One of the things that drives me crazy on occasion is nomenclature. Well, maybe not just nomenclature, it's really the continual changes in the nomenclature, and the time it takes for those changes to ripple through various databases and get reconciled with other kinds of information. And the realization that sometimes this reconciliation may never happen.
One of the projects that I've been working on during the past couple of years has involved developing educational materials that use bioinformatics tools to look at the isozymes that metabolize alcohol. As part of this ... Read more
If you like ham and bacon, you might be interested in this. GenomeWeb reports that researchers at the University of Barcelona have developed an assay that tests 46 SNPs and can be used to trace the origin of your pork dinner.
According to GenomeWeb, the test identifies both the breed and origin of the animal.
The university and the company said meat traceability is necessary to ensure consumer safety, particularly in cases of infectious disease outbreaks or accidental feed contamination.
Since DNA diagnostics companies seem to be sprouting like mushrooms after the rain, it seemed like a good time to talk about how DNA testing companies decipher meaning from the tests they perform.
Last week, I wrote about interpreting DNA sequence traces and the kind of work that a data analyst or bioinformatics technician does in a DNA diagnostics company. As you might imagine, looking at every single DNA sample by eye gets rather tiring. One of the things that informatics companies ( ... Read more
