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mtbcYesterday was the annual symposium of our Gene Regulation and Expression division. For me it had some amusing aspects: for instance, when I see mention of DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide, used as a solvent and in DNA sequencing) I am reminded of DHMO (dihydrogen monoxide) and for the Hallowe'en-themed baking competition the cakes bore names like
I got to thinking about how our group's microscopy image management software OMERO might be generally useful in the life sciences. Broadly, we allow organization and annotation of one's images, with easy plugins for one's own bulk analysis scripts and suchlike. It occurs to me that the ability to mine data out of many images may allow one to vary the organism (say, knock out genes) and its environment and observe changes in protein expression, morphology, etc.: learn the relationships between what one can control and the functional or behavioral effects. Further, given how much biological research is done on organisms where the colonies go through many generations as the individuals have short lifespans and reproduce frequently, I wonder to what extent we enable phenotype-directed evolution for creating designer organisms, if the image analysis can guide which individuals' progeny to favor.
I also wondered about the many talks in which researchers presented what one might regard as being
Perhaps there is a weak analogy to be made with funding software projects wherein the less-glamorous but entirely appropriate maintenance of the codebase is quietly done alongside the more attractively fundable addition of new features: maybe one may follow a relatively information-efficient course of scientific research so long as enough
Update: On reflection, I do now recall that one talk told us that P affects Q and also appears not to affect R, though I don't think we got confidence in the latter quantified.
Mouse Dissection.
I got to thinking about how our group's microscopy image management software OMERO might be generally useful in the life sciences. Broadly, we allow organization and annotation of one's images, with easy plugins for one's own bulk analysis scripts and suchlike. It occurs to me that the ability to mine data out of many images may allow one to vary the organism (say, knock out genes) and its environment and observe changes in protein expression, morphology, etc.: learn the relationships between what one can control and the functional or behavioral effects. Further, given how much biological research is done on organisms where the colonies go through many generations as the individuals have short lifespans and reproduce frequently, I wonder to what extent we enable phenotype-directed evolution for creating designer organisms, if the image analysis can guide which individuals' progeny to favor.
I also wondered about the many talks in which researchers presented what one might regard as being
positiveresults: that some particular thing is shown to have some effect or whatever. One might think that even
negativeresults would be useful information that tell us more than we knew before. I wondered: do the many positive-sounding results reflect educated choice of which experiments to perform or are there perhaps at least as many performed whose outcome seemed more disappointing? I can imagine that an information-theoretic perspective might suggest that a healthy rate of disappointments is entailed by any efficient empirical course of scientific discovery: if we are good at guessing what will
workthen perhaps we are not gaining much new information from each experiment.
Perhaps there is a weak analogy to be made with funding software projects wherein the less-glamorous but entirely appropriate maintenance of the codebase is quietly done alongside the more attractively fundable addition of new features: maybe one may follow a relatively information-efficient course of scientific research so long as enough
positiveresults come out along the way. One would hope that it is appropriately to one's credit if some of those results are also rather surprising, encouraging the
riskier, more information-rich, lines of inquiry.
Update: On reflection, I do now recall that one talk told us that P affects Q and also appears not to affect R, though I don't think we got confidence in the latter quantified.
