Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Applications are invited for the post of Information Officer in Distributed Information Sub-Centre (DISC) established by Dept. of Biotechnology at Indian Institute of Advanced Research, Koba, Gandhinagar, Gujarat Applications are invited for the post of information officer at Distributed Information Sub-Centre (DISC) Position (scale), qualifications and experience: 1. Information Officer - one post Qualifications and Experience: M. Tech in IT sciences, MSc Bioinformatics with 2-3 years experience in the bioinformatics domain with expertise in database management, software development, system administration, and work experience on linux environment. Pay scale; Gross emoluments will be about Rs. 20.000/- pm in this post Application process: Please submit your application with biodata to Dr. DD Singh Bioinformatics Deptt. at  ddsingh@iiar.res.in  You can call at 079-30514150 for any queries. The application process is open till suitable candidate is found. Link...

The Google Datasets Project Comes to An End Google will shutter its highly-anticipated scientific data service in January without even officially launching the product, the company said in an e-mail to its beta testers. Once nicknamed Palimpsests, but more recently going by the staid name, Google Research Datasets, the service was going to offer scientists a way to store the massive amounts of data generated in an increasing number of fields. About 30 datasets — mostly tests — had already been uploaded to the site. The dream appears to have fallen prey to belt-tightening at Silicon Valley's most innovative company. "As you know, Google is a company that promotes experimentation with innovative new products and services. At the same time, we have to carefully balance that with ensuring that our resources are used in the most effective possible way to bring maximum value to our users," wrote Robert Tansley of Google on behalf of the Google Research Datasets team to i...

Blogging about curation in the past several issues have been discussed but here is something very critical. To thrive, the field that links biologists and their data urgently needs structure, recognition and support. Biocuration , the activity of organizing, representing and making biological information accessible to both humans and computers, has become an essential part of biological discovery and biomedical research. But curation increasingly lags behind data generation in funding, development and recognition. Three urgent actions to advance this key field. First, authors, journals and curators should immediately begin to work together to facilitate the exchange of data between journal publications and databases. Second, in the next five years, curators, researchers and university administrations should develop an accepted recognition structure to facilitate community-based curation efforts . Third, curators, researchers, academic institutions and funding agencies should, in the ...