Friday, September 18, 2015

Computational biologist's lab notebook

Schnell lab from University of Michigan recently published an interesting editorial in PLOS Comp. Bio. (article link).  It covers various aspect of a typical bioinformatics project especially in life science research environment.  The article is written in a way to make it appear like wet-lab protocol and rule book. My personal favorites are rule #4 and rule #5 about not only recording all scientific activity (e.g. what bioinformatics programs / code were used, data sources, data references, parameters used etc.) but also keeping the track of in a date wise fashion. This rule is basically referring to version control  in a code development setting. Give it read... interesting article.


Ten Simple Rules for a Computational Biologist’s Laboratory Notebook (Santiago Schnell)