Neil Saunders

Journal of Applied Crystallography, Vol. 42, No. 3. (Jun 2009), pp. 376-384. Robbie Joosten, Jean Salzemann, Vincent Bloch, Heinz Stockinger, Ann Berglund, Christophe Blanchet, Erik Rudloff, Christophe Combet, Ana Da Costa, Gilbert Deleage, Matteo Diarena, Roberto Fabbretti, Géraldine Fettahi, Volker Flegel, Andreas Gisel, Vinod Kasam, Timo Kervinen, Eija Korpelainen, Kimmo Mattila, Marco Pagni, Matthieu Reichstadt, Vincent Breton, Ian Tickle, Gert Vriend - Neil Saunders

hmm less wool, too? bad for the knitters - Christina Pikas

PLoS ONE, Vol. 4, No. 7. (3 July 2009), e6190. Background Australia's dinosaurian fossil record is exceptionally poor compared to that of other similar-sized continents. Most taxa are known from fragmentary isolated remains with uncertain taxonomic and phylogenetic placement. A better understanding of the Australian dinosaurian record is crucial to understanding the global palaeobiogeography of dinosaurian groups, including groups previously considered to have had Gondwanan origins, such as the titanosaurs and carcharodontosaurids. Methodology/Principal Findings We describe three new dinosaurs from the late Early Cretaceous (latest Albian) Winton Formation of eastern Australia, including; Wintonotitan wattsi gen. et sp. nov., a basal titanosauriform; Diamantinasaurus matildae gen. et sp. nov., a derived lithostrotian titanosaur; and Australovenator wintonensis gen. et sp. nov., an allosauroid. We compare an isolated astragalus from the Early Cretaceous of southern Australia; formerly... - Neil Saunders

PLoS Comput Biol, Vol. 3, No. 6. (15 June 2007), e120. Author Summary Prior studies have reported that ~15% of expressed genes show a circadian expression pattern in association with a specific function. A series of experimental and computational studies of gene expression in various murine tissues has led us to a different conclusion. By applying a new analysis strategy and a number of alternative algorithms, we identify baseline oscillation in almost 100% of all genes. While the phase and amplitude of oscillation vary between different tissues, circadian oscillation remains a fundamental property of every gene. Reanalysis of previously published data also reveals a greater number of oscillating genes than was previously reported. This suggests that circadian oscillation is a universal property of all mammalian genes, although phase and amplitude of oscillation are tissue-specific and remain associated with a gene's function. We hypothesize that the cell's metabolic respiratory cycle... - Neil Saunders

In fact, in 1703 the Catholic bishop of Quebec actually excommunicated the entire species. - Neil Saunders

Bioinformatics (2 July 2009), btp406. Motivation: Recently, many univariate and several multivariate approaches have been suggested for testing differential expression of gene sets between different phenotypes. However, despite a wealth of literature studying their performance on simulated and real biological data, still there is a need to quantify their relative performance when they are testing different null hypotheses. Results: In this paper we compare the performance of univariate and multivariate tests on both simulated and biological data. In the simulation study we demonstrate that high correlations equally affect the power of both, univariate as well as multivariate tests. In addition, for most of them the power is similarly affected by the dimensionality of the gene set and by the percentage of genes in the set, for which expression is changing between two pheno-types. The application of different test statistics to biological data reveals that three statistics (sum of... - Neil Saunders

Bioinformatics, Vol. 25, No. 14. (15 July 2009), pp. 1775-1781. Motivation: There has been an increasing interest in expressing a survival phenotype (e.g. time to cancer recurrence or death) or its distribution in terms of a subset of the expression data of a subset of genes. Due to high dimensionality of gene expression data, however, there is a serious problem of collinearity in fitting a prediction model, e.g. Cox's proportional hazards model. To avoid the collinearity problem, several methods based on penalized Cox proportional hazards models have been proposed. However, those methods suffer from severe computational problems, such as slow or even failed convergence, because of high-dimensional matrix inversions required for model fitting. We propose to implement the penalized Cox regression with a lasso penalty via the gradient lasso algorithm that yields faster convergence to the global optimum than do other algorithms. Moreover the gradient lasso algorithm is guaranteed to... - Neil Saunders

The antibodypedia is a community-based portal showing application-specific validation of publicly available antibodies to human protein targets. - Neil Saunders

ExactAntigen is also a nice set of data screaming for a more usable front-end. - Mr. Gunn

CSIRO has announced the sale of its Funnelback search engine technology company to content management company Squiz. - Neil Saunders

CSIRO science is being used to improve land management practices on farmland to help reduce run-off of sediments, nutrients and pesticides on to the Great Barrier Reef. - Neil Saunders

A wiki defining all SO terms - Neil Saunders

Dad gummit, I read that as "Stack Overflow". - Chris Lasher

We are so fucked. - Bill Hooker

Insects are cool! - Björn Brembs

Molecular Cell, Vol. 33, No. 5. (13 March 2009), pp. 537-545. The control of biological events requires strict regulation using complex protein phosphorylation and dephosphorylation strategies. The bulk of serine-threonine dephosphorylations are catalyzed by a handful of phosphatase catalytic subunits, giving rise to the misconception that these phosphatases are promiscuous and unregulated enzymes in vivo. The reality is much more nuanced: PP1 and PP2A, the most abundant serine-threonine phosphatases, are, in fact, families of hundreds of protein serine/threonine phosphatases, assembled from a few catalytic subunits in combination with a highly diverse array of regulators. As recent publications illustrate, these regulatory subunits confer specificity, selectivity, localization, and regulation on these important enzymes. David Virshup, Shirish Shenolikar - Neil Saunders

do let us know if you find him! - Christina Pikas

Apparently he is - http://twitter.com/William.... Although several others claiming to be him too :-) - Neil Saunders