Blogs

The first time I saw the name of this competition I envisioned a big machine with a huge crank arm being industriously twisted around and around by a horde of scientists in white lab coats. And although I got the details wrong (lab coats are optional!) the basic idea, people working together to achieve something big, was accurate.

The NSF 2026 Idea Machine is a competition to help set the U.S. agenda for fundamental research in science and engineering. Participants can earn prizes and receive public recognition by suggesting the pressing research questions that need to... Read more

Digital World Biology recently received an NSF ATE project grant [1] to advance the Bio-Link.org and Biotech-Careers.org websites. The project started in July, and we are proud to share our first update to the Bio-Link.org website. The last update was launched in early 2016, nearly three years ago. In web-years that's really old. Read more

The Allen Institute for Cell Science has been busy! Two new resources are now available for everyone to explore cells. Here is what the Institute says about their new offerings.

The Allen Integrated Cell summarizes a large collection of live human stem cells, gene edited by Allen Institute scientists to incorporate fluorescent protein tags. By allowing researchers around the world to see many structures inside a living cell together at the same time, the Allen Integrated Cell provides a baseline for understanding cells, studying human disease models, and identifying pathologies.

To see something really amazing,... Read more

In partnership with Illumina, LaMar "Mr. Q-U-E" Queen and David "Mr. D" Landix (directed by Jimmy Pascascio) have created a song to highlight work being done to study the human genome and career options in genomics. This video is a fun way to learn about genetics, genomics, and the careers these two fields can help you build. Watch it and enjoy! Read more

The Coalition of State Bioscience Institutes (CSBI) released the 2018 Life Sciences Workforce Trends Report June 5, 2018 at the BIO International Convention held in Boston, Massachusetts June 4-7. The report provides a national snapshot of the current and anticipated talent needs of the nation’s dynamic life science industry.

The biotech industry continues to be a leading driver of employment across the country, providing 1.73 million jobs in 85,000 companies. In 2017, employers listed almost 264,000 postings for life science positions.

Building on the success of its three prior reports, the 2018 CSBI Workforce Trends Report identifies the... Read more

Congratulations to Bio-Link member Los Angeles Mission College for being named a top-ten finalist in the National Science Foundation’s fourth annual Community College Innovation Challenge ! The college’s team presented their proposal for using wastewater to generate electricity throughout Los Angeles. Biotechnology students Thibault Angouillant, Karla Martinez Hurtado, Mary Abrams, Juan Sosa Matute, as well as faculty mentor, Stephen Brown, PhD., are team members. Their project uses bacteria in a microbial fuel cell configuration to both treat wastewater and produce energy.

The Community College Innovation Challenge (CCIC) is a prestigious, two-stage... Read more

The ABRF 2018 workshop on microbiome and metagenomics may not teach you to zip-line through fire, but you will learn how to generate and manage a fire hose worth of data from microbiome projects.

What is it? A workshop covering practical tools to improve your microbiome research and to facilitate microbiome services at core facilities. The full-day workshop has two components: a morning portion covering nucleic acid extractions from difficult environmental samples, and an afternoon session covering laboratory and bioinformatics approaches to 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and shotgun metagenomics.

Who should attend? Researchers interested... Read more

The technological Singularity is the moment beyond which "technological progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated [1].” Hmmm. That sounds like bioinformatics.

Surviving the Singularity requires reducing complexity. This was the topic of a recent three-day Cyverse Container Camp hosted at the University of Arizona, Tucson AZ. I attended the camp as part of Digital World Biology's effort to design the advanced bioinformatics portion of Shoreline Community College's Immuno-biotechnology certificate [2]. From what I learned, containers will have a significant role in bioinformatics computing and teaching data science in biology.

... Read more

Last Tue - Mar 7, 2018 - NIH released an RFI - Request for Information (RFI): Soliciting Input for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Strategic Plan for Data Science - to invite comments and suggestions on the first National Institutes of Health (NIH) Strategic Plan for Data Science. News about the RFI can be found at Genome Web .

As our available data resources continue to grow, the need to educate students and communicate opportunities in biological data science become more acute. NIH has identified several issues that need to be addressed. In workforce development, NIH... Read more

From communicating with friends and colleagues, to promoting business, to influencing elections, social media’s impact can be significant. Once you’ve decided to use social media, you need to pick platforms and measure your effectiveness. This can be daunting. What are the must-haves and what are the nice-to-haves? Do you have to have a Facebook page, a LinkedIn page, a Pinterest page, and your own website? What about Twitter, blogging, Instagram, and Snapchat? The simple answer to these questions is - it depends. It depends on your goals. What do you want to accomplish? Who do you want to reach? And,... Read more