The Maine INBRE in its 22nd Year – Looking Back and Ahead
Guest post by James A. Coffman, Director, Maine IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence
Continue ReadingCloud Computing 101
Guest blog by Joel Graber, Ph.D., Senior Staff Scientist, Director of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Core
Continue ReadingBioinformatics: The Importance of Training the Trainer
In recent years bioinformatics – using computational power to help process the massive swathes of data produced by modern experiments – has become an indispensable tool for research scientists.
Continue ReadingMINOTA 2020 – a change of direction
Transcriptome-profiling is the primary means by which researchers characterize what is happening at the molecular level. When a transcriptome profile is generated for a sample, it tells us which genes are active (being expressed) and at what amount. Comparing profiles among samples allows us to identify genes, and importantly the biological processes that are varying...
Continue ReadingPart III: Meet the Computational Biology Core
(Read part one or part two of the series.) For this entry into our ongoing discussion of the MDI Biological Laboratory Computational Biology Core, I want to take a step back and, rather than talk about the specifics of the science, instead talk about who we are, what we do, and why it is so...
Continue ReadingBioinformatics Part II: What do my genome-scale measurements of gene expression mean?
Graphical representation of differential gene expression for a single gene. The red triangles represent measurements of replicate treated samples, and the black diamonds represent matched control samples. Differential expression of this gene is determined by a statistical analysis of the separation between expression levels in treated and control, compared to the variation within each group...
Continue ReadingPart I: Computational Biology is vital to modern research
But what exactly is it and why does science need it? The typical interpretation of this figure is that the arrows represent the “flow of information”: that DNA is capable of self-replication (represented by the circular arrow); that the information stored in DNA is activated by first being transcribed to RNA (resulting in an RNA...
Continue ReadingCourse Spotlight >> The Colby INBRE Course: Taking the Cookie Cutter Out of STEM Education
Continue ReadingREGEN2017 Students Share Their Thoughts
The MDI Biological Laboratory’s recent signature course in comparative regenerative biology, REGEN2017, attracted senior graduate students, post-docs and junior faculty from around the world. Here, some of the students talk about what the experience meant to them. Pictured above: Susannah Kassmer, Ph.D., post-doctoral fellow, University of California-Santa Barbara. ‘I want to help people who...
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