Master in Biological Sciences (MBS) at the University of Vigo, SPAIN

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Master in Biological Sciences (MBS) of the University of Vigo (Spain) for the academic year 2013-2014. The MBS aims to provide future professionals in biology with the knowledge, skills and insights they will need to take on top science-based positions around the world (academic, research, environmental and biomedical applications, bioinformatics).

The official language of the MBS is English. Non-English speaking students must demonstrate that they have acquired the minimum language skills to study the Master. No additional proof is required, although holding a B1 or equivalent title would be desirable. In addition, personal interviews with members of the Academic Commission might be required before admission.

The staff teaching in this master cover a wide range of areas giving students contact with renowned researchers, specialists in developing professional skills and practitioners from industry. They all have long-term teaching experience.

For those students interested in doing a PhD, there are two Doctorate Programmes linked to the MBS, and rated as excellent from the Spanish Education Ministry

Master outline

The MSc programme comprises 120 ECTS in total distributed between 2 academic years (60 ECTS each one). During the 1^st year, students will follow 4 general courses (Basic Module, 12 ECTS) on basic tools for designing and performing experimental tasks, analysing results and elaborating conclusions. This will be followed by the Elective Component (42 ECTS) where students will have the chance to follow specific tracks:

1. Molecular Biology for Health and Life Sciences
2. Environmental Sciences
3. Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
4. Green-Industries Management

The main part of the second year consists of a major project (Mandatory Major Project 48 ECTS), in which students will acquire advanced knowledge on different methodologies and techniques under the guidance of experienced experts to fulfil your professional requirements and possibly to gain a better position on the job market.

Finally, all students need to carry out a Master’s thesis (12 credits).

APPLICATION for academic year 2013-14

•       First pre-registration period: 28 June to 4 July 2013

•       Second pre-registration period: 27 August to 3 September 2013

DOCUMENTS that must accompany the application form:

•       DNI, NIE or Passport

•       Bachelor’s degree diploma

•       Brief CV

CONTACT

María Jesús Iglesias Briones (coordinator)

mbriones@uvigo.es

Master in Biological Sciences

Facultad de Biología

Campus Lagoas-Marcosende

Universidad de Vigo

36310 Vigo, Spain.

FURTHER INFORMATION

http://biology.uvigo.es

You can also download an informative poster  about the program.

ADVANCES IN ECOLOGICAL SPECIATION (AES) Conference, Portugal, 29-30 April 2013

I just received the following info about the AES Conference:

ADVANCES IN ECOLOGICAL SPECIATION (AES) Conference, CIBIO/UP, Portugal, 29-30 April 2013

LIVE BROADCAST of the AES Conference!

We are happy to announce that the AES Conference can be followed Live on streaming from http://tv.campusdomar.es/directo.html

If you want to join us please check out the program of the AES Conference from our website (http://www.aes-cibio.org/). The Live broadcast will be on Portugal local time (UTC/GMT+1hour).

Invited Speakers:

Dolph Schluter (Biodiversity Research Centre and Zoology Department, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)
Felicity Jones (Friedich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society, Tubingen, Germany)
Walter Salzburger (Zoological Institute, University of Basel, Switzerland)
Sebastien Renaut (Botany Department, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)
Roger Butlin (Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, UK)

You can also follow the AES Conference on:

https://www.facebook.com/AdvancesInEcologicalSpeciation

https://twitter.com/aes_cibio

The conference videos will be available afterwards at the Campus do Mar website, and you can dowload the book of abstracts right now.

