As part of Cambridge Science festival last weekend, I joined a group of about 40 volunteers from The Sanger and EBI at an event “DNA, diversity and you”. This was a series of education and outreach events designed to explore how differences in your genetic code make you different from other individuals, and what makes the humans different from other living things –  with a bit of computational biology thrown in for good measure.

Madder than the Mad March Hare, more entertaining and surreal than Alice down-a-rabbit-hole in Wonderland: today marks the start of this years Cambridge Science festival: A team of scientists and engineers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and The EBI will be participating, on Saturday 13th March with a session on DNA, diversity and you and also tackling the thorny issue of Who Owns Science? on Friday 19th March.

Release 66 of Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) is now available, containing 534,521 total entities, of which 20,151 are annotated entities and 698 were submitted via the ChEBI submission tool. This months entity of the month is Viagra, also known as Sildenafil citrate: (Text below reproduced from ChEBI website) * or as wikipedia puts it…“Viagra aids jet lag recovery in hamsters” …that’s an interesting side effect.

One of the many tools we use in our team to manage the development of the ChEBI software is an automated build tool called Apache Maven. Opinions are often divided on whether Maven is a good or a bad thing. Most of them are very subjective, argumentative and often very extended. See why does Maven have such a bad reputation? and 25 things* I hate about Maven for examples.

The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) [1] are a set of reference ontologies for describing all kinds of biomedical data shared in a centralised repository called The OBO Foundry.

In preparation for a joint seminar I’ll be doing with Midori Harris here at the EBI, here’s a classic paper [1,2] on the social problems of building biomedical ontologies.

If you wanted to write a guide to Biomedical and Biological Ontologies [1], especially the what , why , when , how , where and who , there are at least three choices for publishing your work: Journal publishing in your favourite scientific journal. Book publishing with your favourite academic or technical publisher.

Michel Dumontier was visiting the EBI this week, here’s the details of his seminar Bio2RDF and Beyond! Large Scale, Distributed Biological Knowledge Discovery (slides embedded below) for anyone interested who missed it: Some quick notes: Bio2RDF is currently indexing around 5 billion triples , and is built with the open source Virtuoso database.

Happy New Year from the ChEBI team where release 64 is now available, containing 534,142 total entities, of which 19,645 are annotated entities and 693 were submitted via the ChEBI submission tool. This month’s entity of the month is Abscisic acid. References Ohkuma, K., Lyon, J., Addicott, F., &

If you weren’t able to attend this years Christmas lectures in person, they are being televised tonight in the UK on More4 from 7pm. This year, they are given by Professor Sue Hartley [1] (pictured right) from the University of Sussex. Here is some blurb on the series from the Royal Institution called “The 300 million year war”. So if you’re festively feasting this holiday, those brussel sprouts, carrots, potatoes won’t look so innocent now.

There is an interesting review [1] (and special issue) in the Biochemical Journal today, published by Portland Press Ltd.