Friday, January 10, 2014

A Field Guide to Genomics Research

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001744

High-throughput technologies are enabling scientists to profile genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, and metabolomes at an unprecedented scale[1]. All this “-omics” research (let's call it genomics for simplicity) is exciting—and game changing—but it's also fraught with dangers for the tenderfoot. Here, we've put together a brief “field guide” for those wishing to visit the genomics frontier, in which we use caricatures to illustrate various pitfalls that can beset those who inhabit this new territory. By documenting the behaviors of these common types, we hope to guide researchers in their quest to apply sound practices when designing genomics experiments and analyzing the resulting data. Many of the tendencies we have encountered are not specific to genomics research, but they are particularly acute in this field due to its interdisciplinary nature and the complexity of the data it produces.


The Farmer

“Let's harvest a bunch of data and design fancy tools, and then we'll figure out what to do with them.”
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