BOL: All site news

Make Genomic Research Less Ethnically-Biased

Shikha Logwani — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 16:08:17 -0500

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Hélu, the world’s 2nd-richest man, is giving an additional $74 million to a genomics center in Boston in order to right a bias in the field–a kind of scientific racism, you might call it. The problem: most samples of DNA analyzed in biomedical research come from people of European descent.

Find more detail news at http://www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2013/10/30/carlos-slim-gives-another-74-million-to-make-genomic-research-less-ethnically-biased/?utm_campaign=forbesfbsf&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

BEReX : Biomedical Entity-Relation eXplorer

Rahul Nayak — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 15:53:26 -0500

BEReX is a new biomedical knowledge integration, search, and exploration tool. BEReX integrates eight popular databases (STRING, DrugBank, KEGG, PharmGKB, BioGRID, GO, HPRD, and MSigDB) and delineates an integrated network by combining the information available from these databases. Users search the integrated network by entering keywords and BEReX returns a sub-network matching the keywords. The resulting graph can be explored interactively. BEReX allows users to find the shortest paths between two remote nodes; find the most relevant drugs, diseases, pathways and so on, related to the current network; expand the network by particular types of entities and relations; and modify the network by removing or adding selected nodes. BEReX is implemented as a stand-alone Java application.

More at http://infos.korea.ac.kr/berex

News reference @ http://infos.korea.ac.kr

An entire genome written in lab

Rahul Nayak — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 09:43:03 -0500

This is the first time ever the genetic code has been fundamentally changed. The breakthrough is a huge step forward in synthetic biology and opens up the possibility of turning re-coded bacteria into biofactories, capable of producing potent new forms of protein that could fight disease or generate sustainable materials.

More @ http://news.yale.edu/2013/10/17/researchers-rewrite-entire-genome-and-add-healthy-twist

News Reference: Yale news

Image Source: Sciencedaily.

RNA-Seq Data Pathway and Gene-set Analysis Workflows

Jit — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 08:00:48 -0500

It describe the GAGE (Luo et al., 2009) /Pahview (Luo and Brouwer, 2013) workflows on RNA-Seq data pathway analysis and gene-set analysis. The gage package (2.12.0) now includes a new tutorial, “RNA-Seq Data Pathway and Gene-set Analysis Workflows“.

First cover a full workflow from preparation, reads counting, data preprocessing, gene set test, to pathway visualization in about 40 lines of codes. The same workflow can be used for GO analysis or other types of gene set analysis too. We also describe joint workflows, i.e. to do gene-level analysis using one of the major RNA-Seq analysis tools, DEseq/DEseq2, edgeR, limma and Cufflinks, and feed the results into GAGE/Pahview for pathway analysis or visualization. All these workflows are implemented in R/Bioconductor.

The work ows cover the most common situations and issues for RNA-Seq data pathway analysis. Issues like data quality assessment are relevant for data analysis in general yet out the scope of this tutorial. Although we focus on RNA-Seq data here, but pathway analysis work ow remains similar for microarray, particularly step 3-4 would be the same. Please check gage and pathview vigenttes for details.

Note: You need to update to current release versions of R(3.0.2)/ Bioconductor(2.13) to use all the features.

Reference:

Please check it out:
http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/gage.html
http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/vignettes/gage/inst/doc/RNA-seqWorkflow.pdf

PubMed opens for comment

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 12:40:17 -0500

The informal conversations that researchers have at scientific meetings look set to move online, if a new initiative by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has its way. On 22 October, the NCBI of Bethesda, Maryland, launched the pilot phase of a programme called PubMed Commons. This will allow users to comment on published abstracts on the PubMed website, which indexes some 22 million papers.

For now, only a select group of researchers and their invited guests can use the system. But the NCBI's director David Lipman, who helped to develop the programme, says that soon any PubMed author will be allowed to comment under his or her real name and anyone will be able to read the comments.

More @ http://www.nature.com/news/pubmed-opens-for-comment-1.14023

News source Nature.

The anatomy of successful computational biology software

Jitendra Narayan — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 11:53:08 -0500

Creators of software widely used in computational biology discuss the factors that contributed to their success

Nature Biotechnology spoke with Altschul and several other originators of computational biology software programs widely used today (Table 1). The conversations explored what makes certain software tools successful, the unique challenges of developing them for biological research and how the field of computational biology, as a whole, can move research agendas forward. What follows is an edited compilation of interviews.

