A recent article on the Chronicle of Higher Education presents the difficult (if not grim) situation of the higher education in Greece. I was interviewed by the author of the piece, Paul Hockenos, last summer and it seems that he liked my -lukewarm- optimism to which he devotes the last paragraph of the article. Read more in the attached file of go to this link:
http://chronicle.com/article/Academic-Hostages-Languish/141793/ if your university is a lucky subscriber of the CoHE.

A company video of LifeTechnologies gives a thorough yet concise and graphically beautiful layout of the semiconductor sequencing technology applied through Ion Torrent and Ion Proton platforms.
Watch more here:

This weeks Nature Biotechnology features an article by two not-exactly computational biologists offering advice on becoming one :)
The article is entitled "So you want to be a computational biologist?" and although it is rather one-sided focusing mostly on technical aspects of bioinformatics it gives a good idea of what is perceived today as "being a computational biologist". The article misses the big picture on what lies behind all the "pipelines" and the "analyses", namely the algorithmic innovations, the mathematical conceptual approach to biological problems and in general all things that are necessary before someone sits in front of terminal to "run analyses".
But what do you think of it?
Give it a read and post your comments here.

A recent work of the group on how chromatin structure affects gene expression was published in this month's issue of Nucleic Acids Research. The paper, a collaboration with Joaquim Roca of the Barcelona Scientific Park shows how distinct chromatin structures at the promoters of yeast genes may shape the gene expression susceptibility upon topo-isomerase II inactivation. In this sense, a link is drawn between chromatin structure (and nucleosome positioning in particular) with the local topological strains imposed by the absence of topo-isomerase II. 
In a nutshell, the effect of topological stresses that are not resolved by topoisomerases are also dependent on the underlying sequence and 3D structure of the promoter region.
Read more online here and check out the group's publications page.