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Archive for March 4th, 2009

 04 Mar 2009 @ 8:11 AM 
 

Publish a Paper by Finding Bugs on Excel

 

The the jounral BMC bioinformatics, a recent paper was published… not about the intricate details of our genetic code, but rather how you shouldn’t use Microsft Excel to do any bioinformatics.

Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics
When processing microarray data sets, we recently noticed that some gene names were being changed inadvertently to non-gene names. A little detective work traced the problem to default date format conversions and floating-point format conversions in the very useful Excel program package. The date conversions affect at least 30 gene names; the floating-point conversions affect at least 2,000 if Riken identifiers are included. These conversions are irreversible; the original gene names cannot be recovered.

While I am sure the news is extremely useful, physicists can only dream of publishing papers by finding bugs in computer programs. Well, at least its not a randomly generated paper!

Tags Categories: Site News Posted By: Mile Gu
Last Edit: 04 Mar 2009 @ 08 11 AM

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