I frequently get asked to recommend workshops or online learning resources for bioinformatics, genomics, statistics, and programming. I compiled a list of both online learning resources and in-person workshops (preferentially highlighting those where workshop materials are freely available online):List of Bioinformatics Workshops and Training ResourcesI hope to keep the ... [Read more...]

If you ever write code for scientific computing (chances are you do if you're here), stop what you're doing and spend 8 minutes reading this open-access paper:Wilson et al. Best Practices for Scientific Computing. arXiv:1210.0530 (2012). (Direct link t... [Read more...]

I've said it before: Twitter makes me a lazy blogger. Lots of stuff came across my radar this week that didn't make it into a full blog post. Here's a quick recap:PLOS Computational Biology: Chapter 1: Biomedical Knowledge IntegrationAssuring the quali... [Read more...]

Coursera's free Computing for Data Analysis course starts today. It's a four week long course, requiring about 3-5 hours/week. A bit about the course:In this course you will learn how to program in R and how to use R for effective data analysis. Y... [Read more...]

Here are links to all of this year's posts (excluding seminar/webinar announcements), with the most visited posts in bold italic. As always, you can follow me on Twitter for more frequent updates. Happy new year!New Year's Resolution: Learn How to Code... [Read more...]

In case you missed it, a new paper was published in Nature Biotechnology on a method for detecting isoform-level differential expression with RNA-seq Data:Trapnell, Cole, et al. "Differential analysis of gene regulation at transcript resolution with RN... [Read more...]

If you need to catch up on all those years you spent not learning how to code (you need to know how to code), here are a few resources to help you quickly learn R and Python, and have a little fun doing it.First, the free online Coursera course ... [Read more...]

Update (Dec 18, 2012): Please see this related post I wrote about differential isoform expression analysis with Cuffdiff 2.DESeq and edgeR are two methods and R packages for analyzing quantitative readouts (in the form of counts) from high-throughput e... [Read more...]

About a year ago I wrote a post about producing scatterplot matrices in R. These are handy for quickly getting a sense of the correlations that exist in your data. Recently someone asked me to pull out some relevant statistics (correlation coefficient ... [Read more...]

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I saw this plot in the supplement of a recent paper comparing microarray results to RNA-seq results. Nothing earth-shattering in the paper - you've probably seen a similar comparison many times before - but I liked how they solved the overplotting... [Read more...]

A few folks have asked me how I get my news and stay on top of what's going on in my field, so I thought I'd share my strategy. With so many sources of information begging for your attention, the difficulty is not necessarily finding what's interesting... [Read more...]

I'm a huge supporter of the Free and Open Source Software movement. I've written more about R than anything else on this blog, all the code I post here is free and open-source, and a while back I invited you to steal this blog under a cc-by-sa license.... [Read more...]

If you're doing any kind of big data analysis - genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, bioinformatics - then unless you've been on vacation the last few weeks you've no doubt heard about the NSF/NIH BIGDATA  Initiative (here's the NSF solicitation... [Read more...]

There were lots of interesting developments this month that didn't work their way into a full blog post. Here is an incomplete list of what I've been tweeting about over the last few weeks. But first I want to draw your attention to the latest manuscri... [Read more...]

I get asked frequently how to convert from one gene identifier to another. This can be tricky, especially when relying on gene symbols, as Will pointed out in a previous post a few years ago. There are several tools that can do this, including DAVID an... [Read more...]

*Edit March 12* Be sure to look at the comments, especially the commentary on Hacker News - you can supercharge the find|xargs idea by using find|parallel instead.---Do you ever discover a trick to do something better, faster, or easier, and wish you c... [Read more...]

I get a lot of requests in the core about running a "pathway analysis." Someone ran a handful of gene expression arrays, or better yet, ran an RNA-seq experiment (with replicates!). These, and many other kinds of high-throughput assays (GWAS, ChIP-seq,... [Read more...]

I direct the Bioinformatics Core at the University of Virginia, and I'm hiring. Visit this link on the UVA Jobs website for more information. Here's the description:The University of Virginia Bioinformatics Core is seeking a full-time position as a bio... [Read more...]

Title: A Backstage Tour of ggplot2 with Hadley WickhamDate: Wednesday, February 8, 2012Time: 11:00AM - 12:00PM PacificPresenter: Hadley Wickham, Professor of Statistics, Rice UniversityRegister here.I used ggplot2 extensively a few years ago, but rever... [Read more...]