Nature's technology editor, Jeffrey Perkel, started blogging about workplace technology in science in 2016. Here are some highlights.
Most bioinformaticians are either biologists skilled in programming or programmers with an interest in biology. Mike Goodstadt, the programmer behind the 3D genome-visualization tool TADkit, took a different approach. In the early-to-mid 1990s, Goodstadt was a student at the University of Bath, UK. His course of study? Architecture, with an emphasis on 3D modelling. After graduation, he helped to design and build a 61,500-seat stadium. But a faltering economy and newly acquired programming skills helped to steer him towards biology.
Lorena Barba, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC, has long championed research reproducibility. “I've always believed that the open-source model is ideal for science, as it exposes the complete sequence of steps that produces a given result,” she says. In January, she travelled to Chile to run a week-long course on reproducible research computing. The month before, she had been awarded a 2016 Leamer-Rosenthal Prize, which celebrates those “working to forward the values of openness and transparency in research”. In this Q&A, she talks flying snakes, 'repro-packs' and copyright.
With an alphabet comprising just four letters, a DNA sequence isn't much to look at. So when sequence-analysis tools want to highlight key elements, they typically do so using colour or font, or by overlaying other types of information. In the not-too-distant future, there may be another option. Molecular biologist and part-time drummer Mark Temple at Western Sydney University, Australia, describes DNA sonification, “an auditory display tool” for DNA: sequence in, audio out. “I'm not saying audio by itself is the bees' knees for interpreting DNA sequence,” Temple says, “but surely audio can contribute to your visual interpretation.”
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A taste of Toolbox. Nature 550, 144 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/550144a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/550144a