Useful Quotes Relating to Bioinformatics

• A caveat, not a criticism
  "All models are wrong. Some models are useful."
  -- George Box

• "The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing."
  -- John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

• The original description of orthologs and paralogs
  "Therefore, there should be two subclasses of homology. Where the homology is the result of gene duplication so that both copies have descended side by side during the history of an organism (for example, alpha and beta hemoglobin) the genes should be called paralagous (para = in parallel). Where the homology is the result of speciation so that the history of the gene reflects the history of the species (for example alpha hemoglobin in man and mouse) the gene should be called orthologous (ortho = exact)."
  -- Walter Fitch( Syst. Zool. 19: 99-113)

Projects

The Monterey Bay Coastal Ocean Microbial Observatory

Exploring the diversity of microbial life in the ocean. TIGR is doing this in collaboration with the Monterey Bay Aquatic Research Institute. John Heidelberg, Jonathan Eisen and Ed DeLong are the principal investigators.

The North American Consortium for Genomics of Fibrolytic Bacteria

Defining the microbial ecology of the rumen using genomic and other sequence-based techniques (subtractive hybridization, microarray). Karen Nelson is the TIGR pricipal investigator. We are collaborating several other institutions. This project is funded by the USDA.

William C. Nelson, Ph.D.
The Institute for Genomic Research
9712 Medical Center Drive
Rockville, MD 20850
(301)795-7580
wnelson@tigr.org