Hi, my name is Jens.

The R version 3.3.0 was released today (hooray!). It relies on a curl library version of newer than 7.28. Unfortunately, the latest curl available to wheezy is version 7.26. Instead of using backports and/or update to a newer curl version from jessie, I decided to have the newest curl in...

Often in modelling of statistical processes with basic distributions, like Gaussian, Beta or Gamma, the observed data is not captured very well by the chosen distribution. What is asked for, is often a mixture of distributions that, taken together, fit the observed data more closely. Formally, a distribution f consisting...

Results from publications in low impact journals are often underrated in the scientific community. Even worse, if those publications additionally contain negative results, e.g. reporting a non-correlation or that no enrichment was found. Today, such a publication was made available online, at Comp. Biol. Chem.. Mantsoki et. al. provide a...

In the past years, the catalogue of elements involved in gene regulation has been filled up with many classic cis-regulating elements, like promoter or enhancers, with a variety of histone modifications, with distal DNA interactions and with different chromatin states, such as active or poised. But still, the prediction of...

A report published in Nature this week adds N1-methylation of adenosine to the list of functional post-transcriptional modifications of messenger RNAs. To study the modification in greater detail, the authors characterized the N1methyl-adenosine methylome with a method termed N1-methyladenosine sequencing (m1A-seq). Therefore, Dan Dominissini et. al. altered a similar method...

Connections between physical objects, like devices, buildings or vehicles that are embedded with electronic sensors to collect and analyse data in real-time and/or communicate them to other devices are known as the Internet of Things. A report in the current issue of Nature now introduces a wearable device that monitors...

The expression of genes is seen as the one of the big determinants that shape the phenotypic and functional outcome of a cell. But in order to be expressed, a mostly complicated interplay of regulatory elements influences the when and how a gene is expressed. A large library of regulatory...

I’m sure everyone experienced small or not so small forms of muscle soreness after a fitness session - a result of small damages in the muscle fibers. The regeneration of damaged fibres requires the presence of so-called satellite cells, which are muscle stem cells in a dormant state, meaning that...

In a recent study published in Nature this week, the authors Silvia Domcke and Anaïs Flore Bardet were interested in finding transcription factors that are affected in their DNA binding abilities by DNA methylation. As argued by the authors, previous studies have shown that transcription factors bound to regulatory regions...

A week from today, the RECOMB-CG will take place in Frankfurt. Starting with the investigation of a allohexaploid member of the mustard plant family, the first two sessions generally deal with scaffolding, synteny and the order of genomes. Intersting, if you want to learn something about genome organizations! After lunch,...