My weekly picks from ResearchBlogging #1

As many of you may already know, Researchblogging.org (RB) has created “Editor’s selections” in which “experts who are also accomplished bloggers” serve as editors in each of the four major content areas at RB: Biology, Health/Clinical Research, Psychology/Neuroscience, and everything else. Their task is to select posts they find interesting in their respective areas and post links to them at RB [See Dave Munger’s explanation: Editor’s Selections — a new way to find your favorite posts].

I posted the following comment over at Dave’s post (edited):

This is a great idea. Nevertheless, having just one editor for “Biology” may not be enough. If the selected scientist/blogger is someone working on evolution, he will undoubtedly be more interested, and then highlight, articles in that area more frequently than in some other areas. Maybe with the rise of new bloggers this could be fixed over time.

Dave sent me an email explaining that indeed he felt the same way and was looking for a second biology editor. I was among the potential candidates to fill the position (which was an honor!) but in the end Vincent Racaniello was selected to join Jarrett Byrnes in the “Biology” field, as the second biology editor. I'm sure both Vincent and Travis will do an excellent job. You can check their picks every week over at ResearchBlogging News.

As I mentioned at Dave’s post, I considered “Editor’s selections” to be a great idea and even though I wasn’t selected, I decided I wanted to serve as a sort of “independent”¹ Biology editor, highlighting posts on molecular biology aggregated at RB and posting them here at MolBio Research Highlights for other readers to enjoy.

Once a week, I will be selecting and sharing the posts on molecular biology I consider appealing, under the following criteria:

1. The “interest” of the article being discussed. As you can imagine, this reflects my personal bias on what I consider of interest. To get a sense of my interests, check “Around the journals” where I highlight articles directly from by Google Reader, from a wide selection of journals, and share them with you. In general, gene expression (transcription, RNA processing, translation) and its regulation, and both genetics and genomics are the main focus.

2. The analysis of the article discussed and clarity of the post. The ideal post is a critical one, which also puts the article into context and explains why the blogger considered the article to be important (enough to blog about).


Note I will only consider posts aggregated under "Biology" at RB.

This week, I selected a nice and critical post by Daniel MacArthur over at Genetic Future discussing a Nature Biotechnology article reporting “yet another "complete" individual genome sequence”. Here’s the kick, though: this is the first genome to be sequenced using single molecule sequencing technology. The technology in question is Heliscope, by Helicos BioSciences.

Daniel nicely discusses the pros and cons of this new technology in light of the data reported and compares it with the performance of other competitors, namely Illumina. You should definitely check it out.

That wraps it up for the week.
I’ll post my picks every Thursday here at MolBio Research Highlights so stay tuned!

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¹ Independent in the sense that I’m not doing this for RB.