No.

Google Trends is an amazing tool that can shed light on important historical trends relating to politics, religion, and society as a whole. It can also be used to see whether 'genes' has ever been a more popular search term than 'cheese'.

Looking across the whole corpus of Google Trends data (2004–present) it reveals — in the UK at least — that 'genes' came tantalisingly close to overtaking 'cheese' in popularity in 2007:

But wait! If we zoom in to that early part of 2007 we see that for a glorious week at the start of February that 'genes' was indeed a more popular search term than 'cheese'!

British genes for British people?

This historic victory for genetics seems to be a British phenomenon. Running the same search in other countries, or using the 'worldwide' dataset, doesn't reveal the same pattern. Here is what the genes vs cheese fight looks like in America:

Why?

I have described an important historic event but I am at a loss to explain why this trend emerged. The trend starts on January 30th 2007...I have searched Google for genes-related news around this time but nothing notable crops up. Any ideas?

I really wasn't intending to hand out any more JABBA awards. The last time I gave out an award for a bogus bioinformatics acronym was back in February 2016 and that was meant to be that.

However, I recently saw something that sent a shiver down my spine and I felt obliged to dust off the JABBA award one more time (for now anyway).

Let's get straight to the point. Published in bioarXiv is a new preprint:

• BURRITO: An interactive multi-omic tool for visualizing taxa-function relationships in microbiome data

Now don't get me wrong, I love burritos and I think it's kind of a fun name for a piece of software. I just happen to think that in this case it is a somewhat tenuous acronym. So how do you get to make BURRITO the name of your tool?

Browser Utility for Relating micRobiome Information on Taxonomy and functiOn

It's the inclusion of 'O' from 'functiOn' that gets me.I guess 'BURMITF' didn't have such a good ring to it.

What else is on the menu?

Note that BURRITO shouldn't be confused with the QIIME application controller code called burrito-fillings or the electronic lab notebook software for computational researchers known as Burrito.

Also, you get bonus points if you can use BURRITO with SALSA. Of course, if BURRITO doesn't work out for you, then maybe try TACO or...er, TACO.

After a decade of CEGMA you may have thought people would have stopped using it (and people really should stop using it), but no. Google Scholar reveals that is has now passed the 1,000 citation mark and 2017 may yet see more citations to this paper than in any previous year.

Yesterday, the The Institute of Cancer Research — disclaimer: that's where I work — published a new blog post where they spoke to Nik Matthews, Genomics Manager in the ICR’s Tumour Profiling Unit, about the Illumina NovaSeq sequencing platform.

It's a little more technical than some of the ICR 'Science Talk' blog posts that we usually publish which is why I thought I'd link to it here.

As someone who was started their PhD around the time the yeast genome was being finished I still am shocked by how far the world of DNA sequencing has come. This is something Nik refers to in his opening answer:

We can now produce data equivalent to the size of the original human genome project every six minutes, which is astonishing.

By comparison, the yeast genome project — an international collaboration involving many different labs — took over five years to sequence its genome...all 12 Mbp of it! Read the full blog post to find out more about how, and why, the ICR adopted the NovaSeq platform:

• Exploring the future of genomics – the potential of sequencing technologies like NovaSeq

I was surprised to see this blog featured in a recent list of the Top 75 Bioinformatics Blogs and Websites for Bioinformaticians.

Any list that includes this blog — which I barely ever update these days — feels a little bit dubious, especially when I'm listed above some genuinely useful blogs.

Anyway, there are many genuinely useful blogs on this list so I recommend having a look at it. I also made an attempt a few years at listing some of my own favourite bioinformatics blogs...a list which seems to remain relevant.

It feels a bit strange to be using this blog to link to a news post at my current employer, but I'm happy to share the news that the ICR has become the first organisation in the UK to deploy Illumina's NovaSeq platform.

The ICR's Dr Chris Lord, Deputy Director of the Breast Cancer Now Research Centre, had this to say:

One key area we are keen to use the NovaSeq sequencer for is to discover new ways to select the best available treatment for each individual cancer patient’s specific disease.

If we can do this, we should be able to improve how a significant number of patients are treated. With the NovaSeq system, this kind of work is now feasible – this will be a real game-changer for a lot of the work across the ICR.

Read more in the full news article on the ICR website:

• World-leading cancer researchers first in UK to receive NovaSeq - the latest genome sequencing technology

This morning I gave my last presentation at UC Davis. My highly informal exit seminar was a great opportunity to reflect on some of the many projects I've been involved with over the last decade here at Davis. Thank you to all who came, and a special thanks to Ian Korf for his kind introduction.

I include the slides below, but note that some of these slides won't make much sense without the narration (and you also get to miss out on two embedded videos). There was some video recorded via the Periscope app, but I found out today that Periscope only keeps video around for 24 hours, so unfortunately if you didn't watch the video when you had the chance it is now lost.

2015年11月21日 12.34: Updated to reflect that Periscope video content is no longer available.