nodalpoint.org

First up, meet-up(s) details are still being worked out, Roland will be attending tomorrow and David Aanensen has suggested getting together after the cocktail reception this evening, meet at the exit after the event. I'll try and update via email or this post before I leave tonight.

This year the SIG ticket was open so, I drifted into talks on on biopathways, alternative splicing, and bioontologies, here-in, a few of my picks:

• The Galaxy data integration system (similar to Pise/SRC) written in Python
• Mitch Skinner's talk on AJAX genome browser developments. Mitch discussed some of the optimization problems involved with dynamically rendering the genome tracks in the browser. Basically the Gmaps tiling approach does not scale for the Genome so Mitch is experimenting with rendering the tracks in HTML (SVG was tested and abandoned). Slides for the talk can be found here
• Some nice work combining transcription factor data and time course expression data to reconstruct dynamic regulatory maps from Jason Ernst, some nice visualizations using their DREM software (very nice visualizations).

I'm doing the tutorials today, Genome browsers in the morning and protein networks in the afternoon. Peter Schattner from USCS is giving the Genome browsers tutorial, helpfully he wrote an article for PLOS Computational Biology on this topic, which gives an overview on automated batch querying of Ensembl and UCSC database (source code included).