Tag: GoBiG

I am part of the organizing committee for the newly invented annual meeting for GOTBIN – the Gothenburg Bioinformatics Network. We will arrange a meeting on December 6 to get the networking activities for 2017 kickstarted, and every bioinformatician in Gothenburg is invited!

GOTBIN was launched to bridge and bring together all researchers in Gothenburg who fully or partially dealt with bioinformatics in their research. Through the network it should be possible to quickly find other local researchers tackling the same research problems as you are; to find appropriate resources to run your analyses; and to discuss research or infrastructure problems as they arise. To keep the network alive and kicking, it is crucial to keep relations active. Furthermore, it is also crucial to interact with key persons in the GOTBIN network to keep the lists of active researchers, resources and discussion forums up to date.

To facilitate future communication, we invite everyone who works with bioinformatics in Gothenburg to participate in a get-together workshop. The purpose of this workshop is to find out who is working with what and where, and to better get to know each other. This is a great opportunity to meet your next collaboration partner, post-doc or supervisor! The event will take place in Birgit Thilander at Medicinareberget (just next to the large lecture hall Arvid Carlsson) on December 6th, from 9.00 to 12.00. Fika will be provided and we will arrange ice-breaker activities suitable for the number of participants, so please register at: https://goo.gl/forms/KYdiiZMBDf0F9hvp2 by the 16th of November.

We hope to find everyone with a research interest in bioinformatics there and that this will be the launch of the next era of GOTBIN in 2017! See you there!

I am happy to announce that our Viewpoint article on strategies for improving sequence databases has now been published in the journal Proteomics. The paper (1) defines some central problems hampering genomic, proteomic and metagenomic analyses and suggests five strategies to improve the situation:

1. Clearly separate experimentally verified and unverified sequence entries
2. Enable a system for tracing the origins of annotations
3. Separate entries with high-quality, informative annotation from less useful ones
4. Integrate automated quality-control software whenever such tools exist
5. Facilitate post-submission editing of annotations and metadata associated with sequences

The paper is not long, so I encourage you to read it in its entirety. We believe that spreading this knowledge and pushing solutions to problems related to poor annotation metadata is vastly important in this era of big data. Although we specifically address protein-coding genes in this paper, the same logic also applies to other types of biological sequences. In this way the paper is related to my previous work with Henrik Nilsson on improving annotation data for taxonomic barcoding genes (2-4). This paper was one of the main end-results of the GoBiG network, and the backstory on the paper follows below the references…

References

1. Bengtsson-Palme J, Boulund F, Edström R, Feizi A, Johnning A, Jonsson VA, Karlsson FH, Pal C, Pereira MB, Rehammar A, Sánchez J, Sanli K, Thorell K: Strategies to improve usability and preserve accuracy in biological sequence databases. Proteomics, Early view (2016). doi: 10.1002/pmic.201600034
2. Kõljalg U, Nilsson RH, Abarenkov K, Tedersoo L, Taylor AFS, Bahram M, Bates ST, Bruns TT, Bengtsson-Palme J, Callaghan TM, Douglas B, Drenkhan T, Eberhardt U, Dueñas M, Grebenc T, Griffith GW, Hartmann M, Kirk PM, Kohout P, Larsson E, Lindahl BD, Lücking R, Martín MP, Matheny PB, Nguyen NH, Niskanen T, Oja J, Peay KG, Peintner U, Peterson M, Põldmaa K, Saag L, Saar I, Schüßler A, Senés C, Smith ME, Suija A, Taylor DE, Telleria MT, Weiß M, Larsson KH: Towards a unified paradigm for sequence-based identification of Fungi. Molecular Ecology, 22, 21, 5271–5277 (2013). doi: 10.1111/mec.12481
3. Nilsson RH, Hyde KD, Pawlowska J, Ryberg M, Tedersoo L, Aas AB, Alias SA, Alves A, Anderson CL, Antonelli A, Arnold AE, Bahnmann B, Bahram M, Bengtsson-Palme J, Berlin A, Branco S, Chomnunti P, Dissanayake A, Drenkhan R, Friberg H, Frøslev TG, Halwachs B, Hartmann M, Henricot B, Jayawardena R, Jumpponen A, Kauserud H, Koskela S, Kulik T, Liimatainen K, Lindahl B, Lindner D, Liu J-K, Maharachchikumbura S, Manamgoda D, Martinsson S, Neves MA, Niskanen T, Nylinder S, Pereira OL, Pinho DB, Porter TM, Queloz V, Riit T, Sanchez-García M, de Sousa F, Stefaczyk E, Tadych M, Takamatsu S, Tian Q, Udayanga D, Unterseher M, Wang Z, Wikee S, Yan J, Larsson E, Larsson K-H, Kõljalg U, Abarenkov K: Improving ITS sequence data for identification of plant pathogenic fungi. Fungal Diversity, 67, 1, 11–19 (2014). doi: 10.1007/s13225-014-0291-8
4. Nilsson RH, Tedersoo L, Ryberg M, Kristiansson E, Hartmann M, Unterseher M, Porter TM, Bengtsson-Palme J, Walker D, de Sousa F, Gamper HA, Larsson E, Larsson K-H, Kõljalg U, Edgar R, Abarenkov K: A comprehensive, automatically updated fungal ITS sequence dataset for reference-based chimera control in environmental sequencing efforts. Microbes and Environments, 30, 2, 145–150 (2015). doi: 10.1264/jsme2.ME14121

Backstory
In June 2013, the Gothenburg Bioinformatics Group for junior scientists (GoBiG) arranged a workshop with two themes: “Parallelized quantification of genes in large metagenomic datasets” and “Assigning functional predictions to NGS data”. The following discussion on how to database quality influenced results and what could be done to improve the situation was rather intense, and several good ideas were thrown around. I took notes from the meeting, and in the evening I put them down during a warm summer night at the balcony. In fact, the notes were good enough to be an early embryo for a manuscript. So I sent it to some of the most active GoBiG members (Kaisa Thorell and Fredrik Boulund), who were positive regarding the idea to turn it into a manuscript. I wrote it together more properly and we decided that everyone who contributed with ideas at the meeting would be invited to become co-authors. We submitted the manuscript in early 2014, only to see it (rather brutally) rejected. At that point most of us were sucked up in their own projects, so nothing happened to this manuscript for over a year. Then we decided to give it another go, updated the manuscript heavily and changed a few parts to better reflect the current database situation (at this point, e.g., UniProt had already started implementing some of our suggested ideas). Still, some of the proposed strategies were more radical in 2013 than they would be now, more than three years later. We asked the Proteomics editors if they would be interested in the manuscript, and they turned out to be very positive. Indeed, the entire experience with the editors at Proteomics has been very pleasant. I am very thankful to the GoBiG team for this time, and to the editors at Proteomics who saw the value of this manuscript.

The newly formed bioinformatics network for PhD students in Gothenburg (GoBiG), will have an introductory meeting next week, on thursday the 26th at Chalmers. See this page for more info.