nodalpoint.org

Where does the time go? The deadline is rapidly approaching for the next issue of Bio::blogs at Fourth Floor Studio, so send in those entries, people! Remember, it can be any recent blog post related to bioinformatics, not necessarily a special post. Feel free to nominate others' posts, too!

MEDIE is an “intelligent” semantic search engine that retrieves biomedical correlations from over 14 million articles in MEDLINE.

While I wasn't watching Source Code for Biology and Medicine, a new journal from Biomed Central, was released. The first volume is a little light, but I'm sure once everyone has tidied all those uncommented Perl modules we'll see submissions increase.

The cynic in me thinks that journals like this will allow authors to spin three papers per project, one for the the biology, one for the algorithm and one for the module that implements it. If anything it will hopefully decrease the number of parser papers published in regular journals.

The Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (MIB) is officially opening on 25/26th October 2006. The centre has been about a decade in the making, and aims to be a world-class research centre, with around £37 million (~$70 million) of initial funding from the Wellcome Trust charity, UK Research Councils and others. If you're looking for a bioinformatics job, PhD, PostDoc etc in the UK, MIB is continuously hiring and looks like a good place to work, if the opening programme (which follows) is anything to go by.

Reading the article Gene Wiki conceptual overview posted at TSL on Nodalpoint some time ago, and looking in the proposal made there, I wonder if this is not already being done. There is the BOWiki Project. BOWiki extends a Semantic MediaWiki by additional functionality to allow the annotation of gene data and is supposed to allow the curation of biomedical ontologies as well. It makes heavy use of biomedical ontologies in the description of genes and gene functions, in order to allow a search of the wiki using the categories in the ontologies.

Some regular readers may have noticed the site was off-line for a few days. Basically I forgot to pay my credit card bill, this has now been remedied, so the site is back and so am I. Over the last few months I changed jobs and moved into a new apartment. I don't need to explain the effect this has on one's mental and physical well being but the worst of it is over. Read on for the full story

First reminder gang: Bio::Blogs #5 is due to land at Fourth Floor Studio in two weeks' time. Plan those submissions, and send to bioblogs at gmail dot com, or cotsapas at gmail dot com. Submissions preferably by 5pm 31st Oct (ESDT) - that's coffee time 1st 11th in Australia, and coffee time 31st 10th in Europe.

The 17th annual Mathematical and Statistical Aspects of Molecular Biology (MASAMB) meeting will take place in Manchester on March 29-30, 2007. The call for submissions has just opened.