May 2010
Why Craig Venter Isn't Actually God
28/05/10 12:50 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Many bloggers have been critical of the hype that Craig Venter has generated with the successful transplantation of a synthetic genome into a bacteria. S. Pelech feels that this achievement from Dr. Venter and his team is monumental, even if it is incremental, and that Dr. Venter has been entirely frank and reasonable about the accomplishment and its implications in public interviews. Read More...
'Overstepping Your Authority' With Online Comments?
21/05/10 12:50 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Prof-like Substance questioned whether publicly commenting on journal articles is worth the professional risk that it entails as there may be damaging repercussions of publicly criticizing another colleague's work. S. Pelech notes that with the variable quality in peer reviews for published scientific manuscripts, despite the associated personal risks, it does not serve the scientific community if researchers refrain from an active dialogue in search of the truth and fail to be critical of problematic research results. Read More...
The Changing Roles of 'The Sequencers'
17/05/10 12:49 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Kelly Rae Chi at Nature noted that as the DNA sequencing process becomes more and more automated, the analysis of the data is becoming more challenging and requires increasing bioinformatics expertise. S. Pelech argues that while it is desirable to have in-house programmers to help analyze data, it is necessary to train more graduate students and post-doctoral fellows with a much deeper and broader understanding of biochemistry, systems and molecular biology than what is typically offered today. Read More...
HIV Makes Music
13/05/10 12:47 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
University of Georgia graduate student Alexandra Pajak has composed original music based on the DNA of HIV, which has been recorded with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. S. Pelech mentions that Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation has converted the amino acid sequences of several signal transduction proteins into musical notes based on their hydrophobicity to produce a unique melody for each of these proteins that can be freely downloaded at http://www.kinexus.ca/scienceTechnology/gallery/music/music.html. Read More...
Letting Go of the Details
10/05/10 12:45 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Bloggers Candid Engineer, DrugMonkey and Comrade PhysioProf have suggested that principal investigators should let their trainees have more free rein in the design, execution and interpretation of experiments, and that the PI's should really focus on getting funding, recruiting, training, and trouble-shooting after the fact. S. Pelech argues that a PI should definitely be very familiar with the underlying theory and limitations of technologies that are being used by the trainees under their supervision and take a strong and active lead in guiding the research of their more junior trainees to avoid waste and unnecessarily prolongation of M.Sc. and Ph.D. thesis projects. Read More...
Systems Biology Meets 'Real' Biology
07/05/10 03:59 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Tim Hunt encouraged practicing systems biologists to spend plenty of time talking to real biologists as it's difficult to map interactions among systems "when you don't even know what the players are." S. Pelech comments that Dr. Hunt's major criticisms of systems biology really arise from the infancy of the field, and the enthusiasm of those in this area to make sense of the limited data that is currently available about proteins. Genomics research has provided the identification of the protein players and data about where and when they are produced. Proteomics reseach is revealing how these proteins are modified and their interactions with each other. Read More...
Because That Would Make Too Much Sense
05/05/10 12:41 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Bloggers DrugMonkey and Thomas Mailund have wondered why authors are not able to have more control of where the figures appear in their published manuscripts. S. Pelech points out that the size and placement of the figures in the final journal print format can be tricky, and if authors embedded figures with the text in their submitted manuscripts, there is a high chance that the text of the figures may be too small to discern or the figures may be of too low resolution. Read More...
Oh, the Vanity
03/05/10 12:39 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Apparently authors with connections to industry are more than twice as likely to pay open access fees to make their work free — a bias that some think could lead to preferential publishing and reading of pro-industry results. S. Pelech argues that even with the traditional journal subscription model, there has alway been an "author-pays' element to scientific publishing in most cases and academic authors are just as inclined to publish "favorable work" as industrial authors, because they are subjected to even more pressure to publish or perish that those in industry. Ultimately, a scientific manuscript stil has to pass independent, scrutiny from peer-review before it is published. Read More...