Mailund on the Internet

If you are into next generation sequencing, then you might want to check out this video where Roald Forsberg presents CLC Bio's Genomics Workbench.

Roald from CLC Bio complained to me that I haven't mentioned this news ... sorry, I've had a cold all week and couldn't be bothered to blog :-(  ... anyway, here goes:

First of 100 Arab Human Genomes Sequenced by Saudi Biosciences, Beijing Genomics Institute Shenzhen, and CLC bio

So, at CLC Bio they are participating in a project to sequence 100 arab human genomes using next generation sequencing technologies.

First of all, I find it pretty cool that you can actually completely sequence a hundred human genomes in a couple of years, and I look forward to the population genetics we can do in the very near future as a consequence of this.

The mind boggles at what we can learn from hundreds of full sequences once we start getting them from populations all over the world.

Still, this quote from the press release looked a little hyped to me:

An international consortium consisting of Saudi Biosciences, Beijing Genomics Institute Shenzhen, and CLC bio have in a joint effort performed an initial sequencing and analysis of the first Arab human genome

Ok, so you have sequenced "yet another human genome". To make this into a news story, you have to mention that it is an arab genome, 'cause we haven't sequenced any of those yet.

It was also a news story when we had the first Chinese genome and when we had the first -- snigger -- female genome.

Is it going to be a news story when we get the first Danish genome?  Outside of Denmark, that is.  When we get the first Aarhusian genome? Will we have a press release when we get the first genome from Paludan-Müllersvej?

Sequencing genomes is cool, and what we can learn from the genomes is even cooler, but do we really need to make up reasons why a new sequence is newsworthy?

I'm not planning on turning my blog into a commercial for CLC Bio (with whom I have no affiliation at all, trust me), but I'd like to show this video showing a preview of their new software, to be released shortly:

It's not something I think I will be using myself -- I do mainly theoretical work and on the rare occasions where I have to analyse "real data" I usually need custom software anyway -- but the presenter, Mikkel Nygaard Ravn, is an old friend from my computer science days. I haven't seen him for ages so it was fun watching him on youtube and I just had to link to it.