I handed in the final assignment of the semester yesterday, which marked the end of my Junior year at Brown. I can safely say it was the best year I’ve had so far, with the first semester spent abroad in Budapest and the second back in the states. Looking back, I accomplished and learned a huge amount about traveling, bioinformatics, the research process, cooking, the professional environment in biotech and myself as a person.

Today I’m headed up to my friend’s house off the coast of Portland, Maine for some much needed decompression time. I’ll be back in Providence for the summer, though. As a recipient of Brown’s UTRA award I’ll be spending my summer working for Dr. Nicola Neretti on a computational epigenetics project. The project I’m working on will likely continue for my senior thesis, so stay tuned!

I don’t know how they find the time to do it, but many of today’s top bioinformatics and computational biology researchers have a regularly updated blog. Reading some of them actually gave me the inspiration to start Blogging Bioinformatics: I liked the idea of having a space where I can talk about research and other topics that interest me. Here’s a list of a few blogs I read regularly. It’s nowhere near complete, and I’m always looking for new suggestions of new people to follow.

• Homolg.us runs an exceptional bioinformatics blog. They have regularly updated content covering new research, funding situations, and commentaries on issues in the bioinformatics field.
• assertTrue() by Kas Thomas covers interesting topics and new research in biology and bioinformatics. Many of his recent posts discuss how published genomes are too often “auto annotated,” leading to an abundance meaningless gene calls and hypothetical proteins.
• Living in an Ivory Basement where Titus Brown talks about bioinformatics, programming and teaching. I’ve previously mentioned content from his site in defense of publishing code for my computational biology classes on my GitHub.
• Judge Starling by Dan Graur has posts about bioinformatics mixed in with poetry, musings about modern research practices and commentary on ENCODE (which seems to be a popular topic to blog about these days… everyone has an opinion on the consortium).
• Bits of DNA by Lior Pachter isn’t updated as frequently but the content is always extremely well thought out and backed up by solid reasoning. Lior uses the blog to comment on issues in the computational biology and bioinformatics fields, like ENCODE, missuses of statistics in research and the state of funding in the US.
• The Mermaid’s Tale – I just added this blog to my list, the first post currently is about a new study of resveratrol (remember how drinking red wine was supposed to extend your life?) and how it didn’t uncover any measurable benefit of the chemical. The real question: which body of research should be treated as fact?
• Job Etiquette by Paula – A blog I started reading after the Brown Club of Boston Biotech Conference. Paula Freeman discusses advice for young people searching for a job and has excellent content about resumés, interviews and job etiquette in general.

Know of another blog I should add to the list? Let me know in the comments!