HUGO's 13th Human Genome Meeting
Hyderabad, India Sat 27-Tue 30 Sep 2008
Hope to meet many of you there and BioSaga will be back in action form October
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Wednesday, September 24, 2008
HUGO's 13th Human Genome Meeting Hyderabad, India Sat 27-Tue 30 Sep 2008
I am off to HGM2008
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Sign up it's free, and takes less than a minute. Just click here:www.xtractor.in.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
The future of biocuration
Blogging about curation in the past several issues have been discussed but here is something very critical.
Three urgent actions to advance this key field. First, authors, journals and curators should immediately begin to work together to facilitate the exchange of data between journal publications and databases. Second, in the next five years, curators, researchers and university administrations should develop an accepted recognition structure to facilitate community-based curation efforts. Third, curators, researchers, academic institutions and funding agencies should, in the next ten years, increase the visibility and support of scientific curation as a professional career.
Failure to address these three issues will cause the available curated data to lag farther behind current biological knowledge. Researchers will observe an increasing occurrence of obvious gaps in knowledge. As these gaps expand, resources will become less effective for generating and testing hypotheses, and the usefulness of curated data will be seriously compromised. When all the data produced or published are curated to a high standard and made accessible as soon as they become available, biological research will be conducted in a manner that is quite unlike the way it is done now.
Researchers will be able to process massive amounts of complex data much more quickly. They will garner insight about the areas of their interest rapidly with the help of inference programs. Digesting information and generating hypotheses at the computer screen will be so much faster that researchers will get back to the bench quickly for more experiments. Experiments will be designed with more insight; this increased specificity will cause an exponential growth in knowledge, much as we are experiencing exponential growth in data today.
Also read this
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Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service, that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords of preference from time to time, with changing research needs. The categorized sentences could then be tagged and shared across multiple users. Thus XTractor proves to be a platform for getting real-time highly accurate data along with the ability to Share and collaborate.
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To thrive, the field that links biologists and their data urgently needs structure, recognition and support.Biocuration, the activity of organizing, representing and making biological information accessible to both humans and computers, has become an essential part of biological discovery and biomedical research. But curation increasingly lags behind data generation in funding, development and recognition.
Three urgent actions to advance this key field. First, authors, journals and curators should immediately begin to work together to facilitate the exchange of data between journal publications and databases. Second, in the next five years, curators, researchers and university administrations should develop an accepted recognition structure to facilitate community-based curation efforts. Third, curators, researchers, academic institutions and funding agencies should, in the next ten years, increase the visibility and support of scientific curation as a professional career.
Failure to address these three issues will cause the available curated data to lag farther behind current biological knowledge. Researchers will observe an increasing occurrence of obvious gaps in knowledge. As these gaps expand, resources will become less effective for generating and testing hypotheses, and the usefulness of curated data will be seriously compromised. When all the data produced or published are curated to a high standard and made accessible as soon as they become available, biological research will be conducted in a manner that is quite unlike the way it is done now.
Researchers will be able to process massive amounts of complex data much more quickly. They will garner insight about the areas of their interest rapidly with the help of inference programs. Digesting information and generating hypotheses at the computer screen will be so much faster that researchers will get back to the bench quickly for more experiments. Experiments will be designed with more insight; this increased specificity will cause an exponential growth in knowledge, much as we are experiencing exponential growth in data today.
Also read this
Do you want to know more?
Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service, that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords of preference from time to time, with changing research needs. The categorized sentences could then be tagged and shared across multiple users. Thus XTractor proves to be a platform for getting real-time highly accurate data along with the ability to Share and collaborate.
Sign up it's free, and takes less than a minute. Just click here:www.xtractor.in.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Just 400 bucks to sequence your own genome and make a personal genetic profile
Well it so exiting to watch how man makes his future ... The future, always so clear..., had become like a black highway at night. We were in uncharted territory now, making up history as we went along. The future is not set, because we control what happens through the choices we make. The GATTACA era is not far off.
23andMe has dramatically slashed the price for its service and expanded its offerings to include a lineage tracing service through a partnership with Ancestry.com. In a statement today said that by cutting the price for its genotyping service from $999 to $399 it is “democratizing personal genetics and expanding the opportunity for more people to benefit from the genetic revolution.”
23andMe has dramatically slashed the price for its service and expanded its offerings to include a lineage tracing service through a partnership with Ancestry.com. In a statement today said that by cutting the price for its genotyping service from $999 to $399 it is “democratizing personal genetics and expanding the opportunity for more people to benefit from the genetic revolution.”
The company said advances made to Illumina’s genotyping technology, specifically the introduction of the HumanHap550-Quad+ BeadChip, made the price cut possible. Illumina is the provider of genotyping tools for 23andMe’s services. 23andMe also said that beyond the new ancestry service it has added improved custom content to the BeadChip to include more SNP variations and rare mutations. “By taking advantage of continuing innovation we are able to introduce a new chip that will give people more relevant data at a lower price,” 23andMe Co-founder Anne Wojcicki said in a statement.
