Blue is the colour...for East-of-England-bioinformatics-websites

The Sanger Institute

This is one of the most highly regarded centers for genomics and bioinformatics-based research in the world. The location? East of England (Hinxton, just outside Cambridge). The predominant website colour? Blue.

Their website front page is also undertaking a groundbreaking pilot program that aims to investigate the hypothesis that 'bending your neck to read text causes neck pain'. That can be the only reason for putting most of the main navigation links as text that has been rotated 90º. Presumably this is all part of their human interface guidelines which might also stipulate that as a user moves physically closer to their computer screen, that any images should decrease in size and resolution in order to prohibit easy recognition.

The Eastern Sequence and Informatics Hub

This is a relatively new player in the world of genomics/bioinformatics resource centers. They strangely have opted for an unwieldly, and non-sensical, abbreviation for their name: EASIH (shouldn't that be ESAIH?). On the location front, they play it safe by sticking to Cambridge proper (and not some outlying village). And on that vital issue of website colour, they take no risks with a solid colour scheme of teal blue with teal blue highlights that are accented by a lovely shade of teal blue.

If you want to contact the ESAIH, er...I mean the EASIH, then it is simple matter of writing to this short address:

EASIH
University of Cambridge
Academic Department of Medical Genetics
Level 6, Addenbrooke's Treatment Centre
Box 238
Addenbrooke's Hospital
Cambridge
CB2 0QQ
UK

I like the implication that inside Addenbrooke's Hospital, there are a number of boxes (at least 238 of them). One of those boxes contains a Treatment Center that has at least six levels, and inside one of those levels is a Department of Medical Genetics that contains the University of Cambridge, which in turn contains the EASIH! Wow, I guess Cambridge scientists have achieved a way of building TARDIS-like structures.

The Genome Analysis Centre

This is the new kid on the block and is not even an year old, they have made their name by locating somewhere in the East of England that is best described as 'not Cambridge'. But controversy aside, they have done solid work in basing their name on an abbreviation that uses each letter of the four DNA bases. The resulting abbreviation 'TGAC' features prominently on the home page of the website, but not quite as prominently as the name 'BBSRC Genome Analysis Center' that appears immediately above it. So it remains unclear whether one should address this place as the TGAC or as the BBSRCGAC. I guess the latter name helps avoid any confusion with this organization.

As is presumably stipulated by the laws governing bioinformatics research centres in the East of England, they have stuck to blue for their website colour. Possibly aiming to pick up any passing trade from web surfers who were trying to find the EASIH website, they have ensured that their shade of blue is almost identical to that of the EASIH's website.

For completeness, I'll also point out that the website makes it clear that this institute was established in parternship with the East of England Development Agency. So I'm not sure if this institute is therefore the EEDABBSRCGAC?

The slow death of bioinformatics and the eternal popularity of shoes

I was playing around with Google Insights for Search today and randomly decided to see how the search term bioinformatics has fared over the last six years (this is as far back as you can search for a trend). This is what I found:

Initially I was quite surprised by this and so I then performed a search for genomics, only to seem the same sort of trend.

According to Google the Y-axis of these graphs reflect "how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time" (emphasis on the word 'relative' is mine). This could just mean that the absolute number of search terms for 'bioinformatics' and 'genomics' is the same, or has even grown, but has been swamped by an increase in the frequency of all other search terms. To a lesser degree, there seems to be less searches occurring for many different biologically-related terms, e.g. here is the graph for the word biology.

On top of the overall declining trend, I like how you can clearly see a dip in the middle of each year. Presumably this is when millions of high-school kids take their long summer vacation and are therefore not searching about anything to do with school work. You can see similar annual 'wobbles' if you also search for chemistry or physics. So does this mean that all science-related searches are declining? Well, surely there is more interest in the newer fields of biology (and bioinformatics in particular) and the related technology. This does seem to be the case. Here is the graph for the search term 'next generation sequencing'. Clearly this term has exploded in popularity as the everybody moves to doing short-read sequencing as opposed to the traditional Sanger method.

So clearly, some topics are becoming hotter. However I still feel that the decline for the term bioinformatics might indeed represent a real decline in the whole field of bioinformatics. That is not to say that I think any less bioinformatics is being done these days, or that it is less 'worthy' as a field. Rather, I think bioinformatics has moved from being a specialist field that was carried out somewhat separately from 'traditional' wet-lab research, to something which is much more integrated with many other fields of research. There are still many dedicated bioinformatics group (the lab where I work is one such group), but I think it is increasingly common that more biologists need to (and want to) undertake some bioinformatics as part of their wider research. To me, bioinformatics has gone mainstream in biology and that means that it no longer makes sense to think of it as a separate field as such.

Anyway, regardless of whether any particular biological term is rising or falling in popularity, I think it is more interesting to see what search terms remain eternally popular. Despite changing governments, economic turmoil, and global uncertainty what is it that we search for with any degree of constancy? My first guess seemed to be a good one. So let me end by presenting the Google Insights graph for the search term shoes.

The Bradnam Blog

Filed under: bioinformatics

Blue is the colour...for East-of-England-bioinformatics-websites

The slow death of bioinformatics and the eternal popularity of shoes