This week Illumina launched their own personal genome sequencing service. For $48,000 they'll send you the sequence of your entire genome on a Mac computer that you can keep. According to their website, all the sequencing is done in a CLIA-certified clinical lab.

Here's a good paper published online this morning in Nature Reviews Genetics. As the title suggests, the paper covers many of the challenges associated with translating molecular genetic tests into clinical practice. There are tons of references to articles on the ethical, legal, and social issues surrounding genetic testing in health management.

The estout package for Stata is useful for quickly creating nicely formatted tables from a regression analysis for tables or papers. To install it, fire up Stata and type in this command: ssc install estout, replace Stata will automatically download and install the package. Run the regression as you normally would, then use the esttab command (part of the estout package) to create a table using those results.

I know that a lot of you are scrambling to spend your training grant money by next week. If you think you'll ever need to use R, I strongly recommend buying this book: Introductory Statistics with R, by Peter Dalgaard ($48, Amazon). I picked this up a while back and read through most of it in a day or two.

Some of the best figure design ideas come from cartographers. If you've ever read a Tufte book you've seen lots of examples. Let's talk about using color effectively. Penn State geography professor Cindy Brewer's ColorBrewer tool for selecting color schemes for figures has been conveniently packaged into an R library called RColorBrewer.

GWAS reviews are a dime a dozen these days, but I found this one in particular that's a good up-to-date review suitable for people relatively new to the field. While this one has a focus on psychiatric genetics, it has a short summary on topics like positional methods, candidate gene studies, common variation, rare variation, CNVs, GWAS design, and issues concerning power and sample size.

The R journal just published its inaugural peer-reviewed journal. Aligned with the open-source mantra, the journal is free and openly accessible. The journal features short articles on topics focused on R, including notes about new add-on packages, hints for R newcomers, application reports detailing examples of data analysis with R, and other news items. The current issue in PDF and information about submission can be found at link below.

Hi! I'm Julia Wall, the Technical Writer in Vanderbilt's CHGR. Every two weeks or so, I'll be posting citation links to the articles that the students in our Program for Computational Genomics (PCG) Journal Club discuss in their bimonthly meetings. Enjoy!

Google's chief economist was recently quoted as saying "The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians… The ability to take data-to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it-that’s going to be a hugely important skill." I'll leave you for the weekend with this ego-boosting article relating how our skill set as statisticians is a hot commodity in the real world.

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.