Eisen Lab Blog

A Postdoctoral research position in Antarctic Metagenomics and Microbial Ecology

Here is an ad for a post doc that is to work on a joint project between my lab and that of Craig Cary.

POST-DOC ANNOUNCEMENT

A Postdoctoral research position in Antarctic Metagenomics and Microbial Ecology

A Royal Society Marsden Funded project “Life at the extreme: resolving the genetic basis of microbial endemism in the super-heated soils of Mt. Erebus, Antarctica” is available at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand.

Project description

Tramway Ridge geothermal site on Mt. Erebus, an active volcano in Antarctica, is the most geographically isolated geothermal site on earth providing an excellent system for studies of microbial speciation, biogeography, and evolution of thermal adaptation. A recent preliminary genetic survey of the Tramway Ridge microflora revealed an unprecedented diversity of extremely novel microbes only distantly related to any known bacteria [Soo et al., (2009). Environ. Microbiol. 11 (3), 715-728]. Most of these loose affiliations are with organisms identified from deep-subsurface systems suggesting the Tramway Ridge community may be archaic and of a sub-surface origin. A group dominates the community that to date has no known cultured or environmental representative. The successful candidate will employ cutting-edge high throughput DNA sequencing and bioinformatics to acquire and decipher the genetic capabilities and structure of entire microbial community at Tramway Ridge. A combination of these advanced genetic methods coupled with culture dependant approaches will be used to analyse the Tramway Ridge microflora and other Antarctic geothermal sites to address questions focused on endemism, biogeography, evolution, and adaptation.

The project is in collaboration with Dr. Jonathan Eisen, U.C. Davis Genome Center.

Required qualifications

We are looking for a highly motivated postdoctoral scientist with and interest in Antarctic microbiology and experience in metagenomics, microbial ecology, cultivation of microorganisms, and bioinformatics. The successful candidate will drive his/her own project within the context of the project and be actively involved with practical guidance of an MSc student. The University is especially interested in candidates who can contribute to the diversity and excellence of the academic community through research and service.

The position is full time with a salary of NZ$ $56,164 to $68,060 depending on experience. The initial appointment is for 1-year on this multiyear project; continuation beyond will be based on performance. Applicants should submit a CV, a statement of research interests, and the names of three referees to caryc@udel.edu or caryc@waikato.ac.nz. The position is available immediately and will remain open until filled.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Science Stimulus Spam II – Double Yuck

And another science stimulus spam, this one from Perkin Elmer

PerkinElmer self promotional statement deleted to not help them distribute it.

“As you know, the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) is providing large opportunities for grant funding through the NIH.

NIH Challenge Grants in Health and Science Research (RC1)
Recovery Act Limited Competition: High-End Instrumentation Grant Program (S10)
Recovery Act Limited Competition: Biomedical Research Core Centers to Enhance Research Resources (P30)
View More NIH Grant Funding Opportunities
PerkinElmer is here to assist you. “

More self promotional text deleted.

More yuck.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Science Stimulus Spam – Yuck

Just got this email from Sequenom

“NIH Challenge Grants

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the NIH invites Challenge Grant (RC1) applications from domestic institutions/organizations proposing research on Challenge Topics that address specific scientific and health research challenges in biomedical and behaviorial research that will benefit from significant two-year jumpstart funds.

Challenge Areas, defined by the NIH, focus on specific knowlege gaps, scientific opportunities, new technologies, data generation, or research methods that would benefit from an influx of funds to quickly advance the area in significant ways. The research in these areas should have a high impact in biomedical, behavioral science and/or public health.

We are here for you!”

Sequenom self promotional text here deleted to not aid them in distribution.

I mean, Sequenom might do some cool things but yuck. SSS. Science stimulus spam.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Congrats to Phil Bourne who beat out me and some others to win the Ben Franklin Award.

Congrats to Phil Bourne for winning the “Ben Franklin Award.” (Bio-IT World) I was honored to be one of the nominees, but if I had had a vote, I would have voted for him. He has been relentless as an Open Access advocate as well as as a bioinformatician.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Yet Another Reason Davis Should Be Selected for the Bicycling Hall of Fame

Davis is just an incredible bike town.  There is good reason it is one of two finalists for being the host city of the Bicycling Hall of Fame.  And here is one example of why it should win — the bike paths and bike lanes around town make this city great for commuting on ones bike.  Here are some pictures I took yesterday of my favorite bike ride to work.  It is a little bit out of the way but it is worth it.  About 7 or so miles total each way and it only has ~ 4 road crossings and one short stretch of a few hundred yards on a bike lane – and the rest is on off road bike paths.  

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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The Evolution Particle?

The New York Times is reporting that the Large Hadron Collider was not actually shut down over the winter but was actually apparently looking into the possibility that a new particle is particularly mutagenic.   It seems that when they fired up the accelerator, they found that some particles with unusual affinity for DNA were created.  So, no black hole but particles that could shape evolution.  Seems like the ID people will be all over this one — maybe this is the guiding hand they have been looking for?

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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HHMI early career scientists

HHMI has announced a new list of anointed ones (HHMI News: HHMI Gives 50 Early Career Scientists a Jump on Their Next Big Idea).

A few comments.

First, it is really really surprising that they are so low on females here (41 men, 9 women by my count). Given that this is for early career scientists and that women have on average sometime more challenges in the early career than men, it would have been nice to see this the other way around.

That being said, they did pick some good people in this list (shocking, I know). Here are a few I want to highlight as they are related to things I tend to write about here:

Rob Knight, at U. Colorado at Boulder who has been developing computational methods to study microbial diversity and has developed lots of cool methods.
Harmit Malik, FHCRC, who does some great stuff on genome evolution.
Michael Laub, MIT who works on Caulobacter development.
Martin Cohn, U. Florida who has done some very cool work on evolution of development in vertebrates.
Neil Hunter UC Davis. UCD’s first HHMI awardee. And a good one to pick. He does some cool work on recombination.
Molly Przeworski, U. Chicago, who works on population genetics on a genome-wide scale.
Aviv Regev, Broad Institute, who has done some interesting work on regulatory networks.

I love the idea of finding people not projects. Too bad there is not more of this type of thing from Federal Agencies. We would probably save money in the long run — review people once every few years and give them some money to do work. Not that competitive grant programs should be eliminated, but funding people more would reduce the # of grant proposals and panels and would probably save $$ in the long run by allowing people to focus on doing work.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Sean Eddy in PLoS Biology on Open Revolution

Interesting article by Sean Eddy on “Open Education” in PLoS Biology on March 24. (see PLoS Biology – Open Revolution). The article is (mostly) a review of “Opening Up Education” a book from MIT Press.

For those not in the now, Sean is a big supporter and proponent of Open Science and is now at the HHMI’s Janelia Farm Campus. In addition to developing some smashing software and doing cool science, Sean was instrumental in my conversion to supporting Open Science so I pay attention to what he says. And there is some interesting material in this pub. The ending sums up a lot of what is in there:

More attention must be paid to the fact that someone still needs to spend time painstakingly developing artful ways to make difficult concepts understandable—to teach!—and that it will take even more time (thus money) to render these hard-won ideas using multimedia web technology compared with writing textbooks. Success hinges on the adoption of open licensing by the professionals who make digital educational resources, and on finding ways to finance their work.

Basically, Sean is saying the Open Education is great in concept but that many Open Education resources need work for them to be effective. And that work can take a lot of money. So we need to find ways to get more money into the development of Open Education materials.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Lessons Learned at the JGI Users Meeting

Well, the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) Users Meeting is Over. For some rapid fire notes on the meeting see the FriendFeed room here. where Jason Stajich, Tom Sharpton and I (and occasionally a few others) took notes on the whole thing as it was happening.

So – what were the lessons learned? What were the main points? So – if you want to know what we were writing about – and don’t want to read the notes (they are quite fun actually) how about a word cloud? Well, here is one, which I made by taking the notes, editing out some of the names and other non notes text, and then pasting them into TagCrowd.Com and I got this to the left here:

Not actually a bad representation of many of the topics.  
But you know, this does not per se capture the big points, just the common points.  So I guess if you want the key points, you have to think a bit. First, you have to realize this is a JGI focused meeting (which of course is the whole point of the meeting – it is the JGI User Meeting after all) and most of the people work with JGI in some way so it is a bit hard to see the forrest of genomics for the JGI trees.    And here are my top lessons I got out of the meeting after trying to not get too biased by the JGI focus (note – I have an Adjunct Appt. at JGI and do lots of things through there so I am sure I cannot remove the JGI focus completely)
  1. NextGen sequencing continues to open up new windows into biology.
  2. Ecological and population genomics are truly the next big thing.
  3. Related to the above point, one of the next revolutions is going to be in high throughput phenotyping — after all, we cannot solve the genotype-phenotype problem when we only know the genotype.
  4. Model / reference organisms are still in, but every single organism on the planet is now in play.
  5. NextGen sequencing has completely outrun the ability of even good bioinformatics people to keep up with the data and to use it well.
  6. Related to the above point, the NextNextGen (e.g., Pacific Biosciences) seems to be barreling along and almost ready for prime time.  WTF are we going to do in terms of informatics then?
  7. Following up on the above point- we desperately need a MASSIVE effort in the development of tools for “normal” biologists to make better use of massive sequence databases.
  8. I am happy to report that just about everyone seems to be trying to use an evolutionary perspective as part of their work – especially in the selection of organisms for sequencing
  9. I am sorry to report that many of the evolutionary “perspectives” are a bit off kilter.
  10. Sequencing is definitely not over – it is just getting started.
  11. People pushing the technology (e.g., George Church, Craig Venter) into new arenas definitely inspire the crowds.
  12. If you study a plant or an animal and are not studying the microbes that live with them, you are missing something.
  13. If you study ANY organism and are ignoring epigenetics you are behind the curve
  14. Open Access journals like PLoS Biology and PLoS One and Open Science got some huge props at this meeting, for example, with Venter showing many PLoS related images, many others showing stuff from OA journals, George Church talking about Open Source sequencers and Open personal genomics, and many referring to Open genomics databases.  Still some areas in need of improvement (e.g., not enough publishing in open access journals still) but the move in the direction of openness is great.
  15. Genome Centers definitely each have their own flavors with JGI positioning itself well in the niches of Ecology, Evolution, and Energy.
  16. Genome Centers are definitely going to have to reinvent themselves as the sequencing capacity for individual labs goes up and up with Illumina/Roche/ABI Solid continuing to spread.  Bigger, better, faster, more is one way they can stay ahead of the curve.
  17. Education and training did not get as much play during the talks as I would have hoped.  I mentioned it a bit but I do not recall too many other mentions.  Too bad as the real potential for the democritization of sequencing comes from people getting trained in how to generate and handle the data and how to at least think about it even if they do not use it directly.
  18. Organismal biology is still desperately important in all of this work – if you know a lot about the organism as a whole then you already are a systems biologist.
  19. Genomic characterization of entire multi-organism systems is on the rise and this is not just microbiota stuff but also things like host-pathogen interactions and symbioses and so on.
  20. Reading DNA is being used in every which way imaginable.  Next up – writing DNA.  
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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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JGI Day2

Jason Stajich set up a friendfeed room for today. See below where I am using the FriendFeed embed function …

http://friendfeed.com/rooms/jgi-user-meeting/realtime?embed=1

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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