Travel
I will be in Brazil from Saturday to Friday (16-22 May) to present at Annual Meeting of the Brazilian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. I will also spend a few days in São Paulo afterwards to visit the University. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to meet/chat!
Links
Calibrating for absolute microbiome abundances without spike-ins by de Wit et al. I mostly want to highlight this calculation: “[If you] sequence 50 million paired-end reads of 150 bp, you would end up sequencing 15 Gbp weighing 16.2 pg.” Somehow, it had never occurred to me to ask how much mass of DNA a typical metagenome represents. 15 Gbp is pretty typical and roughly 1pg/Gbp is a good number to remember.
Day job link: The elusive resistome: a global comparison reveals large discrepancies among detection pipelines has been a long time in the making, but we have a preprint now: different antibiotic resistance gene pipelines return results so different that we can craft conflicting biological stories out of them!
This earlier Rabbit Thought is was motivated by AMP detection, but also applicable to the problem of antibiotic resistance gene identification: Why are bioinformatics results so full of false positives? There is a market failure in our attention/citation economy where false positives are rewarded rather than punished.
Tweets
Photo/painting
