One of the long-running goals I’ve had is to get this Oly GBS data taken care of and out the door to publication. I think I will finally succeed with this, with the help of Pub-A-Thon. Don’t get too excited, it’s not what you think. It is not the drinking extravaganza that the name implies. Instead, it’s a “friendly” lab competition to get some scientific publications assembled and submitted.

Another goal for this month is to get the -80C organized. We’ve made some major progress on lab organization, with major kudos going to Grace Crandall and her work on cleaning out fridges/freezers and putting together our lab inventory spreadsheet. The -80C organization is the final frontier of getting the lab fully under control and more well-regulated.

Continuing on the organization front, it’d be great if we could get the Data Management Plan finished. Sean Bennett has helped get us much closer to completion. Hopefully this month we can get it finalized and have it be fully functional so that any lab member can easily figure out what to do when they receive new sequencing data.

I’d also like to put together a more automated means of handling our high-throughput sequencing data when we receive it. Ideally, it’d be a Jupyter Notebook and all the user would have to do is enter the desired location (heck, maybe I could even simplify it further by requiring just a species name…) for the files to be stored and then press “play” on the notebook. The files would go through a post-download integrity check, moved to final location, re-check integrity, update checksum files, and update readme files. I have most of the bits here and there in various Jupyter Notebooks already, but haven’t taken the time to put them all together into a single, reusable notebook.