THe popUlARiTY of VARioUS iUpAC NUCleoTiDe AMBiGUiTY CHARACTeRS

There have now been 18 interviews in my series of 101 questions with a bioinformatician. The final question in each interview is always:

101. IUPAC describes a set of 18 single-character nucleotide codes that can represent a DNA base: which one best reflects your personality?

So after 18 interviews we have the statistical possibility of equal representation by all possible nucleotide ambiguity codes. Let's take a look at what the results actually look like:

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So N and Y are the most popular choices so far but no love for A, C, G, U, K, M, D,  or H! What's so bad about the letter K? I always thought of K as a distinguished member of the IUPAC ambiguity code community!

If you are sharp-eyed you may notice that there are actually 19 responses shown here. That's because a certain someone claimed two characters in their answer. I'm sure that you will all be glued to the next 18 interviews to see if, and how, these frequencies change. And I will be Keen in my undertaKing to maKe sure that I Keep this blog free from any subtle bias that may influence folK.

10 tips for improving your presentations & speeches →

Some fantastic advice here from the Presentation Zen site (which is always worth looking at). Many scientific presentations would be greatly enlivened if presenters took more effort to turn a collection of facts and observations into a story. Tip #4 is something that I frequently mention to students in our lab:

(4) Have a clear theme. 
What is your key message? What is it you REALLY want people to remember? What action do you want them to take? Details are important. Data and evidence and logical flow are important. But we must not lose sight of what is really important and what is not. Often, talks take people down a path of great detail and loads of information, most of which is completely forgotten (if it was ever understood in the first place) after the talk is finished. The more details that you include and the more complex your talk, the more you must be very clear on what it is you want your audience to hear, understand, and remember. If the audience only remembers one thing, what should it be? Write it down and stick it on the wall so it's never out of your sight. 

Sometimes students seem almost surprised by the notion that the audience should be expected to remember something from their talk.

Better Posters: A design brief for conference posters →

Zen Faulkes has a great post on the Better Posters blog, it's well worth a read if you think you will ever need to make an academic poster. This section nails it for me (emphasis mine):

Goals of a poster

Posters should get conference attendees talk to the presenter. Because attendees are busy, posters must grab attention, even if a potential reader is quite a long way from the poster. Similarly, posters should make an implicit promise to the reader that the gist of the poster can be grasped quickly.

Posters should also contain enough information that a person is able to read it and understand the main message.