In addition to technological advances, there has been speculation from industry observers that the crop of new DTC genomics service providers, such as 23andMe, Navigenics, and DeCode Genetics, may be facing price pressure from an ongoing research initiative undertaken by the Coriell Institute for Medical Research earlier this year. Coriell is trying to recruit 100,000 volunteers — 10,000 by the end of 2009 — to provide DNA through a saliva sample for a similar, but free, service as those being offered by the commercial firms. The Camden, NJ-based institute plans to use the information in a research study exploring the utility of using genomic information in clinical decision making.
The company said the ancestry analysis service it will provide through the Ancestry.com partnership “allows users to trace their genetic lineage and discover the role that their ancestral origins have played in human history.” Ancestry.com’s DNA database contains over 7 billion names in 26,000 databases, and it includes more than 7 million user-submitted family trees, which enables customers to “trace their roots and connect with distant cousins,” 23andMe said.
Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service, that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords of preference from time to time, with changing research needs. The categorized sentences could then be tagged and shared across multiple users. Thus XTractor proves to be a platform for getting real-time highly accurate data along with the ability to Share and collaborate.
Sign up it's free, and takes less than a minute. Just click here:www.xtractor.in.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Scientists - Get Networked
Social networking is the latest buzz on the internet. You’ve heard about it, but what does it mean to you as a scientist? Well for one thing, it means that networking has never been easier. Here are six of the best social networking sites for scientists that are designed to help you make and maintain your professional contacts.
Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service, that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords of preference from time to time, with changing research needs. The categorized sentences could then be tagged and shared across multiple users. Thus XTractor proves to be a platform for getting real-time highly accurate data along with the ability to Share and collaborate.
Sign up it's free, and takes less than a minute. Just click here:www.xtractor.in.
1. SciLink is a souped-up networking site that actually knows who a lot of your contacts will be before you even sign up. Uniquely, SciLink mines literature databases to build a network of professional relationships that you can slot into (and of course expand further) when you sign up. You can also find jobs, discussion, news etc on the site.
2. MyNetResearch is a powerful website for finding collaborators for your project. You set up your own account/profile and build a network of contacts as with the other social networks but MyNetResearch is designed to help you find people who work in the areas you are interested in (or interested in expanding into) and arrange collaborations with them.
3. The Nature Network. As you might expect, this is the grand-daddy of science social networks. Not only can you set up a contact network, but you can also browse niche-specific forums and groups, start your own blog, and much more.
4. LinkedIn is a site professional networking site for all professions. Unlike the science-specific networking sites,your LinkIn contact list can contain contacts who are not scientists, which is useful if you actually know people in the real world too and it has a more professional atmosphere than Facebook so people of all ages are more likely to join up.
5. Labmeeting primarily allows you to archive, track and share your literature. From your account you can search for papers of interest and upload the PDFs to your account for later retreival. You can also set up streams to keep you informed of the latest publications in your fields of interest, which you can then add to your archive. However, you can also set up a group area to share papers and talk about your interests, and to schedule events, such as lab meetings.
6. XTractor This free service helps discovering newer scientific relations across abstracts. it provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the keywords of your choice. Maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies. Just play around with their drug, disease, etc entity types and you can actually track a drug or process across various diseases across abstracts :)
What social networking sites do you use?
Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service, that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords of preference from time to time, with changing research needs. The categorized sentences could then be tagged and shared across multiple users. Thus XTractor proves to be a platform for getting real-time highly accurate data along with the ability to Share and collaborate.
Sign up it's free, and takes less than a minute. Just click here:www.xtractor.in.
Monday, September 8, 2008
An alternative to existing antidepressants a drug effective in treating cognitive disorders, such as Alzheimer's
Drugs that encourage the growth of new neurons in the brain are now headed for clinical trials. The drugs, which have already shown success in alleviating symptoms of depression and boosting memory in animal models, are being developed by BrainCells, a San Diego-based start-up that screens drugs for their brain-growing power. The company hopes the compounds will provide an alternative to existing antidepressants and says they may also prove effective in treating cognitive disorders, such as Alzheimer's.
Do you want to know more?
Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service, that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords of preference from time to time, with changing research needs. The categorized sentences could then be tagged and shared across multiple users. Thus XTractor proves to be a platform for getting real-time highly accurate data along with the ability to Share and collaborate.
Sign up it's free, and takes less than a minute. Just click here:www.xtractor.in.
Do you want to know more?
Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service, that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords of preference from time to time, with changing research needs. The categorized sentences could then be tagged and shared across multiple users. Thus XTractor proves to be a platform for getting real-time highly accurate data along with the ability to Share and collaborate.
Sign up it's free, and takes less than a minute. Just click here:www.xtractor.in.
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