the rms package for R in action. Frank's rms package does regression modeling, testing, estimation, validation, graphics, prediction, and typesetting by storing enhanced model design attributes in the fit.

A few weeks ago I covered an R package for efficient mixed model regression that is capable of simultaneously accounting for both population stratification and relatedness to compute unbiased estimates of standard errors and p-values for genetic association studies.

Definitely a seminar not to miss: Curtis Fideler, director of Sales at Pacific Biosciences, will be giving a special seminar here at Vanderbilt Thursday, May 20, 11:00a-noon in 202 Light Hall entitled "An Introduction to SMRT Sequencing: A description of Pacific Biosciences single molecule real time sequencing technology." Science: Real-Time DNA Sequencing from Single

First, if you haven't taken a look at the comments on my previous post on this paper, go take a look. Thanks to everyone for sharing your thoughts and pointing out some of my own oversight regarding this paper. There was one issue in particular that deserves more attention than just another comment thread.