101 questions with a bioinformatician #37: Keith Robison

This post is part of a series that interviews some notable bioinformaticians to get their views on various aspects of bioinformatics research. Hopefully these answers will prove useful to others in the field, especially to those who are just starting their bioinformatics careers.


Keith Robison is a Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at a small biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His employer has an interest in the natural products drug discovery space and as Keith puts it, his own work concerns 'Assembling and analyzing actinomycete genomes to reveal their biosynthetic moxie'.

If you didn't already know — and shame on you if that is the case — Keith writes about developments in sequencing technologies (and other topics) on his Omics! Omics! blog. This is required reading for anyone interested in trying to understand the significance of the regular announcements made by various companies that develop sequencing technologies. In particular, his analysis of news coming out from the annual AGBT conference is typically detailed and insightful.

You can find out more about Keith by reading his aforementioned blog or by following him on twitter (@OmicsOmicsBlog). A special thanks to Keith for waiting patiently on me to get this interview posted! And now, on to the 101 questions...



001. What's something that you enjoy about current bioinformatics research?

All sorts of re-thinking how to do things — productive ways to look at old problems. Look at all the exciting improvements in assembly coming from long reads, or alignment-free RNA-Seq and metagenomics. Cool stuff.



010. What's something that you don't enjoy about current bioinformatics research?

Too many papers that report a new program without adequate benchmarking or a clear description of what differentiates the program — is it really different, or just old wine in new bottles?



011. If you could go back in time and visit yourself as a 18 year old, what single piece of advice would you give yourself to help your future bioinformatics career?

Wow. I didn't dabble into bioinformatics until I was 19. I think my advice would be try out a new programming language every other year — I've gotten a lot of mileage out of a few languages, but even learning a new one (that I subsequently drop) productively influences my programming.



100. What's your all-time favorite piece of bioinformatics software, and why?

My favorite bioinformatics software was the original WWW interface to FlyBase — first: because I wrote it as a lark, second: FlyBase paid me to support it after I showed it off, and third: because its one of the few programs of mine that ever had an explicit sunset!



101. IUPAC describes a set of 18 single-character nucleotide codes that can represent a DNA base: which one best reflects your personality, and why?

M — Methionine is good at getting things started (KRB: yes I know, Methionine is not an IUPAC nucleotide character…but that was the given answer to the question).

The last ever awards for Just Another Bogus Bioinformatics Acronym (JABBA)

jabba logo.png

All good things come to an end…and, more importantly, all bad things come to an end. For that reason, I have, with some sadness, decided to bring my series of JABBA awards (Just Another Bogus Bioinformatics Acronym) to an end.

This is partly because my new job means that I am no longer a bioinformatician. It is also partly because it seems that the flood of bogus bioinformatics acronyms will never cease.

I've tried campaigning to raise awareness of why these acronyms are often awkward, tenuous, and generally unhelpful to the wider community. Hopefully, I've made some of you think about naming your software just a little bit.

I can't go without presenting you with a bumper crop of recently minted JABBA awards…

  1. Kicking us off, from BMC Bioinformatics we have a paper titled SPARTA: Simple Program for Automated reference-based bacterial RNA-seq Transcriptome Analysis. This is not excessively bogus, but omitting any contributions to the acronym from the words 'reference-based bacterial' is what gets this earns a tool a JABBA award. Oh, and don't confuse this tool with the 2014 bioinformatics tool called sPARTA. Who would make that mistake?

  2. From Nucleic Acids Research we have the following paper…DIDA: A curated and annotated digenic diseases database. DIDA is derived from DIgenic diseases Database. Never a good sign when an acronym only takes letters from two of the three words. Also never a good sign when there is a completely different piece of bioinformatics software that uses the same name (although I think the software mentioned here may have been around first).

  3. From Genome Research we have a new paper: SCRaMbLE generates designed combinatorial stochastic diversity in synthetic chromosomes. SCRaMbLE is derived from Synthetic Chromosome Rearrangement and Modification By LoxP-mediated Evolution. They really could have just gone for 'SCRAMBLE' (all upper-case) as it would be a legitimate acronym. However, my dislike of this name is because it is just a little too tenuous. Oh, and the fact that is already a bioinformatics tool called Scramble.

  4. Next up, from the journal BMC Bioinformatics we have NEAT: a framework for building fully automated NGS pipelines and analyses. NEAT derives from NExt generation Analysis Toolbox. Leaving aside the general issue of how I feel about NGS as a phrase, this name is bogus for taking two letters from 'next' and none from 'generation'. Oh, and there is also a bioinformatics tool called NeAT.

  5. From the journal Bioinformatics we have…ParTIES: a toolbox for Paramecium interspersed DNA elimination studies. Let's break that acronym down: PARamecium Toolbox for Interspersed dna Elimination Studies. As I've always said, ain't no party like a Paramecium party.

  6. Okay, are you sitting down? Next we have a paper published in the journal Bioinformatics. The title is going to make you very curious…SUPER-FOCUS: a tool for agile functional analysis of shotgun metagenomic data. Surely nobody was seriously going to try to make an acronym called SUPER-FOCUS? Oh wait they have…SUbsystems Profile by databasE Reduction using FOCUS. Any time you have the word 'database' as part of your software name and you choose to use just the last letter of this word…that's a bogus acronym, or should I say SUPER-BOGUS?

That is your lot. I reserve the right to maybe come back with one more JABBA-related post to present my top 10 JABBA awards. I'll end with a brief summary of the advice that I've tried to impart many times before:

  1. Not all software needs to have an acronym…you could choose to call your novel transcriptome validator 'Keith' rather than tenuously coming up with KEITH: Kmer-Enriched Inspection of Transcript deptH.
  2. Preferably, do not name your acronym after animals …especially when your software has no connection with that animal.
  3. Check: has anyone else has used that name before? Search Google with your intended name plus the word 'bioinformatics'.
  4. Check: is your name pronounceable? Tell the name to your parents over the phone and ask them if they can spell it correctly.
  5. Check: are you using random capitalisation to be cool (or 'KeWL' even)? Will other people who reference your software likely bother to use the italicised superscript font that you unwisely chose to use for every other letter in your software name?

ANARCI in the UK: time for a new JABBA award

Time for a new JABBA award. This one comes from a group based at the Department of Statistics in Oxford, UK. The paper was published recently in the journal Bioinformatics:

I think they're trying a little too hard to make a clever acronym here:

ANARCI: Antigen receptor Numbering And Receptor ClassificatIon

It's fun but just a little too tenuous for my liking, and so it merits a JABBA award.