Twitter Coverage of the Lorne Genome Conference 2017

Things to know about Lorne in the state of Victoria, Australia.

• It’s situated on the Great Ocean Road, a major visitor attraction and a great way to see the scenic coastline of the region
• It’s home to a number of life science conferences including Lorne Genome 2017

This week’s project then: use R to analyse coverage of the 2017 meeting on Twitter. I last did something similar for the ISMB meeting in 2012. How things have changed. Back then I prepared PDF reports using Sweave, retrieved tweets using the twitteR package and struggled with dates and time when plotting timelines. This time around I wrote RMarkdown in RStudio, tried out the newer rtweet package and, thanks to packages such as dplyr and lubridate, the data munging is all so much cleaner and simpler.

So without further ado here is the Github repository.

The report examines several aspects of the conference coverage under the broad headings of timeline, users, networks, retweets, favourites, quotes, media and text.

Giant panda genome: mapped or sequenced?

I’m with Ogden Nash who said:

I love the baby giant panda,
I’d welcome one to my veranda

This week, I learned via Keith that Chinese scientists announced the completion of the giant panda genome. An impressive achievement, given that the project was announced in March this year, but what exactly has been completed? Has the genome been sequenced – that is, there are strings of A, C, G and T covering most chromosomes, or mapped – that is, the approximate chromosomal location of most genes determined? The media seem unsure.

• The Australian: Scientists in China have mapped the genome of the giant panda…
• Window of China (the official source, it seems): Chinese scientists have completed sequencing the genome of giant pandas…
• The China Post: The Chinese-led genome-mapping effort…
• Melbourne Herald Sun: Genome sequencing confirms pandas are bears…but then “endangered giant pandas have had their genomes mapped…”
• Indian Express: Genome mapping to find out why Pandas are sex-shy…
• Discovery Channel: Scientists Map Giant Panda Genome…but then later on “by sequencing the genome, we have laid the genetic and biological foundation to gain a deeper understanding of this peculiar species”

And so on. Here’s a Google News search with more hits.

So what has been achieved – sequencing or mapping? If the former, is it really complete (I doubt this) or draft – and if draft, what kind of quality? And where are the data? Nothing in the genome project section of NCBI as yet.