Serious errors plague DNA tool that's a workhorse of biology

Re:Serious errors plague DNA tool that's a workhorse of biology by HayBale on Thursday July 11, 2024 @01:29PM (#40938795)

Honestly, a crazy amount of biology and bioinfo works like that. Do any in silico analysis on NCBI accession genomes. I would say wast majority of them is either shoddy at best and at worst completely mislabeled.

Bioinfo tools? You scrape the surface of the reported results and see what is inside and a lot of stuff is either broken or work on a trust me bro principle.

Sequencing? In one technology results can be a bit different depending on the graphic card used and reported error rate is kinda shady.

Don't get me wrong people working with these stuff are amazing but the constant push for publishing more and more and the profit drive of the companies does a lot of bad stuff.

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Re:Serious errors plague DNA tool that's a workhorse of biology by dsign on Thursday July 11, 2024 @01:35PM (#40938846)

You are onto something there. I believe that there is a lot of good science being made. But there is a world of difference between even a well-conducted research paper and a 99.999999% SLA: we don’t have anything like that in biotech. Some will say that you just can’t. I say that we are not trying hard enough.

Back in the day I did some PhD research in horizontal gene transfer with plasmids. Really fascinating stuff.

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