nodalpoint.org

If you're here looking for Duncan Hull's blog, it has moved to O'Really?. Nodalpoint lives on at nodalpoint.org.

Nodalpoint has been obviously indexed by Google for a long time now, but did you know it is also indexed and counted by Google Scholar too? See Mistaken Identity: Google thinks I'm Maurice Wilkins for details...

If you are interested in running a Drupal site with PubMed content you should check the screencast below. It explains how it can be done with existing Drupal modules. I'm working with a student from the University of Szeged on a PubMed module for Drupal. So in the future this should become a bit more straightforward ;)

Hi,
python 2.6 is going to implement a new kind of data (like lists, strings, etc..) called 'named_tuple'.
It is intended to be a better data format to be used when parsing record files and databases.

You can download the recipe from here (it should be included experimentally in python 2.6):
- http://code.activestate.com/recipes/500261/

Basically, you instantiate a named_tuple object with this syntax:

> Person = NamedTuple("Person name surname")

"Person" is a label for the named_tuple; the following fields, 'name' and 'surname'

Primer-BLAST combines primer design (using Primer3) and a specificity check with BLAST.

The NIH has published, in 2000, a definition of bioinformatics which is supposed to be the 'official' one:
- http://www.bisti.nih.gov/CompuBioDef.pdf

I partly disagree with that!! Or at least, I think it is incomplete.

Bioinformatics is not only providing services and tools for scientists and for analyzing data.
It is also a scientific discipline, in which you make an hypothesis, you write down your assumptions, you manage to find a way to demonstrate it, and then you share your results with other scientists and confront with them.

Scientists usually share information with collaborators from all around the world. For that purpose, eyeOS (www.eyeos.org) provides an invaluable system to access and share documents, create and save data files or store crucial personal and professional information.

To see eyeOS widely used by scientists all around the world, we initiated the eyeLIMS project ! eyeLIMS is a community-driven project which aims at providing a Free, web-based, Open Source Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) powered by eyeOS.

There are a few remaining places left on the Building Scientific Workflows for Bioinformatics and Systems biology using Taverna course held in Manchester, UK on 15th April 2008. Attendance at the workshop is free, but participants will have to cover their own travel costs. Due to the hands-on nature of the workshop, numbers are limited to 30, so there is a ‘first-come, first-serve’ policy on bookings. Book now to avoid disappointment!

Well it's that time of year again. The 15th annual stamp collecting edition of the journal Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), also known as the 2008 Database issue [1], was published earlier this week. This year there are 1078 databases listed in the collection, 110 more than the previous one (see Figure 1). As we pass the one thousand databases mark (1kDB) I wonder, what proportion of the data in these databases will never be used?

It seems that most bioinformatics web services use SOAP, and the extent of their documentation is the accompanying WSDL file - not very helpful for anyone who wants to use them outside a workflow-type tool like Taverna, and even then often not descriptive enough to know what should go in each field.