Bioinformatics or B101nformatics

Recently Google came up with Google Genomics  to store genomes and work with them. The easiest way to explore it is through their genome browser ( GA browser ).  Position 132564975 of chromosome 7 of genome HG01440 from the Google repository of the 1000 Genomes Project. Which are the next steps? For developers it has come up with a new API . The system is currently in open beta , so the income of comments and early adopters is going on. This is part of the feed back I want o give as well as some thoughts about it. Improve help pages In my experience a better documentation is better than a better version. What do I mean? I try to do more with less time, when I look for help I want a quick and easy (to follow) answer (if possible). Thats why Stack Overflow  has so many questions, or why the mailing list are open, to help more people with less effort. In fact the help is now divided between Stack Overflow' tag g oogle-genomics  and google-genomics-api...

Probably  you have heard about blast. It helps to find homologous sequences, it can be use through different variants with proteins, genes or just partial sequences to try to find what it is. It can be used also for proteins but there is another tool which can compete with it: HMMER In this article I will describe how I used it to find which kind of protein do we have. HMMER, like blast, has a family of functionalities but it was originally thought as a tool to find homologous proteins through a Hidden Markov Model . At the date of publication has four main functionalities ( hmmsearch jackhmmer hmmscan phmmer ) that can be used online. I will center in hmmsearch, the main tool, which we can run locally after downloading the software, I assume in this post that you are working with a computer with some of the Linux distributions and that you already downloaded the HMMER software and installed it. (See the manual ) Setps We need a profile o...

Yes, this blog is about Biotechnology, as you can understand from the title. But I knew this blog could turn into completely anything else, so I added the on & off. That is the short explanation. The long one: I love biotechnology, I am studying biotechnology and I hope it will help much more than what it does now to people. But I also love bioinformatics, and other related fields. Well, they don't need to be related to get me interested in, so I like to keep myself up to date in several fields. I am driving my career towards bioinformatics , and I have a few pieces of code that I would like to share here, some of them are already in my github account. Or I will post some thoughts about the news I have read. The post will not be always nice, but I hope that they will be always full of good content. I also speak other languages, and sometimes I will post in Spanish, Catalan, or German, or other languages I can learn in the future (I hope to learn at least one more). If I...

Seguro que has oído hablar de Linkedin, a lo mejor tienes un perfil en él porque te han dicho que va bien para encontrar trabajo, o simplemente porque lo has visto en alguna noticia como un espacio con futuro. Quizá no estés muy seguro de que es lo que te puede aportar, para conseguir tus objetivos aquí dejo un conjunto de consejos de mi experiencia de cómo usar Linkedin: 0)  Linkedin es una red profesional , si piensas que te vas a encontrar con información o contactos de amigos, estás muy alejado de lo que es. Es un lugar para mantener el contacto con aquellos profesionales con los que te has encontrado a lo largo de tu vida y hacer nuevos contactos a la vez que compartís dudas e intereses comunes. 1) Una de las primeras cosas que hace alguien interesado en tí en Linkedin es mirar tu perfil . ¿Cómo lo tienes? Seguramente ya tienes una foto de perfil, ahora le faltará rellenarlo lo máximo que puedas sin engañar o exagerar... Utili...

Seguro que si has llegado aquí es que seguramente te has planteado conseguir tu primera experiencia en un entorno laboral próximo a tu formación actual. Muy seguramente habrás mandado curriculum vitae a diferentes empresas, laboratorios, comercios o a autónomos. Quizá habrás tenido éxito o tal vez no, pero te resumo aquí algunas ideas que he aprendido: 1) Eres estudiante. Tienes una gran carta de presentación tus notas. Aunque inicialmente no estén interesados puede que si ven tus buenas notas se decidan a cogerte para contar con alguien espabilado. El conocimiento nunca está de más, te ayudará en tu trabajo! 2) Seguro que has mandado a bastantes sitios los c.v , pero ¿has aprovechado también para difundir la noticia entre tus contactos, los de tus familiares, amigos? Muchas veces alguien a quien conocen te puede presentar a la persona, que te puede facilitar la entrada en su trabajo. Aprovecha tus contactos (networking), y así antes conseguirás un puesto. 3) ...