Detail @ http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/full/nbt.2721.html

News Source @ Nature

Biggest Human Brain Project (HBP) launched!!!

Rahul Agarwal — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 19:50:55 -0500

"In neuroscience, the project will use neuroinformatics and brain simulation to collect and integrate experimental data, identifying and filling gaps in our knowledge, and prioritising future experiments.

In medicine, the HBP will use medical informatics to identify biological signatures of brain disease, allowing diagnosis at an early stage, before the disease has done irreversible damage, and enabling personalized treatment, adapted to the needs of individual patients. Better diagnosis, combined with disease and drug simulation, will accelerate the discovery of new treatments, drastically lowering the cost of drug discovery.

In computing, new techniques of interactive supercomputing, driven by the needs of brain simulation, will impact a vast range of industries. Devices and systems, modelled after the brain, will overcome fundamental limits on the energy-efficiency, reliability and programmability of current technologies, clearing the road for systems with brain-like intelligence."

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2013/10/07/the-human-brain-project-begins/

(https://www.facebook.com/humanbrainproj/info)

Home Page:

https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/

Jobs:

https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/participate/jobs

Programming language to build synthetic DNA

Jit — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 16:37:24 -0500

A team led by Georg Seelig (http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~seelig/index.html) at University of Washington has developed a programming language for chemistry that it hopes will streamline efforts to design a network that can guide the behavior of chemical-reaction mixtures in the same way that embedded electronic controllers guide cars, robots and other devices. In medicine, such networks could serve as “smart” drug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level.

Reference & More @

http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2013.189.html

http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/09/30/uw-engineers-invent-programming-language-to-build-synthetic-dna/

Image source: washington.edu

Petrol from Ecoli

Rahul Agarwal — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 10:31:17 -0500

"In recently published paper (entitled "Microbial Production of Short-chain Alkanes") in Nature journal on September 29, a group of genius Korean researchers led by Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) reported, for the first time, the development of a novel strategy for microbial gasoline production through metabolic engineering of E. coli.

The research team engineered the fatty acid metabolism to provide the fatty acid derivatives that are shorter than normal intracellular fatty acid metabolites, and introduced a novel synthetic pathway for the biosynthesis of short-chain alkanes. This allowed the development of platform E. coli strain capable of producing gasoline for the first time. Furthermore, this platform strain, if desired, can be modified to produce other products such as short-chain fatty esters and short-chain fatty alcohols."

Find more at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KDXYMIgAi0

http://www.gbcghana.com/index.php?id=1.1550084

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130929142737.htm

Paper:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12536.html

Image source : Wikipedia

Accelerating Biology 2014:The Next Wave (18-22 February, 2014)

MineshJ — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 01:36:42 -0500

New advances in biology are being made at a rapidly increasing pace, largely due to new technologies and a large amount of automation. The advent of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology has brought in a new dimension to understand the molecular basis of a living organism. The Next Generation Sequencing technology enables sequencing of hundreds of genomes at an extremely rapid rate and at a significantly lower cost. The availability of hundreds of genomes in a short time is expected to revolutionize area of life sciences. A number of new methods like de-novo sequencing, resequencing, transcriptomics etc. are emerging in the Next Generation Sequencing area. These technologies have a tremendous applications is various areas of Human Health, Agriculture, Livestock and Environment.

The pace of sequencing is leading to a data overload and therefore the ability to analyze is much beyond the existing computing capabilities. This tsunami of data has led to a sea change in the storage and computing requirements. In order to gear up to tackle these challenges most biologists are adopting the use of cyberinfrastructure. Cyberinfrastructure is a combination of data resources, high-speed networks and high performance computing resources that bring people, information and computational resources together to perform science in this information driven world.

The last few decades have witnessed the evolution of biology from what used to be a purely experimental field, to a high end computational domain, where unrelenting computational power is required to decipher pieces of data generated through high throughput techniques into blocks of information that will help to answer many mysteries of life. To be able to generate knowledge from the oceans of genomic data, enabling technologies like High Performance Computing, Grid Computing and Cloud Computing are the latest weapons in the hands of the modern biologist.

This symposium intends to bring together researchers in various domains of human health, agriculture, livestock and environment who are using advanced computational biology tools to solve scientific problems in their respective domains.

More at Accelerating Biology 2013:The Next Wave (20-22 February, 2013) , CDAC, Pune.