Do as I say, not as I've been doing

Raising standards : Nature Immunology 14, 415 (2013) doi:10.1038/ni.2603 -- Nature journals' updated editorial policies aim to improve transparency and reproducibility:

. For example, authors will need to describe methodological parameters that may introduce bias or influence robustness and to provide precise characterization of key reagents, such as cell lines and antibodies, that may be subject to biological variability.
(...)
To help improve the statistical robustness of papers, the Nature journals will now employ statisticians as consultants on certain papers, at the editor's discretion and on the referees' suggestions. (...) Exploratory investigations often are not amenable to the same degree of statistical rigor as hypothesis-testing studies.
(...)
Those who would put effort into documenting the validity or irreproducibility of a published piece of work have little prospect of seeing their efforts valued by journals and funders; meanwhile, funding and efforts are wasted on false assumptions.

These are certainly much needed changes in NPG's policy, provided they are not just lip service while in practice neglecting valid statistical criticisms to their flagship papers. I remain skeptical. Would they put their money where their mouths are and demand openness for already published data or allow for retroactive post-review? (The infamous "your criticism won't add to the discussion" boilerplate reply?) Anyway, a few more links:

What We Have Here is a Failure to Replicate | Evolutionary Psychology:

Discussions of why replications aren’t more common – including Pashler’s remarks – focus extensively (but not exclusively) on incentives. If a researcher attempts to do an exact replication of published work, there are two possible results. If the result replicates successfully, it is likely to be difficult to publish because journals tend not to publish replications, though this is changing.(...) Other journals are proving more receptive to publishing replications – and failures to replicate – which will probably have some beneficial effect. In any case, my guess, though I don’t know, is that replications of results are cited relatively infrequently, especially compared to the original results. Publishing failures to replicate is likely no easier than publishing successes.

Authors, Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You | Psychology Today:

Privileged access is only one of the many means by which political forces distort debates about evidence and select which conclusions are legitimized and which perspectives are marginalized. Because privileged access articles often escape rigorous peer review, the science is often flabby and grossly simplistic, and claims in privileged access articles can be extravagant.

Strategies for challenging inaccuracies and outright misrepresentations in privileged access articles are limited. Journals that grant privileged access also often restrict publishing of letters to the editor to only what authors indicate a willingness to respond. A refusal to respond is effective censorship, causing criticism to be barred from publishing. Even when letters are accepted, they often have severe restrictions on their length (often 400 - 600 words), are often published much later than the privileged access articles, fail to be indexed in ISI Web of science or other electronic bibliographic sources, or are limited to e-letters, not the paper editions of the Journal. It is notable that the webpages of the journals making the most use of privileged access articles do not link subsequent critiques with the original article, so that anyone in defining the critiques has to search for them separately.

Non-consensual replication | john hawks weblog:

You are building one assumption upon another. The disturbing part is that the discipline accepts that some researchers just have a "knack" for making a particular experimental design work, and other researchers may have trouble recreating the exact conditions. That very attitude enables fraud, as we have seen repeatedly during the last few years. In science, if no one else can make the experiment work, it didn't happen.

Opinion: Missing Methods | The Scientist Magazine®:

How has the requirement to share every iota of technical detail with the research community given way to “as described elsewhere,” elsewhere being Never Never Land?  First, I blame the journal editorial boards.  The push in recent years to shorten papers and limit the number of figures has never been clearly rationalized to the research public.
(...)
Next, I blame the authors. Failure to transmit clear and detailed technical details is not just a sin against the scientific community, it’s also indicative of poor internal mentoring skills. (...) This brings up the worst consequence to our increasingly lax eye for technical detail: faster publication of findings in higher impact journals will mean squat if the data will not stand the test of time, and in our field, this means experimental reproducibility.
(...)
The recent proliferation of smaller journals devoted solely to publishing novel methods and technologies is a great advance in this regard.

Actually this last conclusion is wrong -- the existence of journals devoted to these details is an incentive for the authors to hide the details from other manuscripts, in the (sometimes unfulfilled) hope that this slice of research will be a publication on its own. That is, you persuade authors to think about the method, software and data/conclusions as independent entities, and consequently it will become not more, but less likely for them to provide you with the other elements.

Random Image (from here)

Criticizing ENCODE -- who is your target audience?

