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

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.