Chemical Entitites of Biological Interest, ChEBI, is a freely available dictionary [1] of molecular entities, especially small chemical compounds. Like all big dictionaries and ontologies, it has its own unique challenges. Fortunately, those nice people at the EBI are holding a workshop to discuss future developments in ChEBI. In preparation for the workshop, here are some brief notes on how ChEBI could be made better.

Twenty one years ago this month, in May 1987, Irish rockers U2 released their classic Joshua Tree single, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. Those twenty one years have seen incredible technological change: the adoption of desktop computers, mobile phones, the birth of the Web and the widespread use of search engines like Google.

Veteran broadcaster Humphrey Lyttelton sadly passed away last week. He was probably best known for hosting the BBC Radio 4 show I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. To commemorate, over at Nature Network, Bob O’Hara kicked off a game of Cheddar Gorge.

The seventeenth international World Wide Web conference (WWW2008.org) is currently finishing in Beijing, China. There are some interesting papers this year. Thankfully, the Great Firewall of China doesn’t prevent these papers reaching the rest of the world. It’s One World, One Web (allegedly). Here are some brief highlights from the conference.

The Ensembl Weblog provides news, views and announcements about the Ensembl Genome Browser. The blog has been going for a few years now, but I have only just become aware of it thanks to a recent Ensembl Genome Browser Tutorial by Bert Overduin. Catching up on posts from Ensemblians this year, Ewan Birney wrote a piece about The Gene Love-in last week and Paul Flicek briefly described the 1000 Genomes project back in January.

Michael Ashburner at the University of Cambridge once famously quipped that “Biologists would rather share their toothbrush than share a gene name” [1]. And so we have many different colourful and imaginative names for genes. The same mis-naming rule applies the reactants and products (input and output) of metabolism. Here are some example names, would you like to share my toothbrush chemical name?

With apologies to Jonathan Swift: “Great sites have little sites upon their back to bite ’em And little sites have lesser sites, and so ad infinitum…” So what happened was, Carole Goble asked on the myExperiment mailing list, “is there a list of scientist social networking sites”? Here is first attempt at such a list […]

Back in 2003 The Human Genome cost approximately $500 million, years of work and huge international effort to produce. How much does a genome cost now, and what might it cost in the future? Using the same technology today (2008), some people have estimated it would be 5 times cheaper, around $100 million.

Genomes to Systems is a biannual conference held in Manchester covering the latest post-genome developments. The final programme for Genomes to Systems 2008 is available here. To supplement this with a little more information, the following briefly overviews sessions during the three days of the 2008 conference.

Genomes to Systems is a biannual conference held in Manchester covering the latest post-genome developments. Here are some brief and incomplete notes on some of the speakers and topics from the third and final day of the 2008 conference.

Genomes to Systems is a biannual conference held in Manchester covering the latest post-genome developments. Here are some brief and incomplete notes on some of the speakers and topics from day two of the 2008 conference.