You know you’re in an emerging field when you see things like this:
…Asia’s oldest bioinformatics organisation set up in 1998. (Bioinformatics research in the Asia Pacific: a 2007 update)
I simply find it worthy of note that I work and study in a field whose ‘old and venerable’ organizations are between 10-20 years old.
Makes you realize how far we’ve come in such a short time.
Posted: February 14th, 2008 under bioinformatics, hmmmmm.
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One of my recent projects has been to map short sequences of DNA (tags) to specific positions in transcripts (ie. exons, introns, UTRs). Everything was going along nicely, until I was looking through my output data and saw something weird.
I had one sequence map itself to an exon and a 5′UTR - on the same transcript. This caused me some concern (and an afternoon of frustration), because it seemed that according to the Ensembl database, this one position is both an exon and a 5′UTR. I thought I had done something wrong in my code, such as calculating the start and end position of the UTRs wrong or pulling out the wrong starting position for the start of translation.
Seems that wasn’t the problem. What it turned out to be was partially my fault, but also partially the fault of the Ensembl gene annotation.
Posted: July 15th, 2007 under bioinformatics, hmmmmm.
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So I was looking around Information Aesthetics and found an interesting piece on DNA visualization. It seems some guys took the entire human genome, assigned a colour to each of the four bases (plus grey for ‘undetermined’), and rendered pictures based on our genetic code.
Looking at them, I’m reminded of those annoying 3D pictures that only ever worked when I was too tired to concentrate on anything other than keeping my eyes open. And while they do make for interesting pictures, I’m not sure you can really consider this ‘art’. I certainly don’t.
It a unique idea - of sorts - but in the end it’s all just static. And the entire issue about ‘patterns emerging from our DNA’, I think, is kind of misleading. The ‘patterns’ or ‘bands’ seen are merely a biproduct of how the pictures were rendered in the first place. ie. where the ‘newline’ is placed.
And DNA is in actuality one long string, so how can you show it in a 2D image format, and expect it to be representational of the human chromosomes? (There’s an interesting discussion over at Slashdot about this entire project.)
But this all led me to the discovery of DNA11 - From Life Comes Art
Again, really cool pictures (better than the 3D-DNA-rainbow-thing ), but when you get right down to it, these are blown up gels. Way to bastardize the technologies that revolutionized molecular biology and genetics!
They also do fingerprints.
While these are interesting ideas and all, it’s like sending your social insurance number out to be blown up and framed so you can hang it over your mantel. DNA and fingerprints are that personal.
But if you don’t mind having your genetic markers or unique identifiers up on the wall for all the world to see, that’s your call.
Just don’t commit any crimes, cause then you’re screwed. (ie. freely displayed = no warrant needed)
Posted: June 17th, 2007 under genetics, hmmmmm, interesting stuff, science.
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