If you were here for any of the talks Rick Myers has given here at Vanderbilt over the last few years you'll remember all the interesting biomedical research going on at his company, HudsonAlpha.  Their spring symposium is March 30, 8am-6pm, at the HudsonAlpha institute in Huntsville, AL. It's FREE, and poster sessions are open to all students and postdocs.

Vanderbilt 2nd year grad students: Here is the study guide I made for studying for my general knowledge phase I qualifying exam. I'd recommend making your own, but this may help you with a place to start. You can download it at the link below. Update January 25, 2013 : I've uploaded the link to Figshare for a more permanent home.

If you caught Soumya Raychaudhuri's seminar last week you heard a lot about the tool he developed at the broad called GRAIL - Gene Relationships Across Implicated Loci. You've got GWAS results and now you want to prioritize SNPs to follow up in replication or functional studies.

"The hunt for the genetic roots of common diseases has hit a blank wall." ...quoting the first sentence in Nicholas Wade's New York Times article reviewing this PLoS Biology research paper by David Goldstein and his colleagues at Duke University. Also be sure to see Richard Robinson's synopsis of this paper, both published this week in PLoS Bio.

Soumya Raychaudhuri is the lead author on the GRAIL paper in Nature Genetics. GRAIL (Gene Relationships Across Implicated Loci) is software available from the Broad Institute and looks like an interesting way to prioritize SNPs for followup. I'll cover it here in the future, but in the meantime, check out this seminar this Wednesday.

Found this nice way to visually summarize contingency tables using ggplot2 in R on Hadley Wickham's ggplot2 cheat sheet. Using the same data in my previous post on making scatterplots in small multiples, I'll demonstrate how to use ggfluctuation() to make a fluctuation plot.

**** UPDATE, May 15 2014 ***** The functions described here have now been wrapped into an R package. View the updated blog post or see the online package vignette for how to install and use. If you'd still like to use the old code described here, you can access this at version 0.0.0 on GitHub.

Christen J. Willer, (of the Willer et al Nature Genetics lipid genetics paper), postdoc at University of Michigan and departmental Faculty Candidate, will be giving a talk tomorrow (Wednesday Jan 20) at noon in 208 Light Hall. I'll be going to this one. Topic:

I have used this chunk of code on numerous occasions to plot GWAS data, so I thought I'd share!The variables needed are a log p-value (or some other statistic) and the absolute genomic position of each SNP (distance from the beginning of chromosome 1). If you need the offsets to compute this absolute position, they are listed in MB in the xline(---) portion of the plot.

Head over to Revolutions Blog for a list of PDF and powerpoint resources for making the transition to R from other programming or stats languages.  All of these notes come from the New York R meetup. I enjoyed browsing the meetup's files - lots of powerpoints, PDFs, and example R data files for various topics, including several slideshows on ggplot2.

Do you submit manuscripts to journals that are not indexed in PubMed? This can make it difficult for others to find your publications, especially if they don't have a subscription to the journal. This often happens with us when we publish in computer science journals. Using the NIH manuscript submission system you can upload your manuscript to PubMed Central, which provides free open access, and is indexed in PubMed.