Bioinformatics for Beginners – Finding known somatic mutations

30/09/2013

I’ve already written about mutation databases a few weeks back (you can read my post here), but there is a big group of variations I haven’t mentioned in my post. These variants are somatic mutations (if you’re not familiar with the main classes of mutations, check out this page). Very...

Flashcard Fridays – A night at the museum

27/09/2013

If you’ve ever worked as a field biologist, you know how hard sample collection can be. It’s a tough job even if you only want to collect biological samples from a small number of animals living in a relatively confined area (I could tell you long stories about the two...

Workflow Wednesdays – Coverage analysis 1.

25/09/2013

Nowadays, when whole exome and whole genome alignments are becoming fairly routine and even gene panels often target hundreds of genes, it’s no longer a valid option for researchers to visually check the quality of alignments. Generating coverage measures and statistics is a good tool for identifying sequencing or alignment...

Bioinformatics for Beginners – ROSALIND

23/09/2013

The Rosalind project provides an opportunity for learning bioinformatics through problem solving. Rosalind works the following way: you select a problem to solve from a list of available problems, you look through the problem and work out your solution (an example input and output is provided for each problem), you...

Flashcard Fridays – NGS and cancer

20/09/2013

The emergence of new sequencing technologies made it possible for researchers to dig deeper into complex genetics related subjects. One of these complex, hard-to-study, but extremely relevant subjects is cancer. Today”s articles provide a glimpse inside the world of cancer research with next generation sequencing: