When running a high-throughput screen, one usually deals with hundreds or even thousands of plates. Due to the vagaries of experiments, some plates will not be ervy good. That is, the data will be of poor quality due to a variety of reasons. Usually we can evaluate various statistical quality metrics to asses which plates […]
Are Bioinformatics Results Too Good To Be True?
I came across an interesting paper by Ann Boulesteix where she discusses the problem of false positive results being reported in the bioinformatics literature. She highlights two underlying phenomena that lead to this issue – “fishing for significance” and “publication bias”. The former phenomenon is characterized by researchers identifying datasets on which their method works better […]
Another Conference Done
The CHI RNAi conference is over and will now head back home. Being new to the field of RNAi screening, I’ve been looking for a place (virtual or real) where I can meet other people, especially those working in large scale screening facilities. Reading the literature is certainly useful, but face to face interactions are […]
Viewing Pathways
There are a variety of pathway databases such as KEGG, Reactome and Wikipathways. One of my projects involves pathway analysis, and it’d be nice to easily display them. In many cases, one can simply display a pre-generated image of the pathway (such as in KEGG), but in general, interactivity is nice. However, the latter would […]