Thursday, February 16, 2012

rRNA genes in the human genome

Larry Moran has an excellent discussion of the organization of rRNA genes in the human genome.  It's an old post, but a good one.

If you're involved in RNA-Seq, you should read it.  Dr. Moran's discussion makes it clear why it is necessary to map reads to a synthetic rRNA-ome before doing full-genome alignment -- if you want to accurately count, or filter out, rRNA reads (which can predominate in RNA-seq datasets).

 

 

Thursday, February 2, 2012

get rid of dashboard in mac os X

Dashboard seems like a good idea, but I can't stand how it always seems to take 5 seconds to "wake up" all those widgets whenever I open it up. So, as a result, I never use it.  It just idles there in the background taking up a sliver of CPU cycles. Oh and occasionally I accidentally key into it. So, I am glad I finally did this:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

killall Dock