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Any healthy diet has a good balance: regular ‘staples’, a fair amount of variety, and the occassional surprise ‘treat’.
For next-generation sequencing, the web offers unparalled information to keep up-to-date. Here is a short list of four sites that compose a healthy NGS diet – everyday staples and a lot of variety!
1. GenomeWeb and it’s specialty (yearly subscription fee) newsletter, InSequence. You may be already subscribed to the twice-daily GenemeWeb emails, but if you haven’t yet it is a worthwhile read. The InSequence newsletter comes out weekly on Tuesdays, and is great to learn the latest news, important new publications, and latest techniques.
2. SeqAnswers online forum. Moderated by two bioinformatics experts Eduardo Olivares and Nils Homer (and perhaps a few others I’m not aware of), this site is a must-read since its founding several years ago. All the major NGS platforms are represented, the most popular section is about bioinformatics, and there is a healthy online ‘critical mass’ of participation.
3. Weekly table of contents from Nature and Science, in case you are not a print subcriber already (or have ready access to them). I’ve thought seriously about subscribing off an on over the years, and invariably I’d foresee the scenario of every week the pile of unread journals growing ever higher! So in lieu of that, the ability to get emailed Table of Contents every weeks is a useful and very informative resource, even for the serendipity of learning the latest goings-on about astrophysics or nanomaterials science. The monthly table of contents from Nature Genetics is also on my ‘must read’ shortlist.
4. A LinkedIn group called “Genomics: Next Generation DNA Sequencing (NGS) and Microarray”, which has over 9K members (this is early 2012), and while it isn’t as focused as SeqAnswers it does have its own place.
Do you have another ‘must read’ site that I should know about? Please mention it in the comments!
Dale, those are all great resources that I use all the time. Another site that your readers might find useful is BlueSEQ’s NGS Knowledge Bank (http://blueseq.com/knowledgebank/home). It describes all of the major platforms as well as many of the emerging technologies. (NB: I am extremely biased as I’m the one maintaining this info 😉
Thanks for the input Shawn. I’ll have to take a look at it, in particular the 3rd party bioinformatics software vendors, as those kinds of questions are the ones I most often field. – Dale