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I was just reading this online article which says "IBM researchers unveil genetic breakthrough". All it talks about is finding coding patterns in noncoding regions... isn't this something that most of you guys know or am I missing something here? We have seen so many papers verifying that JUNK DNA is actually NOT JUNK, so what is the point of this article? Can anyone help me in understanding the breakthrough being made here.
Thanks in advance,
Ani

This is an announcement of a bioinformatics tool, published as freeware for the community.

Geneious is an easy-to-use, cross-platform (Windows, OS X, Unix) bioinformatics data analysis and visualization tool. It has an open API for writing plugins. You can use Geneious to compare genes from different species, to build an evolutionary tree to see how closely related they are, or to search for literature on any topic in medicine or biology. You can view and extract gene annotations from whole genomes, and interactive 3D graphics allow you to move around protein structures.

Version 1.0 of Geneious has just been published as freeware. Biomatters hopes that you will put the program to good use in your research, and we are eager to hear your comments and feedback.

Zugunruhe, seasonally occurring restlessness and anxiety, is a great word for describing animals and their urge to migrate.
The phenomenon of Zugunruhe is discussed by Barbara Helm and Eberhard Gwinner in their PLOS Biology paper Migratory Restlessness (Zugunruhe) in an Equatorial Nonmigratory Bird. They studied African Stonechats and found that these non-migratory birds display Zugunruhe, despite never migrating. One conclusion they draw is that a readiness to move is common in birds, regardless of their migratory behaviour. Zugunruhe, also known as Itchy Feet, is a common behavioural trait of scientists too, though I wonder how it manifests itself? Perhaps in “nocturnal activities” like the Stonechats described in the study? Or never-ending PostDoc positions?

There are indeed quite a few multiple alignment algorithms. Wallace et al counted around 50. They started drawing trees of alignment algorithms.

Has anyone collected a list of all papers that developed a new alignment algorithm (each one, of course, better than a couple of the others)? I personally would bet that - given that the number of algorithms raise with algorithmical simplicity and the interpretability of the results - motif discovery on DNA is one of the disciplines that generated the most different papers about a new algorithm (counted around 80). Fortunately, the decision is much simpler as the savvy bio-computerfreak knows: With so much choice, the first program that gently compiles after "make" has a good chance of getting used in the end. Is this the reason why everyone is using BLAST today? Or was that a completely different time?

Nodalpoint is periodically being hammered by comment spam. Unfortunately it looks to be the work of a Botnet, so I am unable to simply ban by IP. Due to the limited resources on the server the comment spam (which is not working) is acting more like a DoS attack. I may have to take down the site until I can implement some kind of solution. So if service gets slow, or disappears all together, you know why.

Biomedcentral is arguably one of the more progressive online publishers, they have allowed reader comments on each published article for some time now. Recently I tried to track down a comment I made a while back and couldn't actually find a central comments page, so I emailed the support people and asked if they had or planed to implement an RSS feed for comments. At the time no, but now they have a comments page (amazingly Matt Cockerill, who is in charge of Biomedcentral, responded to the support request). Based on Biomedcentral's RSS page you should be able to access the RSS feed of the page by adding rss to the end of the link. This doesn't work at the moment, but I'm sure it will.

May 2006 marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of that infamous semantic web hype in Scientific American and is also the deadline for conference papers for the Fifth International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2006). This year ISWC is in Athens, Georgia at the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems (LSDIS) laboratory.

There are currently lots of life scientists building semantic webs and this conference is a good place for life scientists and bioinformaticians to publish, for example, see A Little Semantic Web Goes a Long Way in Biology from the 2005 ISWC proceedings.

Can someone explain to me how Katoh and Katoh get so many papers published? have a look at these pubmed search results.

By the way, is there any link on the web with the authors that occur most often in pubmed? There's no Pubmedbattle yet? (Well you could googlebattle it out but that's not very scientific). (As for Eric s. lander, he seems to be at 237 papers today).

Welcome to part three of tracking. First up Postgenomic, the appropriately named meme agregator for science weblogs. It is early days yet with not many 'science blogs' out there. However Stew seems to be making incremental progress with new hosting from Seed media, an update on the review metadata page (which I should implement here), a blog, developer's mailing list , and the code is also available . So go download the pipeline and try out your favorite text mining algorithms (I you know you have a favourite), get very afraid about bioinformatics file format standards development when you realise how bad syndication technologies are in the wild. Read on for more tips...