Suggested topics for discussion
Feel free to volunteer to
present one of these or another topic of your choice. These are thrown
out to stimulate thought. Some are practical, some are addressable
with current reviews, and some are not "answerable" but the presenter
can review current wisdom, and then suggest ways to go about answering
the question (hopefully good fodder for discussion).
- What is science?
- Are genetically modified crops safe?: issues and arguments.
- Whole-genome comparative genomics: methods, analysis
- Strategies for searching for orthologous, non-protein sequence elements
- Your new gene prediction: how do you know if it's real?
- What skillset is needed by a computational biologist / bioinformaticist?
- What makes a good benchmark? What can we learn from benchmarks?
- Current and future genome sequencing projects: where, when, what
can we do with all that data?
- Single nucleotide polymorphisms in human populations: new
technology for detection, uses in medicine and research
- Publishing your data or "search engines" on the web (pre- or post- journal
publication)
- Customized HMMs for finding new members of gene families
- How extensive is synteny among mammals? Will syntenic regions
reveal genes involved in related functions / metabolic pathways?
- Diversity of repetitive elements in plants/metazoans
- How common are pseudogenes in large genomes?
- Copyrights, patents, trademarks, and/or software licensing
- Evolution -- molecular evidence for key events
- Large scale genome manipulation (a al minimum genome complement)
- The RNA World: how many RNA genes are we missing?
- History of computing or science.
- Digital organisms: just fun or can we learn something?
- Introns: early or late comers?
- Archaea: closer to eukarya or bacteria? Does phylogenetic
anlaysis using ribosomal RNA agree with analysis using proteins?
- New software technologies
- Genome duplication events: S. cerevisiae, a case study
- Book review
- Software demo