Personal Oncogenomics Program 5 Year Anniversary Art

The artwork was created in collaboration with my colleagues at the Genome Sciences Center to celebrate the 5 year anniversary of the Personalized Oncogenomics Program (POG).

▲ 5 Years of Personalized Oncogenomics Program at Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre. The poster shows 545 cancer cases. (left) Cases ordered chronologically by case number. (right) Cases grouped by diagnosis (tissue type) and then by similarity within group.

The Personal Oncogenomics Program (POG) is a collaborative research study including many BC Cancer Agency oncologists, pathologists and other clinicians along with Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre with support from BC Cancer Foundation.

The aim of the program is to sequence, analyze and compare the genome of each patient's cancer—the entire DNA and RNA inside tumor cells— in order to understand what is enabling it to identify less toxic and more effective treatment options.

Principal component analysis

Principal component analysis (PCA) simplifies the complexity in high-dimensional data by reducing its number of dimensions.

▲ Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Principal component analysis. (read)

To retain trend and patterns in the reduced representation, PCA finds linear combinations of canonical dimensions that maximize the variance of the projection of the data.

PCA is helpful in visualizing high-dimensional data and scatter plots based on 2-dimensional PCA can reveal clusters.

Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2017) Points of Significance: Principal component analysis. Nature Methods 14:641–642.

Background reading

Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2017) Points of Significance: Clustering. Nature Methods 14:545–546.

...more about the Points of Significance column

`k` index: a weightlighting and Crossfit performance measure

Similar to the `h` index in publishing, the `k` index is a measure of fitness performance.

To achieve a `k` index for a movement you must perform `k` unbroken reps at `k`% 1RM.

The expected value for the `k` index is probably somewhere in the range of `k = 26` to `k=35`, with higher values progressively more difficult to achieve.

In my `k` index introduction article I provide detailed explanation, rep scheme table and WOD example.

Dark Matter of the English Language—the unwords

I've applied the char-rnn recurrent neural network to generate new words, names of drugs and countries.

The effect is intriguing and facetious—yes, those are real words.

But these are not: necronology, abobionalism, gabdologist, and nonerify.

These places only exist in the mind: Conchar and Pobacia, Hzuuland, New Kain, Rabibus and Megee Islands, Sentip and Sitina, Sinistan and Urzenia.

And these are the imaginary afflictions of the imagination: ictophobia, myconomascophobia, and talmatomania.

And these, of the body: ophalosis, icabulosis, mediatopathy and bellotalgia.

Want to name your baby? Or someone else's baby? Try Ginavietta Xilly Anganelel or Ferandulde Hommanloco Kictortick.

When taking new therapeutics, never mix salivac and labromine. And don't forget that abadarone is best taken on an empty stomach.

And nothing increases the chance of getting that grant funded than proposing the study of a new –ome! We really need someone to looking into the femome and manome.

Dark Matter of the Genome—the nullomers

An exploration of things that are missing in the human genome. The nullomers.

Julia Herold, Stefan Kurtz and Robert Giegerich. Efficient computation of absent words in genomic sequences. BMC Bioinformatics (2008) 9:167