A Review of Bioinformatics Blogs
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Today we are reviewing and cleaning up the blog links at the right sidebar. Here are few short comments on each link in our current blogroll. Please note that the opinions presented below are biased by our current research interests.
The following three blogs are the ones most visited by us.
It is a blog maintained by Titus Brown, a Professor from Michigan State University. In our opinion, this blog is class apart from other NGS-related blogs, and represents the best value among all.
Why do we say so? It is because Professor Brown’s lab is pushing the limits on NGS analysis on many front, and is coming out with several promising algorithms to handle very large NGS data sets. By following his blog, you can stay current on their cutting-edge research, and have lead time of months over others, who learn about their cool discoveries from printed pages of journals.
The blog is updated once a week, but many updates have enough value to keep you thinking for weeks.
The blog is maintained by Stuart Brown, an Associate Professor at NYU School of Medicine. In professor Brown’s words, it is “a working guide to the rapidly developing world of Next-Generation DNA sequencing, with an emphasis on bioinformatics.” The blog is updated once every two months or so, and the updates are generally insightful.
This blog provides daily updates on published algorithms and research results related to RNA-seq.
Following two blogs are updated very frequently with information from all domains of genomics.
It is maintained by the company Openhelix LLC, and provides daily information on various topics related to genomics.
This one is maintained by Jonathan Eisen, Professor at UC Davis. His interests span many areas of biology, and the blog provides information from all domains. Many discussions are related to phylogenomics of microbes.
The following three blogs are technically oriented. You will need them to get things done.
It is maintained by Stephen Turner, an Assistant Professor of public health sciences and director of the Bioinformatics Core at the University of Virginia. He posts many interesting R codes from time to time. The blog is updated once in every two weeks.
This blog is maintained by Australian bioinformatician Torsten Seemann, who probably understands Velvet as well as its original author. It contains many short coding tips useful for NGS analysis. It is updates once every month.
Another very good blog with many useful codes. It is maintained by Brad Chapman, a biologist and programmer working in the bioinformatics core at Harvard School of Public Health. The updates are infrequent but highly informative. The author went MIA since March, 2012.
Edit.
Peter Cook kindly sent another link for Brad Chapman’s blog that is updated more recently.
The following three blogs are organism-specific with focus on NGS data.
Maintained by Jason Stajich, it is the best source of information on fungi. Updates come almost daily, except when they do not :)
Very good source of information on Drosophila-related research.
An informative blog on latest research related to NGS.
If you want to know how NGS technologies impact research related to human health, this blog is the best place to visit.
We like the following six blogs for various ‘non-specific’ reasons ranging from insightful commentaries to cool picture of giant corn.
Please feel free to mention any other good blog that we may have missed.
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Edit.
We got requests by email and comments about few other excellent blogs.
It is maintained by a bioinformatics expert from UK. One interesting part of his blog is his efforts get the genomes of his family members sequenced through crowd-sourced fundraising.
It is a technically oriented blog similar to ‘Getting Genetics Done’ or ‘Blue Collar Bioinformatics’ mentioned above. He has many helpful scripts to get work done.
An informative blog covering many aspects of biology. It is updated almost daily.
EdgeBio is a Maryland-based company providing high-quality nucleic acid purification products to the scientific research community. Their blog has interesting information on exome sequencing and related topics. It is updated twice or thrice every month.
It was the first bioinformatics blog we ever read long before most others mentioned above were born. Then we forgot about it until rediscovering the blog somewhat fortuitously.
Do you want to know how? We were going through a set of T-cell diversity sequences, and ran google search on a motif. A variation of the motif took us to the movie GATTACCA and Kevin’s blog.
Kevin writes a lot on bioinformatics and programming, but he can make you laugh with his coverage of bioinformatics ads, such as here and here.
