Not Exactly the First Tuesday After the First Monday of November

This past presidential election was as nasty as any in recent memory, and so perhaps folks are reviewing their support for Churchill's dictum ("Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others").  But, I make a plea now that you vote again.  I'll even extend that plea to a request that you honor a deeply held tradition in some urban political systems, which is to vote early and vote often!

In Vivo Blog follows the biotechnology industry, and now for the fifth year in a row they have a poll as to the best biotech deals in three categories: M&A, Alliance and Exit/Financing.  We've been nominated in the Exit/Financing category for our monster financing arrangement with Sanofi, which gives us a $120M runway so we don't have to worry about running out of money (a fate I don't wish to repeat ala Codon Devices).  So, please vote for us!

Okay, perhaps you'd like to objectively consider all the contenders.  The voting site has links to detailed discussions of each of the candidates, and I'm sure after reading each one that you'll be convinced we're the best, and you'll want to vote for us!

If that doesn't appeal, perhaps you like good old fashioned sibling rivalry?  At the moment, we have ground to gain on two other companies funded by Third Rock Ventures, bluebird bio and Foundation Medicine.  Both are fine companies trying to make important health care innovations.  FM was even started by our CEO, reinforcing their big brother status.  But, are any of them trying to reboot an entire sector of the industry that big Pharma nearly universally abandoned?  That sounds pretty courageous, perhaps even legendary.  So vote for us!

Sometimes a vote is strictly for an individual, but other times it makes sense to vote for a team.  We're a team worth voting for: unified in our quest, unbounded in our efforts. 

I'm Keith Robison, Principal Scientist for Computational Biology., and I approve this message.

MUSKET then FLASH, vice versa or just COPE with it?

It's gratifying to see that yesterday's The Trouble with FASTQ item gathered a number of lively comments, and there are certainly a number of branches I could (and should) take from that post.  But one item that garnered both a comment here and on Twitter was the order of operations I described

The Trouble with FASTQ

I spend a lot of time working with sequencing data, and the most common format for such data is FASTQ.  FASTQ has many things to appreciate, but FASTQ data also can be troublesome