First, a few links to commentaries on the latest article criticzing the ENCODE hype:

Biomickwatson’s Ridiculous Criticism of ENCODE Critics « Homologus

Spanking #ENCODE | The OpenHelix Blog

So I take it you aren’t happy with ENCODE… | The Finch and Pea

Scientists attacked over claim that 'junk DNA' is vital to life | Science | The Observer @ The Guardian

ENCODE, Apple Maps and function: Why definitions matter | The Curious Wavefunction, Scientific American Blog Network

Dear ENCODE…. | opiniomics

ENCODE gets a public reaming » Pharyngula

Graur et al. to ENCODE: Zing! « Genomicron

The ENCODE Controversy And Professionalism In Science | Scilogs

To me, one aspect of the ENCODE project that has been neglected is the moral hazard it enforces on the publication process. The concerted publication of 30 papers in practice prevents an objective peer review: 1) the publication is guaranteed; 2) the reviewer will feel responsible for the delay in case of honest concerns; 3) it is hard to find good reviewers if 'everybody' in the field is a coauthor (therefore you might have endogamic or non-expert reviewing). It also weakens the interpretation (value) of an academic article, shifting the importance of a discovery from the article itself to the number of articles. We should be struggling to create better measures of 'impact', and not stimulating the abuse of the current ones.

But another aspect of this discussion that is particularly relevant to me is the problem of the tone.

Lior Pachter on FB points out he deposited paper on 12/2012 critiquing ENCODE arxiv.org/abs/1212.3076 but got little response w/o snark
— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) February 24, 2013

It seems that other polite people have trashed ENCODE: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23268340. Politeness is not always noticed.— Dan Graur (@DanGraur) February 24, 2013

Critical analyses of high-profile works never receive the same attention -- they are seldomly published in the same venues and are not always easy to follow. Grand conclusions are easier to grasp than more boring details and conditions. I have no answer to that -- while I do prefer a calm and objective response, I have first-hand experience that cordial arguments are more easily dismissed. And some times what is perceived as a personal attack by some is simply an objective statement that happens to put the criticized researchers in a less-than-comfortable position. In the end it is a matter of choice between convincing the opponent or the audience.

Oh, and there's also another element that we should take into account when criticizing other people's work: how well we have our backs covered. I cannot pretend that there are not vindictive professors out there that will not hesitate in painting us with the scarlet letter at the smallest sign of threat. Many scientists are miserably gregarious.

 

Update 2013.04.11: There's a longer comment from Dan Graur that expands on some of my observations.

Well-meaning lobbying is eventually supplanted by plain old lobbying

I was just gonna include a link to a commentary on Nature News, but something at the end of the article called my attention. From "Bees, lies and evidence-based policy"(Lynn Dicks at Nature News & Comment):

Yet I also see that lies and exaggeration on both sides are a necessary part of the democratic process to trigger rapid policy change. It is simply impossible to interest millions of members of the public, or the farming press, with carefully reasoned explanations. And politicians respond to public opinion much more readily than they respond to science.

Which is an important point. In fact, one of the most convincing commentaries for me was based on the very understanding that scientists and all their uncertainties are always in disadvantage when compared to the unshakable belief of other policy actors. But I'm at loss about the need to dumb down the arguments in order to convince politicians. And I must disagree strongly with her conclusion, from the same Comment:

It is important to get as near to the decision-makers as possible, providing clear and well-referenced information with an independent voice. (...)
When I saw the exaggerated pollinator-decline claim attributed to me in The Guardian I did not seek to correct it, because the correct information, with references, will go into a forthcoming parliamentary-committee report.

It is shortsighted or worst to think that we can inform policy-makers without trying to correct the public understanding. Our dismaying state of political affairs is in large part consequence of this disconnect between the State as envisioned and as implemented -- governments don't see themselves as having to respond to those they represent, except in a shallow, populistic way. Her attitude might earn her a small immediate victory, but at a high cost in the long term. As scientists, the adoption of our favored solutions by politicians should not serve as a consolation for the maintenance of ignorance and misinformation. A likely outcome is to have an unpopular policy implemented, just waiting to be reverted back or replaced by another opaque and unaccountable one.

