Mailund on the Internet

When I looked up some genome sequencing statistics a little while back, I was surprised to learn that only the human and the mouse genome is considered “completed”.  Maybe the mouse genome wasn’t anyway, ’cause this month there’s a PLoS Biology paper on the completed genome.

Church DM, Goodstadt L, Hillier LW, Zody MC, Goldstein S, et al. (2009) Lineage-Specific Biology Revealed by a Finished Genome Assembly of the Mouse. PLoS Biol 7(5): e1000112. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000112

Oh well, in any case the distinction between a draft and complete genome sequence is a bit artificial anyway.  It is really only a matter of degree.  The “complete” human genome sequence still has a lot of gaps and is still being updated (UCSC’s genome browser updated hg18 to hg19 in February this year), and in any case a genome sequence is really only a reference sequence and a lot of the interesting stuff is in genomic variation, so is a genome really “complete” before we have at least a map of the common variations?

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A Blog Around the Clock has a list of links to blog posts about commenting on (scientific) papers.

There have been quite a few posts over the last few days about commenting, in particular about posting comments, notes and ratings on scientific papers. But this also related to commenting on blogs and social networks, commenting on newspaper online articles, the question of moderation vs. non-moderation, and the question of anonymity vs. pseudonymity vs. RL identity.

Read the post to get all the links.

I must admit that I have never left a comment on an online paper.  If I blog about a paper, I leave a traceback, but that is as far as it goes.

Since putting a review of a paper on my blog, just to add a comment, is a lot of work, I guess I should just get used to leaving comments instead.

Still, I am reluctant to comment on papers.  I don’t mind firing off a half thought through comment off at a blog, but I feel that for a scientific paper I should make sure I understand all the details of the paper before I start commenting on it.  I guess I just have to overcome that feeling.

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