nodalpoint.org

Some time ago, I mentioned that wet/dry earwax is genetic. The same group appears to have now isolated the channel responsible. A SNP (rs17822931 in ABCC11), the causative allele of which is found primarily in East Asians, alters the ability to export cGMP through this channel. Neat!

I haven't been able to find a feed for 'new topics in all forums'. The follow-ups show up in the comments feed, but not the original posts. Is the forum feed hiding somewhere?

Over in the forums, Stew has announced his (beta) version of postgenomic.com, a technorati-like meta aggregator for the life sciences. Looks very cool.

Hi all,

I've whipped up some code for a web project I'd like to get started - it's kind of like a life science specific Technorati. It collects blog posts via RSS from life science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data (in theory). It's at www.postgenomic.com.

One of the aforementioned useful and interesting things that the site does is to act as a centralized repository for reviews of papers and for conference reports written by science bloggers. The site can do some of this just by text parsing, but obviously an approach involving some sort of semantic markup would be better. If anybody has thought - or would like to think - about, for example, what kind of structured information a conference report should convey then please pitch in.

One answer may be because they are very highly cited by other authors. But why are they cited by other authors?

Via CiteUlike

The European Conference on Computational Biology this year will be held September 10-13 in the resort town of Eilat, Israel. The meeting will be held jointly with the 9th Israeli Bioinformatics Symposium.

The first submission deadline is March 15, for papers, workshops and tutorials.

A few weeks back Alf Eaton asked if I had considered enabling forums on nodalpoint so people can post software announcements, questions, on going discussions (perma threads) etc. After a little consideration I had to agree that with the increase in size of nodalpoint's traffic that forums would be a useful addition.

So I have enabled the Drupal forums module and Alf set up some forum topics (general to start with, suggestions welcome). So if you are a bioinformatics software developer and would like to announce your software releases, have questions that no one in the department can answer, have a conference that you would like to let people know about, use the forums.

There are a few posts there now: A discussion on a Review of PDF quality from Journal Publishers, Announcement of a New Life Science Literature Browser (Biolicious), and a few meta-posts on nodalpoint.

I remember people complaining on Nodalpoint before about the weakness of PDFs supplied by publishers for biomedical papers: file naming, lack of metadata, inability to automate downloads etc. I wrote up a quick survey/rant yesterday to see exactly what the state of these files is at the moment, hopefully with some pointers to how things can be improved.

In the correspondence section of Nature this week is a suggestion for a gene function wiki. Not a bad idea. We definitely need a single, integrated, comprehensive and authoritative resource of this kind for genome data. There are standalone alternatives, but why have individual groups compiling their own annotations when we could be sharing?

Chris picked this up: apparently when voting on nodes in the submission queue the post is reentered after a vote is registered. I'm not sure why this is. I'll update this thread with more information once I have look at the queue code...