Posts

Warfarin pharmacogenomics has been on my mind for quite awhile. Warfarin acts as an anticoagulant by inhibiting the vitamin K cycle which is responsible for creating blood clotting factors. When I learned that vitamin K was produced by bacteria in the gut microbiome, I hypothesized that vitamin K producing capability of the gut microbiome would be associated with warfarin dose requirements.

Biostatistics is my favorite applied branch of statistics.

Foreward: I decided to review my coursework for my comprehensive exams. Inspired by my linear regression review, these next posts will review basic topics that I learned in my PhD coursework.

Linear Regression is using a straight line to describe a relationship between variables. It finds the best possible fit through minimizing “error” of the model. Simple linear regression uses one independent variable and one dependent variable and multiple linear regression uses more than one independent variable with one dependent variable.

Creating a website has absolutely been a wild ride! I jumped between tutorials (and themes and hosts and generators) before finding the one I liked the best: Summer of Blogdown by Alison Hill.

The best way to improve prediction is to increase the amount of data you’re using to do the prediction. With warfarin, the anticoagulant I study, there are limited sources of explored variability in drug response.

Goals in Grad School Probably the hardest part of graduate school (besides imposter syndrome) is keeping track of all the different research projects and other important deadlines. My PI suggests each of the lab members write 4 to 5 goals a month to stay on track.

Today I used TreeSnatcher Plus to convert an image of a dendrogram into functional data. I came across a publication of world cusines and thought it may be helpful data for another project I’m working on.

Qiime My sequencing was done by Ion Torrent which made Qiime a bit difficult to use because of lacking documentation. I followed, mostly, this post by Carli Jones: https://forum.qiime2.org/t/possible-analysis-pipeline-for-ion-torrent-16s-metagenomics-kit-data-in-qiime2/13476.