Friday, September 26, 2014

AccuraScience -- Bioinformatics Mercenaries!


Okay, this is pretty cool.

As proteomics and metabolomics have gained speed over the years, people from all walks of life have been sucked into the field.  In a lot of places, good Analytical Chemists are now running the proteomics facilities.  I love visiting labs like this because you always know that there are going to be good quality control standards.  The weakness for these labs is in the biological side.  Going the complete opposite direction, my biology brethren who have been pulled, perhaps unwillingly, into running instrumentation have a great idea of what to do after the instrument spits out a protein list, but we are probably the worst group at running controls and standards (sorry, but its true).

Uniformly, though, we all suck at statistics.  Again, I'm just being honest.  The best labs I know of have all three.  Chemists keeping everything under controls, biologists doing validation and a bioinformatician in a cubicle making sure that the list in the Supplemental data is statistically valid.

If you're a smaller facility of just biologists or chemists sometimes its really hard to make sense of your data in a robust way.  AccuraScience hopes to fill that gap.  This is a group of mercenaries (by that I mean "for hire", no implications here, it just makes a better title) bioinformaticians somewhere out in Iowa who can fill that last step for you.  My guess is that it is probably a whole lot cheaper than hiring your own bioinformatics guy or gal (if you can find one...so in demand these days!!)

You can check out AccuraScience here.

2 comments:

  1. Brazilian Proteomics Society Meeting, in December!

    http://www.brprot2014.com.br/

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  2. sorry o think i post the comment on the BrProt on the wrong window, it was for the post about the proteomics meetings around the world

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