Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

It has been far too long since I last posted. I have missed the Omnome project and the Science Blogging community as a whole quite a bit while I have been distracted. I realized in the first months after initiating this blog site that the diversity of discussion in the science blog community really expanded my scientific thinking.

I hope my experiences in the past few weeks that have caused me to be so absent from Omnome will have provided me some insights that will enrich my posts on a few subjects that are regularly addressed here.

So what have I been doing? First of all, to say that I have been doing anything is a gross overstatement as anything I do is as part of a massive team effort. Secondly, I am somewhat constrained by organizational confidentiality agreements so it would be unprofessional for me to say too much. However, I think I can safely tell you the following about my past month:

1) Data was finally compiled and made accessible to me from a very large gene expression profiling effort which took my group one full year to complete. The dataset is made up of about 9 million data points. Mining is fun! Spotfire software can be fun as a visualization tool of the data. However, the statistical power of the program is sorely lacking.

2) My research group used stem cells in an animal model of neurodegeneration. I am pretty sure that's all I can really say about that. However, I suspect I will interject more thoughts about the technology in future posts as a result of my experiences with these cells.

3) My research group has initiated two large scale gene therapy efforts in animal models of neurodegeneration using adenoviral vectors.

I hope I will be able to find the time to frequent Omnome a bit more again. I look forward to visiting my scienceblogs favorites again as well. However, the people who actually pay me at work will continue to have a say over that.