eric.jain.name 

Google now allows you to create custom search engines. I used this to set up a search engine that searches in well know life sciences sites.

Google Subscribed Links provide a mechanism for adding information at the top of a Google search results page. I set up an example that can be used to see information from the Enzyme Nomenclature Database when searching for something like EC 1.2.3.4.

According to this paper the most influential criteria engineers and scientists use for selecting information resources are not quality or even familiarity but 1. the time it takes to track down information and 2. the authoritativeness of the resource. Perhaps this explains why researchers are increasingly using Google Scholar rather than PubMed (PubMed is more authoritative, but Google’s ranked results allow you to find publications faster) and why the NCBI still receives more requests for protein-related data than we do (both sites are equally bad at searching, but NCBI may be seen as more authoritative).

Much has been said about (and blamed upon) communication problems between biologists and computer scientists. But after attending a meeting with biologists and computer scientists this week, I am starting to suspect that the problem isn’t just communication.

We are currently exploring various strategies to encourage people to let us know when they find errors or omissions in UniProt, or even to contribute data as they publish their research, rather than waiting for a curator to pick up their results from a publication.

After having meetings and discussions that dragged on for more than an year, we are now finally distributing our data under a Creative Commons license.

Biozon is a web server at Cornell that “integrates roughly 2 million protein sequences, 42 million DNA or RNA sequences, 32’000 protein structures, 150’000 interactions and more from sources such as GenBank, UniProt, Protein Data Bank (PDB) and BIND.”

For years people have been misspelling Swiss-Prot…

To remain complaint with NIH accessibility requirements, UniProt databases will be distributed in MP3 format for visually impaired users.

Got these MRI images after volunteering as a lab rat.