Just caught this on the OpenHelix Blog. In an interview with Charlie Rose, NIH director Francis Collins said Computational biologists will be the "breakthrough" artists of the future. Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

While reading through an article on job hunting success on Bitesize Bio I stumbled upon another piece there that's definitely in the spirit of "getting things done" in genetics research. I had always halfway considered going into business manufacturing lab supplies. Take a $10 Easy-Bake Oven and add a little bit tighter temperature regulation, call it a hybridization oven, and sell it for thousands.

Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center, Institute for Medicine and Public Health presents: "Pathway-based analysis for genome-wide association studies" Steven Chen Ph.D Assistant Professor of Biostatistics Tuesday, March 16, 2010 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM 2525 West End Avenue 6th Floor BoardroomGetting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

Here are the papers we talked about in yesterday's Journal Club:Genome Biol. 2009; 10(11): R134Searching for SNPs with cloud computing.Langmead B, Schatz MC, Lin J, Pop M, Salzberg SL.Table of Contents, Nature Methods, Visualization Supplement.Am J Hum Genet.

This Thursday's discovery lecture looks interesting. In case you missed last week's Nobel laureate, you can watch the recording from Cech's talk or any of the previous lectures in the discovery series here.

Check out this month's table of contents in  Nature Methods. It contains a series of five commissioned Reviews discuss the challenges of visualizing biological data and the visualization tools available to biologists working with genomes, alignments and phylogenies, macromolecular structures, images and systems biology data.

Suppose you have billions of reads from a hot new sequencing machine and you want to simultaneously align these reads and call SNPs very quickly on the cheap. Check out an open source tool called Crossbow and the recent paper in Genome Biology.

In a previous tutorial I showed you how to create plots faceted by the level of a third variable using ggplot2. A commenter asked about using faceted plots and viewports and reminded me of this function I found in the ggplot2 Google group. The arrange function below is similar to using par(mfrow=c(r,c)) in base graphics to put more than one plot in the same image window.

I joined the Ritchie Lab back in 2007, and even though it's only been three years away from the bench, I've forgotten much of what I learned back in biochem classes.  I'm giving a talk on lipid genetics next week, and I found the Wiley Essential Biochemistry website very helpful for brushing up on some basic lipoprotein biology. There are 27 chapters covering a broad range of topics from enzyme kinetics to phosphofructokinase regulation.

Time for a little shameless self-promotion. I'll be giving a talk in genetics interest group next week. "Using GWAS in an EMR-linked biobank to explore genetic and environmental determinants of HDL cholesterol" Thursday, March 11, 2010 Noon-1pm 206 PRBGetting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

A while back I went to one of these specifically for writing an F31 NRSA fellowship application. Ended up getting one the first try. I thought the workshop was helpful. This looks a little more general, but may give you some ideas about getting external funding that isn't necessarily from NIH. Grant &