Bottom-up advocacy by informed citizens is always a better option than lobbying. If her proposed solution of cozy relations with policy-makers while neglecting the public is successful, we can expect the appearance of a lot of nonsense "correct information reports". It's "cheaper" to fake authority than to educate and convince the general public. In other words, politicians cannot distinguish between good and bad lobbyists. And this, in the end, will lead to a dillution of scientific education and to a politicization of scientists.

Accepting that scientists must work twice as hard to have half the impact is still better than the alternatives. Education is the only way to go (and by the way, science reporting falls short of that, too).

The Genetics of sexuality

This is just a short and random list of links (articles and comments) about the biological basis for homosexuality, that I decided to collect after some heated discussion in Brazil about it.First a few articles that I found particularly interesting.

David Bierbach, Christian T. Jung, Simon Hornung, Bruno Streit and Martin Plath. 2013. "Homosexual behaviour increases male attractiveness to females". Biol Letters:

Male homosexual behaviour—although found in most extant clades across the Animal Kingdom—remains a conundrum, as same-sex mating should decrease male reproductive fitness. In most species, however, males that engage in same-sex sexual behaviour also mate with females, and in theory, same-sex mating could even increase male reproductive fitness if males improve their chances of future heterosexual mating. Females regularly use social information to choose a mate; e.g. male attractiveness increases after a male has interacted sexually with a female (mate choice copying). Here, we demonstrate that males of the tropical freshwater fish Poecilia mexicana increase their attractiveness to females not only by opposite-sex, but likewise, through same-sex interactions. Hence, direct benefits for males of exhibiting homosexual behaviour may help explain its occurrence and persistence in species in which females rely on mate choice copying as one component of mate quality assessment.

Andrew B. Barron, Malin Ah-King, Marie E. Herberstein. 2011. "Plenty of sex, but no sexuality in biology undergraduate curricula". BioEssays, 33: 889--902:

Research over the last decades has stimulated a paradigm shift in biology from assuming fixed and dichotomous male and female sexual strategies to an appreciation of significant variation in sex and sexual behaviour both within and between species. This has resulted in the development of a broader biological understanding of sexual strategies, sexuality and variation in sexual behaviour. However, current introductory biological textbooks have not yet incorporated these new research findings. Our analysis of the content of current biology texts suggests that in undergraduate biology curricula variation in sexual behaviour, sexual strategies and sexuality barely feature, even though sex is discussed in a range of contexts. In this aspect, biological teaching is lagging behind current research. Here, we draw attention to new findings in the biology of sex, and suggest how these might be incorporated in undergraduate teaching to provide a more contemporary and inclusive education for biology students.

Julie E. Elie, Nicolas Mathevon,Clémentine Vignal. 2011. "Same-sex pair-bonds are equivalent to male–female bonds in a life-long socially monogamous songbird". Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 65: 2197--2208:

Same-sex sexual behaviors are well documented in both captive and wild animals. In monogamous species, these behaviors are often exclusive, each individual having only one same-sex partner. A bias in sex ratio has been proposed as a social context yielding same-sex pair-bonding, but this hypothesis has rarely been tested. Focusing on a life-long pair-bonding songbird, the zebra finch Taeniopygia guttata, we tested whether same-sex pairing results from a shortage of individuals of the opposite sex. By experimentally skewing the sex ratio towards members of one sex, we observed a greater proportion of same-sex pair-bonds of that sex. Moreover, we assessed whether the quality and stability of social interactions were equivalent in same-sex and male–female pairs. Male–male and female–female same-sex bonds display the same behavioral characteristics as male–female ones: they are intense, highly selective, and stable affinitive relationships involving the same behavioral displays already described in wild birds. Moreover, same-sex male bonds were sufficiently strong not to split up when individuals were given the opportunity to reproduce with females. Because the pair-bond in socially monogamous species represents a partnership that may give advantages for survival (e.g., resources defense, fighting against predators, etc.), we propose that same-sex pairing in the zebra finch may result from the pressure to find a social partner.

