A long time ago in a Galaxy browser far, far away…

Today marks exactly 10 years since the first publication that describes the popular Galaxy platform:

The tremendous success of the Galaxy project can be summarized by the following two graphs (taken from the statistics page on the Galaxy Wiki):

New user registrations on Galaxy main site

 

Publications that reference or mention Galaxy

I'm sure that the Galaxy team have a more official date to use as their anniversary, but I'll mark the 10th year since their initial publication to say congratulations and 'Happy Birthday'! I hope that Galaxy can emerge unscathed from those difficult 'teenage years' that lie just around the corner!

Twitter competition: win a signed copy of Bioinformatics Data Skills by Vince Buffalo

I have an extra copy of the fantastic Bioinformatics Data Skills book by Vince Buffalo (who you should all be following on twitter at @vsbuffalo). I've come up with a fun little competition to let someone have a chance of winning this signed copy.

All you have to do is write a tweet that includes the #ACGT hashtag (so I can track all of the answers), which provides the following information:

Name a useful bioinformatics data skill

The winner will be chosen randomly — hopefully by a powerful scripted solution that Vince will help me with — in two weeks time. I will post details of any interesting (or funny) suggestions that you come up with on this site. The full details are below.

Competition rules

  1. Tweets should name a 'useful bioinformatics data skill'
  2. Tweets must contain the hashtag #ACGT
  3. Last day to enter into the competition is 25th September (midnight PST)
  4. One winner will be chosen randomly
  5. Only one entrant per twitter account
  6. Retweets of tweets that use #ACGT hashtag will be excluded

Trying to locate the source of duplicated software names

Thanks to Andrew Su (@andrewsu) and Mick Watson (@BioMickWatson) for alerting me to the following:

The former paper is from 2009, the latter paper is from 2015. Neither paper has anything to do with this 2010 paper which introduced something called the Genome Positioning System (GPS). Most importantly, none of these papers have anything at all to do with GPS (as most people understand the term).

If I run a Google search for GPS Bioinformatics the top hit that I see is for the MSc course in Bioinformatics as part of Brandeis University's Graduate Professional Studies program.

The usual disclaimer applies:

  1. Check existing literature before you name your software (at the very least run a Google search).
  2. Double check the name by adding the word 'bioinformatics' or 'genomics' to the search terms.
  3. Avoid names which wholly or partially contain words or terms that have nothing to do with your software.