Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Published Literature findings act as a key driver for decision making in drug discovery and biotechnology industry. Majority of the researchers prefer PubMed for published literature since it is a free resource for dissemination of scientific information. Data mining biomedical information from PubMed has been a long-standing problem for many researchers across the globe. On an average more than 50,000 scientific abstracts get published in PubMed every month and for a researcher it is a highly time consuming task to pick the most relevant abstracts everyday and annotate them accurately for research purposes. Though many text mining NLP (Natural Language Processing) engines are used to address this problem, manually annotated data has its own advantages in terms of accuracy and quality of the data that is captured. However, one of the major disadvantages with manual data mining still happens to be the processing time and its cost intensive nature. So the need arises for a system, which ...

Blogging earlier on the platypus What's Our Connection to the Platypus? here is some think i came across, a very interesting compilation on the history of the mystery mammal. I have always thought and fancied a platypus in the place of TUX the Linux mascot, every time i see tux i don't think of a penguin but a platypus! may be tux to me looks more like a platypus than a penguin! A nice item, a brief history of the platypus, in 5 parts that's just brilliant. Further interesting is the foot note "Further reading" don't miss it. This is a wonderful historical account and should be made more widely available. For Quick reach here : Genome analysis of the platypus reveals unique signatures of evolution. Nature 453: 175-183. Abstract | Full text Relevant abstracts from Genome Research Platypus Genome Special Hall, B.K. (1999). The Paradoxical Platypus. BioScience 49(3): 211-218. JSTOR link This is a wonderful historical account and should be made more...

It's the technology. Watson's genome was sequenced using one of the next generation sequencing technologies (454), which allows much more sequencing bang for the buck. This isn't a $1000 genome , but it's a step in that direction. The real value of Watson's genome sequence is a proof of principle. This project was completed at a low cost (relative to the previous methods of sequencing genome), but with high quality. They were able to identify not only sequence variation between Watson and the reference genomes, but also structural variation. To truly realize the potentials of personal genomics, we need many more of these genomes, with the phenotypic data on the individuals. Along with the article, Nature has published a News and Views piece on the Watson genome paper . The article takes many steps to point out that, while we are at the cusp of an era of personal genomics, there are many limitations as to what we can do with these data. Given our current knowledge, w...