Nathan W. Bailey, Marlene Zuk. 2009." Same-sex sexual behavior and evolution." Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 24: 439--446:

Same-sex sexual behavior has been extensively documented in non-human animals. Here we review the contexts in which it has been studied, focusing on case studies that have tested both adaptive and non-adaptive explanations for the persistence of same-sex sexual behavior. Researchers have begun to make headway unraveling possible evolutionary origins of these behaviors and reasons for their maintenance in populations, and we advocate expanding these approaches to examine their role as agents of evolutionary change. Future research employing theoretical, comparative and experimental approaches could provide a greater understanding not only of how selection might have driven the evolution of same-sex sexual behaviors but also ways in which such behaviors act as selective forces that shape social, morphological and behavioral evolution.

And then some links to commentaries that were on my feeds

• The Real Story on Gay Genes | Michael Abrams at Discover Magazine
• Suppressed records of “depraved sex acts” by penguins finally released after a century « Why Evolution Is True
• Female bonobos 'advertise' homosexual bonds | Ella Davies at BBC Nature
• La neuroendocrinologia de la homosexualidad | Sapere Audere
• The Genetic Fatality of What You Are « Into Oblivion
• Krauss does it again, so soon! | Rationally Speaking
• The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Natural Selection and Evolution, with a Key to Many Complicating Factors | Jeremy Yoder at the Scientific American Blog Network
• 23andMe Studies the Genetics of Sexual Orientation | The 23andMe Blog
• What we know—and don’t know—about the biology of homosexuality | Kate Shaw at Ars Technica

update (a few minutes later...): In fact I was searching my feeds for an article criticizing the anthropomorphization of animal sexual behavior, but couldn't find it. Here it is.

Reports on 'gay' animal research criticised › News in Science (ABC Science):

"Consistently any scientific report of same-sex sexual contact in any animals is reported as gay or lesbian behaviour," says Barron. (...) "Gay and lesbianism is more than same-sex copulation in humans. Let's not turn this animal behaviour into something that it isn't," he says. "Scientists would never call it gay."

And Barron says in many cases the animals in the scientific study didn't even copulate but simply showed some form of atypical male or female behaviour.

(...)

And Leach says in some fields of research - for example evolutionary psychology - scientists are actively linking human behaviour to animal behaviour. "You read this stuff not just about gay behaviour but about female versus male behaviour and it's irritating," she says.

"I get really tired of evolutionary psychology explanations that my behaviour has to do with hunters and gatherers."

The original critique is this one: Andrew B. Barron and Mark J. F. Brown. 2012. "Science journalism: Let's talk about sex." Nature 488: 151-152.

The difference between the RF and the NNI distances

Just to complement my answer to a blog post, where I maintain that the Nearest-Neighbor Interchange (NNI) distance is not equivalent to the Robinson-Foulds (RF) distance, a simple example:

Where we can see that trees T1 and T2 differ only in the location of nodes A and B -- on these trees, we can naturally think of the nodes A, B, 1,..., 6 as representing leaves, but they might also be large subtrees.

The RF distance is the number of edges (=branches) that are unique to each tree (that's why it's also called the symmetric difference), and it may be normalized to one. If we highlight the unique edges on trees T1 and T2

We see that the (unnormalized) RF distance is 10. For dichotomic trees, the number of unique edges is the same on both trees.

The NNI distance is the minimum number of NNIs that must be applied to one tree such that it becomes equal to the other. One NNI branch swap will change exactly one edge, thus is very tempting to assume that the NNI distance can be found by looking at the distinct edges.

