Today I am officially a published scientist!
The cover story for February's Public Library of Science - Biology issue features the concerted efforts of The International Aphid Genomics Consortium to annotate the pea aphid genome.
Click on the picture to link to the full text article (they're cute aren't they?). One of the many great things about the Public Library of Science is that it's open access, which was one of the reasons the IAGC decided to publish here instead of Science or Nature.
If you look really, really, REALLY carefully in the acknowledgments section, way down in the "Virus transmission and transcytosis group" you will find my name, along with my lab mate Eric and my undergraduate research adviser Dr. Marina Caillaud.
While it is really cool to finally see this paper published (the actual publishing part took well over a year), my own personal contribution to the paper is minuscule, at best. Basically Marina asked me if I would be interested in helping her and Eric out with the annotation as a side project to my own research. I thought it would be a good experience and a small taste of doing bioinformatics work. I quickly learned that I had no taste for bioinformatics, but I could really appreciate not only what goes into making good databases for genomics, but the wealth of information that these databases and annotation projects can provide. The article is a testament to that fact.
As I said, my own efforts were minuscule compared to what a lot of other people provided, since I did not feel comfortable enough to critically analyze gene sequences for intron/exon splice junctions, promoters, enhancers and other regulatory sequences. My job was to simply compare the sequences I was assigned with the iconic model insect organism that is already well established - Drosophila melanogaster - and divine an idea of the sequence's importance through homology. This was not always easy, of course, but my job wasn't to critically analyze the sequence, but to annotate it such that others could easily come back to it and add their expertise. It was truly a lot of database work, and it gave me headaches every time I worked on it (probably due to eye strain). Still, it was a great experience, and it is cool now, over a year later, to see my name on a published paper in PLoS, even if I don't feel I own anything in the article.
Marina is currently working on finishing up a paper that is basically a fleshed out version of my undergraduate thesis, so I am looking forward to looking through the manuscript and seeing that hopefully published later this year (maybe as a birthday present??).
Anyway, take a look at the article and enjoy!
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