For a few years now, my EvoSTAR colleague, Bill Langdon, has been exploring the degree to which Mycoplasma bacteria have contaminated experimental systems and even "infected" online databases with the contents of their genomes.

A few weeks ago the 2014 AMIA Translational Bioinformatics Meeting (TBI) was held in beautiful San Francisco.  This meeting is full of great science that spans the divide between molecular and clinical research, but a true highlight of this meeting is the closing keynote, traditionally given by Russ Altman.

I recently found this little gem of a web app that analyzes the clarity of your writing. Hemingway highlights long, complex, and hard to read sentences. It also highlights complex words where a simple one would do, and highlights adverbs, suggesting you use a stronger verb instead. It highlights passive voice (bad!), and tells you the minimum reading grade level necessary to understand your writing.

I'm calling variants from exome sequencing data and I need to evaluate the efficiency of the capture and the coverage along the target regions. This sounds like a great use case for bedtools, your swiss-army knife for genomic arithmetic and interval manipulation.

Software Carpentry is an international collaboration backed by Mozilla and the Sloan Foundation comprising a team of volunteers that teach computational competence and basic programming skills to scientists.

Last month I told you about Coursera's specializations in data science, systems biology, and computing. Today I was reading Jeff Leek's blog post defending p-values and found a link to HarvardX's Data Analysis for Genomics course, taught by Rafael Irizarry and Mike Love. Here's the course description: If you've ever wanted to get started with data analysis in genomics and you'd learn R along the way, this looks like a great place to start.

At the moment, the world is obsessed with “Big Data” yet it sometimes seems that people who use this phrase don’t have a good grasp of its meaning.  Like most good buzz-words, “Big Data” sparks the idea of something grand and complicated, while sounding ordinary enough that listeners feel like they have an intuitive understanding of the concept.

This is one of those things I picked up years ago while in graduate school that I just assumed everyone else already knew about. GNU screen is a great utility built-in to most Linux installations for remote session management. Typing 'screen' at the command line enters a new screen session.

I first mentioned Coursera about a year ago, when I hired a new analyst in my core. This new hire came in as a very competent Python programmer with a molecular biology and microbial ecology background, but with very little experience in statistics.

I've seen this question asked and partially answered all around the web. As with anything related to Perl, I'm sure there is more than one way to do it. Here's how I do it with Perl 5.10.1 on CentOS 6.4. First, install local::lib with bootstrapping method as described here.

Jeff Leek, biostats professor at Johns Hopkins and instructor of the Coursera Data Analysis course, recently posted on Simly Statistics this list of awesome things other people accomplished in 2013 in genomics, statistics, and data science. At risk of sounding too meta , I'll say that this list itself is one of the awesome things that was put together in 2013.