Tag: Swedish Bioinformatics Workshop

The final schedule is out for the Swedish Bioinformatics Workshop (SBW) 2019! I will be there (after all, it is in Gothenburg and I am in the organising committee…) and will give a workshop on sequence annotation errors on Monday afternoon. And then on Tuesday afternoon, I will participate in a panel discussion on careers in computational biology, organised by RSG-Sweden. I hope I will see you there!

Today the 15th Swedish Bioinformatics Workshop starts in Linköping. For the first time in many many years, I will not be there, which feels super-strange. (I even took part in organizing the workshop two years ago, in Gothenburg.) I would have thoroughly enjoyed the schedule (the workshops look amazing), and hope that everyone will have a very good time there without me. I do miss you! Please make sure I get another opportunity next year!

I have had the pleasure to be chosen as a speaker for next week’s (ten days from now) Swedish Bioinformatics Workshop. My talk is entitled “Turn up the signal – wipe out the noise: Gaining insights into bacterial community functions using metagenomic data“, and will largely deal with the same questions as my talk on EDAR3 in May this year. As then, the talk will highlight the some particular pitfalls related to interpretation of data, and exemplify how flawed analysis practices can result in misleading conclusions regarding community function, and use examples from our studies of environments subjected to pharmaceutical pollution in India, the effect of travel on the human resistome, and modern municipal wastewater treatment processes.

The talk will take place on Thursday, September 24, 2015 at 16:30. The full program for the conference can be found here. And also, if you want a sneak peak of the talk, you can drop by on Friday 13.00 at Chemistry and Molecular Biology, where I will give a seminar on the same topic in the Monthly Bioinformatic Practical Meetings series.

One of the highlights of the Swedish Bioinformatics Workshop 2014 was of course the dinner entertainment, a song specially crafted for the event. It has now, fortunately, been put online. For anyone who might not catch all the words, here’s the complete lyrics for the song (which is based on the song “Java Jive” in the Manhattan Transfer arrangement):

The Bioinformatics ABC

Grab your coffee
Grab your tea
Put down your spoon now and listen to me
For the bioinformatics ABC
Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up
(Boy)

A for ABYSS
B for BLAST
And C for Clustal, though it’s not that fast
Alternatives are Muscle and MAFFT
ABYSS and BLAST and Clustal, Muscle, MAFFT
(Yeah)

D count reads with DESeq or E for EdgeR
And F for FastQC and G for GLIMMER
H for HMMER using Markov Chains
(Explain)
Hidden hidden Markov model

I for Inchworm;
Jellyfish
Add Chrysalis and Butterfly and wish
Assemble fast with a sound that goes swish
Contig, contig, contig, contig, transcript
(Girl)

KBASE
Lasergene
And the ton of tools for metagenomics
MEGAN, Megraft,
MetaPhlan, MG-RAST, Meta-GeneMark
And that’s just mentioning a few of them
(Talk it boy)

N for Newbler, old-school it is
If you’re still using 454 it’s a bliss
O for Oases, P for PyroNoise
45-45-45-454-454

Q is for Quake for that great quality
And R is for all those neat statistics
S for the Spades assembler, oh yeah

T for TopHat
U for Uclust
V for Velvet

There is Wham to align
XMatchView to review
And YASS to pursue
(But do you)
Know any tools beginning with Z?
What?
Yeah, Zorro, Zorro, Zorro
Oh yeah

I would like to sincerely apologize for that I have been terrible at responding to support issues pertaining to ITSx, Metaxa, Atosh etc. lately. I am currently on 50% parental leave and at the same time I am wrapping up three first-author papers, organizing a workshop and preparing a talk. Thus, support issues has been lagging a bit behind the last weeks to be able to cope with everything else. I have been ticking off most (all?) of my support questions the last couple of days, but if I have any remaining issues that I have missed to reply to, please re-send them to me!

I will try to improve response times, but it is hard when I am working less than usual (also, note that I (strangely) don’t get paid for supporting software, so I have to do this on my “sparetime”). My aim is to respond within a few days, so if I have not done so, please resend your e-mail with a friendly reminder that you are waiting for my response. Reminding me will very likely put your question up the priority pile.

So, my advice to becoming dads is: Do take paternal leave. Do take a lot of it. Share responsibilities with your partner. Because what you get back is awesome. (And also you get a good reason not to answer support questions in time.) But finally, don’t plan to wrap up the last couple of year’s worth of work and arrange a conference at the same time as you take out paternal leave. That will only make you feel insufficient at all fronts.

Keep the spirit high!

I would like to bring your attention to that the abstract deadline for the Swedish Bioinformatics Workshop held in Gothenburg in October has been extended to September 15. So hurry on and contribute with your latest research, we look forward to get to know what you’re doing!

I am part of the organizing committee for the Swedish Bioinformatics Workshop (#SBW2014) that will be held October 23-24 this year in Gothenburg. I would like to invite you all, especially master/PhD students and PostDocs in Sweden, to come and share the event with us!

SBW is an annual event that has been organized by the different universities in Sweden. This year it will take place at the Wallenberg Conference Centre in Gothenburg and is arranged by both University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology. SBW2014 will, as the tradition abides, be a meeting point for PhD students and postdocs working with any kind of bioinformatics within Sweden and is therefore free of charge for these groups. We are proud to announce a program including both invited speakers – such as Mick Watson from the Roslin institute, Dawn Field from University of Oxford, and Joakim Lundeberg from KTH – along with participant presentations and poster sessions. This year, the program will also contain a number of workshop sessions where hands-on problems will be used as starting points for discussions on new bioinformatics approaches to these problems. This will provide opportunities for attendees with different methodological backgrounds to interact and work together to find synergies between fields and come up with creative solutions.

More information about the event including registration and abstract submission can be found at www.sbw2014.se.

I, and the rest of the organizers, look forward to meeting you in Gothenburg in October!

Webpage: http://www.sbw2014.se

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1450513325188910/

Google+: https://plus.google.com/events/cuhlpovcc275stut854dk5ussnk

If you want, you can spread the word, for example using this flyer!

Those of you attending the Swedish Bioinformatics Workshop, this year given in Skövde, will have a chance seeing me talk about how sequencing depth influences the picture we get of the environmental resistance gene diversity. I think the topic is very urgent and interesting, and will likely come back to it in a more thorough blog post later. There are also a few other very interesting talks, for example about metagenomic gene quantification, and en masse sequencing of E. coli and H. pylori isolates. I think all attendants are in for a treat! See you there!

The 11th annual meeting of PhD students and Postdoc researchers in Bioinformatics in Sweden will take place in Lund the 29-30 September. The workshop is an opportunity for young researchers to meet, exchange ideas, and keep up to date with the growing body of knowledge. I will go there, and you should be there too! Besides, it’s free for PhD students and Postdocs! All info can be found at the workshop website. The last time I was there (2010) really fueled some interesting discussions, and I am really looking forward to the event this year. Hope to meet you there, fellow Swedish bioinformaticians!