But the problem is when the same branch is involved in more than one path of the "NNI walk". The RF distance (divided by two, for fully resolved trees) is then a lower bound on the minimum number of NNIs. In our example:

The NNI distance between T1 and T2 is 6, one more than the RF distance since the edge splitting (1,2,3) and (4,5,6) is used twice in the NNI computation. The problem, as explained by Liam, is that simulating trees with a specified distance is hard, and the solution of using very large trees masks the cases where the distances disagree...

Reference:
Bryant D. (2004). The Splits in the Neighborhood of a Tree, Annals of Combinatorics, 8 (1) 1-11. DOI: 10.1007/s00026-004-0200-z

open API is not open data

Today I made a comment on twitter about the ownership of the crowdsourced database of Mendeley, and so I decided to look for a few comments on the difference beween open data and open API.

Publishing Open Data – Do you really need an API? | Peter Krantz:

An alternative to the direct integration API model is to publish data dumps in files. “Boring!” may be the initial reaction from developers but they will thank you later. In this model data from the database is exported, transformed to an open readable format [1] (e.g. CSV), properly named and stored on the web server [2]. This means entrepreneurs can get all your data, load it into their own system and design their API according to their use case. Also, high loads will hit their own infrastructure without affecting other apps.

Mendeley’s Open API Approach Is On Course To Disrupt Academic Publishing | TechCrunch:

Meanwhile, Elsevier has been trying to build a similar thing to Mendeley but their philosophy is the exact opposite. The API is not an open access one, but paid-for and closed, open only to paying university customers. They have put a lot of marketing behind it, holding ‘hack days’ etc. Their third party apps have now reached around the 100 mark – although they do allow for easier monetisation while Mendeley’s are free.

(this article wrongly claims Mendeley's open API is open data, but it's interesting that they compare with Elsevier)
iPhylo: On being open: Mendeley and open data versus open source:

For me the question of whether the source code for the Mendeley desktop will be made open source is a red herring, and ultimately a distraction from the real question — will the data be open?

Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - Does “Open API” mean anything? « petermr's blog:

I have no particular quarrel with Mendeley – they are innovating by putting power in the hands of clients and that’s gently useful. But unless they actually are Open according to the OKD then they aren’t giving us much (and this applies to many companies – and almost all in chemistry). (...)
I have no major complaint with a company which collects its own data and offers it as Free – Google does this and many more.
But don’t call it Open.

Don’t use that open API — it could be a trap!:

What the Face.com and Twitter cases reinforce is the dual nature of an open API, as entrepreneur Syed Iqbal noted recently: it can be an incredibly useful tool for other startups, especially if it allows them to tie into a larger platform or network — such as Twitter, or Google, or Facebook — and take advantage of the size and reach of that partner to grow more quickly. And for the platform company itself, all of those developers and outside services can add value relatively quickly (and cheaply) to the network.

The flipside is that when a network or platform gets large enough, as Twitter has, having all those tiny developers and outside services can seem more like an unnecessary bug than a crucial feature — especially if the company wants (or needs) to take control of some of those external features and apps in order to monetize its network effectively.

Update 2013.01.18

I remember this article saying that the difference between "open" API and open source is when the API provider disappears. It was mentioned that Peter Murray-Rust and the Open Knowledge Foundation say that the Mendeley API is Open Data. While I'm not in position to discuss with them, I think it depends very much on your definition of data: if by "data" they mean the bibliographic reference then maybe yes, Mendeley offers a way of getting all entries typed by the user (although no data dump may make it practically impossible to get). And in this sense PMR agreed on the openness I believe. But as for the relational data -- which is where I think the crowdsourcing takes place --, I don't think we have access to it. That is, the association between the PDF file (through its metadata or checksum) and its DOI or its bibliographic info, this may not be openly available. The differential of Mendeley is not to have a 'huge bibtex' file, but to have a 'huge curated bibtex file' where the curation process associated the entries to the pdf documents themselves. I've never used Mendeley's API and I'm not familiar with its internals, so please read my rant cum grano salis. I might be wrong here. But still I'm afraid there's no way to migrate to another platform that can use this database as we use it now, in case we want to leave Mendeley: if I'm not mistaken, even if I manage to download all information available trough the API (is this dowloaded data set all the info that's in their database or something's missing? Dunno, not OSS), I cannot find the entry for a given PDF file I know is on the database. Or can I retrieve the filehash/metadata fields for all entries?

