By Aaron J. Sender

It’s not unusual these days for a talented grad student to develop software to automate his labmates’ work. Yet when Jin-Long Li, now a postdoc at Creighton University in Omaha, submitted a paper to Genome Research describing his software for genotype data, he got a call from an incredulous reviewer. “He asked me very seriously,” Li recalls, “‘Are you sure that Microsoft Access can manipulate all this data?’”