BOL: Rahul Nayak's News

Upgrade R 3.0.3

Rahul Nayak — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 11:23:51 -0500

R is a free software programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. Polls and surveys of data miners are showing R's popularity has increased substantially in recent years. Recently the new version of R codename “Warm Puppy" have been released.

You can download the latest version from here http://cran.rstudio.com/ . Or, if you are using Windows, you can upgrade to the latest version using the installr package http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/installr/ . Simply run the following code:

# installing/loading the package:
if(!require(installr)) {
install.packages("installr"); require(installr)} #load / install+load installr

updateR()

I try to keep the installr package updated and useful. If you have any suggestions or remarks on the package, you’re invited to leave a comment below.

If you use the global library system http://www.r-statistics.com/2010/04/changing-your-r-upgrading-strategy-and-the-r-code-to-do-it-on-windows/ , you can run the following in the new version of R:

source("http://www.r-statistics.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/upgrading-R-on-windows.r.txt")
New.R.RunMe()

Reference:

http://www.r-statistics.com/2014/03/r-3-0-3-is-released/

C-DAC launch supercomputing facility "Param Bio Blaze" !!!

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 11:55:14 -0600

The bioinformatics centre at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) completed 10 years, this month. Established in 2004, the centre has been widely used by numerous researchers across the globe and has an ultimate aim of making personalised drugs depending on the composition of a human body.

When biological data is processed using computer science, statistics, mathematics and engineering, it constitutes bioinformatics. The technological advancements are bringing new dimensions to the understanding of molecular basis of living organisms. There is immense data generated due to computing, but storage and analysis of this data is becoming a challenge, therefore there is an urgent need of supercomputers.

The C-DAC will launch Param Bio Blaze, a supercomputing facility, to address the challenges in bioinformatics on Tuesday at a three-day symposium, titled: 'Accelerating biology: Computing life'. The supercomputing facility will be inaugurated on Tuesday by Ramakrishna Ramaswamy, vice-chancellor, Central University of Hyderabad at the Yashada. The new C-DAC's facility will have a capacity of 10 teraflop and will be able to analyse human cells and its functions.

Param Bio Blaze will help have a larger storage space and better computing facility for the bioinformatics sector. The facility will help capture the movement of molecules and also interaction between two molecules and the effects.

Applications of Param BioBlaze

- Collaboration with National Centre for Cell Science for research on Malaria and understanding how the disease spreads

- Collaborative work with Tata Memorial hospital on breast cancer and find out the difference between normal tissues and tissues from breast cancer patients

- Designing anti-cancer molecules, a collaborative research with the University of Pune

Reference:

Times of India

Image:datacenterjournal.com

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.

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.