Iddo Friedberg at Byte Size Biology says it's time the computational and experimental sides of science got together and collaborate to decipher the mountains of data being generated by sequencing research. "Problem: for most of these sequenced genes, we do not know what they are doing." Friedberg writes. "That's right: most of the sequence data that we have is just that: data. Not information." He likens the data that's being collected to a huge collection of books written in an incomprehensible language. We can guess what some of the words mean, but we don't really know. The solution? "We need a good collaboration between those who do the computational work, and those who do the experimental work in identifying which are the most important books to look at, and what words in them we need to decipher first," Friedberg says.
At Business Bytes Genes Molecules, Deepak Singh says he loves the idea of "targeted work and collaborations between computational and wet lab folks." Most of his graduate work consisted of such a collaboration, and it seemed to work well, he adds.