Category Archives: Research

One of the chapters of my dissertation was just rejected for publication a second time.  I haven’t decided what to do with it yet, but in the meantime it makes an interesting case study in rejection.  In brief, what we … Continue reading →

Moments ago I finally submitted the final frost flower paper from my PhD, a paper which first found life as Appendix 2 in my dissertation.  Once upon a time I thought this particular project was going to be the central … Continue reading →

My postdoctoral adviser at Lamont showed me something really cool today that I suspect is pretty common knowledge (it was new to me!).  Google Earth has a feature that allows you to view historic aerial/satellite photos for any point on … Continue reading →

I recently had an interesting problem that I think I successfully solved using principal component analysis (PCA).  PCA is one of a family of multivariate statistical methods known as ordinations.  Frankly it, and related techniques, scare me a little.  They’re … Continue reading →

I was excited to learn that our long awaited sea ice biogeochemistry review was published today in the journal Elementa.  Many of the contributors to the project are members of the SCOR working group Biogeochemical Exchange Processes at Sea Ice … Continue reading →

An interesting paper was recently published by Durham et al. in PNAS: Cryptic carbon and sulfur cycling between surface ocean plankton.  The all-star author list includes members of the Armbrust Lab at the University of Washington, the Moran Lab at … Continue reading →

We just published a paper in BMC Genomics on the occurrence of genes coding for alkane hydroxylases in the genomes of psychrophilic (cold loving) bacteria.  This paper does a couple of interesting things and fails to do several other interesting … Continue reading →

A very exciting paper was published in Nature Methods a couple weeks ago by Benjamin Buchfink and colleagues: Fast and Sensitive Protein Alignment Using DIAMOND.  The paper debuts the DIAMOND software, touted as a much-needed replacement for BLASTX.  BLASTX has … Continue reading →

I recently started a postdoc in a lab without any real computer infrastructure so I was in need of a system with a little more juice than my laptop.  While a graduate student at the UW I did everything except … Continue reading →

Another interesting paper caught my eye last week, Nielsen et al. in Nature Biotechnology; Identification and assembly of genomes and genetic elements in complex metagenomic samples without using a reference genome. First, a complaint: 53 authors, really?  There are more … Continue reading →