Links

Keeping up with the literature (in your own lab)

My lab has started blogging about each other’s papers. People in our lab use quite a variety of techniques and have some pretty different research focuses. I love seeing my labmate’s work come together into a cohesive whole and I love digging into new (to me) techniques and ideas. I always learn a lot. In our blogging project, one person takes lead and writes a short summary of the paper and everyone else very briefly answers these questions:

  1. What’s your takeaway from the paper?
  2. What’s the coolest thing about it?
  3. What questions are you left with?

Joane started off the series in January and I followed this month talking about one of her papers.

The Homebrew Series: Inferring Demographic History With ABC, By Joane Elleouet And Sally Aitken

Want to know about the history of the populations you’re studying? Joane Elleouet and Sally Aitken see how far Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) and your sequencing method of choice can take you in a new paper in Molecular Ecology Resources. [more]

 

The Commons

The Associate Director for Data Science team at the NIH, in partnership with the research community and the private sector, establishes The Commons

In an era when biomedical research[1] is becoming increasingly digital and analytical, the current support system is neither cost-effective nor sustainable. Moreover, that digital content is hard to find and use. The Commons is a pilot experiment in the efficient storage, manipulation, analysis, and sharing of research output, from all parts of the research lifecycle. Should The Commons be successful we would achieve a level of comprehensive access and interoperability across the research enterprise far beyond what is possible today.

The Commons is a conceptual framework for a digital environment to allow efficient storage, manipulation, and sharing of research objects[2].

Don’t forget the ecology when you’re doing landscape genetics

Because genetic diversity is influenced by both current and historical processes [88], it may be difficult to infer population processes from genetic patterns in landscapes with a history of disturbance.

Banks SC, Cary GJ, Smith AL, Davies ID, Driscoll D a., Gill a. M, Lindenmayer DB, Peakall R: How does ecological disturbance influence genetic diversity? Trends Ecol. Evol. 2013, doi:10.1016/j.tree.2013.08.005.