If you work in toxicology or drug discovery, you might be familiar with the database Open TG-GATEs, a large transcriptomics database that catalogues gene expression response to well-known drugs and toxins. This database was developed by Japan’s Toxicogenomics Project during many years, as a private-public sector partnership, and remains a very valuable resource. As with […]
The J Craig Venter Institute has published a paper detailing the genome of their new Syn3.0 synthetic organism. The major accomplishment was to construct a viable cell with a synthetic, extremely small genome: only 473 genes and about 500 kbp. Even though it is considered to be fully “synthetic”, this genome is not built from […]
The following is an excerpt from a text I am currently in the process of writing, which may or may not be published in this form. The text is concerned with the role of software in the scientific research process, and what happens when researchers must interact with software instead of hardware equipment, and finally […]
I’ve just come back from Biohackathon 2012 in Toyama, an annual event, traditionally hosted in Japan, where users of semantic web technologies (such as RDF and SPARQL) in biology and bioinformatics come together to work on projects. This was a nice event with an open and productive atmosphere, and I got a lot out of […]
I’ve recently seen the film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, based on John le Carré’s novel with the same name. In the 1970’s a TV series based on the same novel, with Alec Guinness as George Smiley, was very popular in Britain. This film, with Gary Oldman as the protagonist, is supposed to be something like […]