Dear diary,

During 2020, ”On unicorns and genes” published a total of 29 posts (not including this one, because it’s scheduled for 2021). This means that I kept on schedule for the beginning of the year, then had an extended blog vacation in the fall. I did write a little bit more in Swedish (about an attempt at Crispr debate, a course I took in university pedagogy, and some more about that course) which was one of the ambitions.

Let’s pick one post per month to represent the blogging year of 2020:

January: Things that really don’t matter: megabase or megabasepair. This post deals with a pet peeve of mine: should we write physical distances in genetics as base pairs (bp) or bases?

February: Using R: from plyr to purrr, part 0 out of however many. (Part one might appear at some point, I’m sure.) Finally, the purrr tidyverse package has found a place in my code. It’s still not the first tool I reach for when I need to apply a function, but it’s getting there.

March: Preprint: ”Genetics of recombination rate variation in the pig”. Preprint post about our work with genetic mapping of recombination rate in the pig.

April: Virtual animal breeding journal club: ”An eQTL in the cystathionine beta synthase gene is linked to osteoporosis in laying hens”. The virtual animal breeding journal club, organised by John Cole, was one of the good things that happened in 2020. I don’t know if it will live on in 2021, but if not, it was a treat as long as it lasted. This post contains my slides from when I presented a recent paper, from some colleagues, about the genetics of bone quality in chickens.

May: Robertson on genetic correlation and loss of variation. A post about a paper by Alan Robertson from 1959. This paper is reasonably often cited as a justification for 0.80 as some kind of cut-off for when a genetic correlation is sufficiently different enough from 1 to be important. That is not at really what the paper says.

June: Journal club of one: ”Genomic predictions for crossbred dairy cattle”. My reading on a paper about genomic evaluation for crossbred cattle in the US.

July: Twin lambs with different fathers. An all too brief methods description prompted me to write some R code. This might be my personal favourite of the year.

August: Journal club of one: ”Chromosome-level and haplotype-resolved genome assembly enabled by high-throughput single-cell sequencing of gamete genomes”. Journal club post about a preprint with a neat-looking genome assembly strategy. This is where the posts start becoming sparse.

…

December: One notebook’s worth of work. Introspective post about my attempts to organise my work.

In other news, trips were cancelled, Zoom teaching happened, and I finally got the hang of working from home. We received funding for a brand new research project about genome dynamics during animal breeding. There will be lots of sequence data. There will be simulations. It starts next year, and I will write more about it later.

Also, Uppsala is sometimes quite beautiful: