Monday Links

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No more delays! BLAST away! Time to blast. Let's see what it means for sequences to be similar.  First, we'll plan our experiment.  When I think about digital biology experiments, I organize the steps in the following way: 
Shotgun sequencing refers to the process whereby a genome is sequenced and assembled with no prior information regarding the genomic location of any of the DNA we sequence. There are quite a few steps that you have to go through before you have an assembled genome sequence.
A few weeks back, we published a review about the development and role of the human reference genome. A key point of the reference genome is that it is not a single sequence.
What tells us that this new form of H1N1 is swine flu and not regular old human flu or avian flu? If we had a lab, we might use antibodies, but when you're a digital biologist, you use a computer.

Good stuff. This article about DNA Evidence not being infallible caught my attention today.

As I wrote in my own blog here, if this assay actually works, it's another advancement for both prosecutors and (more importantly) defense lawyers.