A very important paper for any interested in microbial ecology: importance of rare taxa

Got pointed to this paper by automated Google Scholar searches that I have for many of the authors of the paper: Conditionally Rare Taxa Disproportionately Contribute to Temporal Changes in Microbial Diversity in mBio by Ashley Shade, Stuart E. Jones, J. Gregory Caporaso, Jo Handelsman, Rob Knight, Noah Fierer, and Jack A. Gilbert. In the paper (which is, …

Teaching bioinformatics using IPython Notebooks

I’ve been teaching undergraduate and graduate bioinformatics for three years at Northern Arizona University. This semester I tried an experiment in my undergraduate course: I decided to ditch slides and instead use IPython Notebooks to present my course materials. This turned out to be hugely successful, and resulted in an early version of an online …