Connection Between Epigenome, Selective Mutability, Evolution, and Human Disease
Li, Harris et al., PLoS Genetics
Researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine and elsewhere propose a "connection between the epigenome, selective mutability, evolution, and human disease" based on the findings of their study on associations of structural mutability with germline DNA methylation and with non-allelic homologous recombination mediated by low-copy repeats. "Combined evidence from four human sperm methylome maps, human genome evolution, structural polymorphisms in the human population, and previous genomic and disease studies consistently points to a strong association of germline hypomethylation and genomic instability," the Baylor-led team writes.
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According to Bruce Caron at the New Media Research Institute — the research arm of the Santa Barbara, Calif.- based nonprofit, The New Media Studio — the number of posters presented at academic professional meetings is astounding — perhaps 250,000 [per year]." In February, Caron and his colleagues at the institute announced their intention to build a service, which they dubbed Skolr, that would "ingest meeting posters as PDF files" and make them easily searchable online, they said. In a recent Miller-McCune magazine piece, James Badham describes how its developers intend Skolr to work:
Badham says this system could breathe "new life" into scientific posters — the New Media Research Institute's Caron adds that currently posters are typically "printed at the last minute, carried to the conference, presented for a few hours, and then thrown away or put up on a back wall of a lab somewhere." According to Badham, "while the software will extend the posters' life indefinitely, Caron doesn't want to alter what he calls the 'quintessentially ephemeral nature' of posters." Indeed, Caron tells Miller-McCune that "just because a poster is archived in a database, we don't want to say that it is now a 'publication.' It's still a poster. ... It's a snapshot in time."
Skolr seems to be a
Skolr seems to be a worthwhile endeavor if it is open-access. Presumably advertising and sponsorship would help offset the operating costs of such an enterprise. The main problem with most scientific posters is that they are not always very comprehensible without one of the authors explaining what they did, why they did it and what they found. Skolr could be even better if it was also possible to download video clips of authors presenting their posters. In this era with U-tube and video tablets, such activities are quite feasible and would probably be well received. It could further accelerate the pace of scientific research, although the reported findings would be very preliminary.
Don't we already have this
Don't we already have this capability e.g. www.postersessiononline.com ?
If only
If only www.postersessiononline.com -> www.postersessiononline.com/webs/postersession/ showed more than a blank page, that might be true . . .
Also at three-way-street.com (also currently a blank page) we plan to invite authors to submit posters to a searchable archive . . .