This workshop is aimed at bringing together ~40 diverse speciation researchers:

- to collaborate on populating a database of published reproductive barriers based on a standardized RIO framework (https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/10083/). This will involve working through papers during the workshop to extract RI measures and other metadata and entering them into a draft database (some preparatory work before the workshop may be requested to facilitate these steps during the workshop)

- to start working towards a manuscript using this database to answer an outstanding question in speciation

- to network, learn about reproductive isolation, and have fun!

If you are interested in applying to participate in the workshop, please fill out the form in the link below by ** May 20th **. Room & board will be covered by the organizers; all other travel costs are the responsibility of the attendee.

Application link:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSenAMqSdZjeRmKEDtBNa5tpjPn7IukPyT5BzfZ4JMpIk2YOEw/viewform

The previous IOS workshop was held in Finland in 2023 (see more details at https://speciation-network.pages.ist.ac.at/workshops) and resulted in new interactions between speciation researchers and the successful publication of an Integration of Speciation research manuscript (https://academic.oup.com/evolinnean/article/3/1/kzae001/7609448).

We look forward to seeing you in Glasgow!

BioCoder features:

• Novel therapeutic discovery strategies
• Hardware such as low-cost lab equipment or diagnostics
• Open or low­-cost bioinformatics tools
• Engineered organisms for the production of small molecules, biologics, or other products
• Research projects at a community labspace or projects for science education or public engagement
• Hardware or software for lab automation
• Citizen science or DIY research projects
• Science policy
• Tools to increase reproducibility in research, or anything related

Address of the bookmark: https://www.oreilly.com/biocoder/

During the first phase of ENCODE, published in 2007, microarray-based technologies were used to detect regions associated with transcription factors, certain histone modifications and open chromatin within a pre-specified 1% of the human genome.

ENCODE’s second phase saw a switch to sequencing-based technologies, the addition of new assay types and the analysis of functional elements genome-wide, described in a collection of research articles in 2012.

The Encyclopedia paper of ENCODE 3, published in Nature, gives an overview of the various assays that were performed in human and mouse cell lines and tissues and describes a Registry of human and mouse candidate cis-regulatory elements (cCREs).

More at https://www.nature.com/immersive/d42859-020-00027-2/index.html

https://bioalgorithms.ucsd.edu/research4.html

Updates to the Conserved Domain Database include:

• Position-specific score matrices (PSSMs) have been recomputed for many models in CDD, and frequency tables have been added to the PSSMs;

• The search databases distributed as part of this release can now be used with the more recent versions of RPS-BLAST (BLAST release 2.2.28 and up) using composition-based scoring. This abolishes the need to mask out compositionally biased regions in query sequences;

• Domain annotation displays in CD-Search, BATCH CD-Search, and other services now all use a uniform display style. A new display option in CD-Search and BATCH CD-Search provides “standard” results, in addition to “concise” and “full” results. “Standard” results will provide, for each region on the query sequence, the best0-scoring domain model (if any) from each of CDD’s database providers (Pfam, SMART, COG, TIGRFAMs, Protein Clusters, and the NCBI in-house curation project), but will suppress redundancy from within a single provider's results list.

You can access CDD at the Conserved Domains homepage and find updated content on the CDD FTP site.

Reference:

NCBI Website

More at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/HistoneDB2.0/index.fcgi/browse/

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/HistoneDB2.0/index.fcgi/browse/

For example, you can run a search in Assembly and use check boxes (see left side of screenshot below) to refine the set of genome assemblies of interest. Then, just open the “Download assemblies” menu, choose the source database (GenBank or RefSeq), choose the file type, and start the download. An archive file will be saved to your computer that can be expanded into a folder containing your selected genome data files.

More at https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2017/05/08/genome-data-download-made-easy/

NCBI Hackathon specifically looking for folks who have experience in computational virus hunting or adjacent fields to identify known, taxonomically-definable and novel viruses from a few hundred thousand metagenomic datasets that we’ll put on cloud infrastructure. This event is for researchers, including students and postdocs, who are already engaged in the use of bioinformatics data or in the development of pipelines for virological analyses from high-throughput experiments. If this describes you, please apply! The event is open to anyone selected for the hackathon and willing to travel to SDSU (see below).

https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2018/11/09/ncbi-sdsu-virus-hunting-data-science-hackathon-january-2019/