Journal Club

Welcome everyone to the DePaul CTI Bioinformatics Journal Club.

The purpose of this club is to review together important papers in toe field of bioiformatics. We will try to hold regular monthly meetings. We will list papers to be read here well in advance of the meetings so that you can download and read them.

It is important that you try to read the papers but come for the discussion even if you didn't finish reading them.

Here are some tips on how to search for research articles (using "PubMed" and Medline instead of just Google) and how to stay current in your field. It includes tips on how to access articles through DePaul's library and through UIC (BiTmaP students).

November 13 2006 topic: Systems Biology

• The following reviews are from Nature's special issue, "Systems Biology: A User's Guide" published as Nature Reviews: Molecular Cell Biology in November 2006 (free on-line).
• "Collecting and organizing systematic sets of protein data" - a great overview of the merits and limits of different biochemical techniques
• "Linking publication, gene and protein data" - data annotation, analysis & data mining
• "Modelling data across labs, genomes, space and time" - data management and data standards

October 30 2006 topic: Microarray

• Microarray Quality Control consortium project report-Sept 2006
• Review: Genetics of global gene expression

October 16 2006 topic: Metabolomics

• Review of the field of metabolomics

Journal Club Philosophy

• Here is a review (Educating Systems Biologists and Computer Scientists in the same class from Nature's November 2006 "SYSTEMS BIOLOGY: A USER'S GUIDE") of a course taught at Princeton which attempts to teach quantitative skills to biologists and biology to computer scientists through discussion groups like our journal club. After reading this article I suggest we make the journal club a review of "the classics" instead of (my initial approach) emphasizing the current literature. I suggest reading this short review to see if everyone agrees with this direction.

Our goal is to avoid the sort of disconnect shown below and try to bring everyone up to the same level of understanding of the issues we're trying to computationally solve.



("Integrated Systems Biology" cartoon from a recent review on teaching bioinformatics and systems biology to biologists, physicists, and computer scientists (at Princeton))