This condition for openness was already observed by PMR:

An API should not precludes [sic] access to the raw data. And that’s where the “data” question still needs to be answered. 

And as for the OKFN, the current status of Mendeley is "unresolved" (nobody replied).

Just to be clear, I use Mendeley a lot and really think they are doing amazing things. I wish them the best irrespective to whom they partner with, and I certainly don't think Elsevier or some other company are the evil incarnated. I always worried about not being the owner of the data I helped creating, but then I realized that we do this all the time, and it's just a matter of tradeoff between what I give as input and what I get from it. Google does the same, as well as all loyalty programs or even supermarkets. If they use the information I provide in innovative ways to offer me better products or services, then I can voluntarily accept this exchange. Which I'm glad I did with Mendeley. And I also understand that there might be legal limits to the info that Mendeley can offer freely -- I'm certainly not demanding that they release all the info even if it clashes with some copyright agreement.

I just wanted to highlight a drawback of APIs -- calling them Open or not. APIs hinder the access to the primary data: how much do I have to invest (in time and effort) to make sure I have the complete data set? With Open Data, Open Source, Open Access, that's easy: the one offering the information is responsible for guaranteeing it. And that, in my view, we should not call a crowdsourced data  "Open" if we don't have access to 1) the labor we contributed and/or 2) all data components that make this data innovative.

Conference: NGS4MG -- Next Generation Sequencing for Marine Genomics Symposium

Carlos Canchaya and David Posada are organizing this NGS symposium -- which will be held in our building and will be free. The e-mail communication follows below. 

NGS4MG: Next Generation Sequencing for Marine Genomics Symposium
Vigo (Spain), 27 September 2012

The recent advances in sequencing technology have revolutionized genomic research and have represented a big enough shift from previous technologies to be widely termed “Next Generation Sequencing”, NGS. The main effect effect of these technologies has been the fast processing and analysis of large quantities of genomic data at ever more economical prices. Their effect has been been so profound that they are also changing fundamental investigative methods by moving research from the traditional hypothesis-based approach to one based on data. The aim of this symposium is to explain what NGS consists of, its advantages and shortcomings and its potential use in the marine environment.

Invited Speakers:

Genome Sequencing

•   Monica Bayes (National Centre for Genomic Analysis – Spain)

Genome Assembly

•   Jason Miller (J. Craig Venter Institute – USA)

Evolutionary Genomics

•   Nori Satoh  (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology – Japan)

Genomics of Speciation

•   Iria Fernandez (Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology – USA )

Biodiversity

•   Mehrdad Hajibabaei (Biodiversity Institute of Ontario – Canada)

Microbial Metagenomics

•   Ramon Massana (Institute of Marine Sciences, CSIC- Spain)

The registration to this event is free.

You can find more information at :

http://ngs4mg.uvigo.es/


The organization of this event is supported by Campus do Mar (http://campusdomar.es/) and MG4U consortium (http://mg4u.eu)

The Organizing Committee

Two quick links: peer review of bioinfo software and low engagement on post-publication review

• BioMed Central Blog : How do we standardize peer review of bioinformatics software?

• No Comment? | EveryONE

The first post also links to an interesting and simple suggestion to help improve the review process when software is involved: a checklist where reviewers tell if the code is available, if the program runs on available data and is well documented.

Bonus link: why closed source has no place in science.