Dr Andrew Page and Dr Nabil-Fareed Alikhan from the Quadram Institute and Dr Lee Katz from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have produced the Micro Binfie Podcast for scientists, researchers and clinicians working in microbial bioinformatics.

“It’s a small niche community, spread globally. Often there is only a single scientist or researcher in an organisation working on microbial bioinformatics, so we felt this would be a good way to let them listen in on subjects of interest to them” said Dr Page. “It’s just three friends who share a common interest chatting for half an hour.”

Podcasts are a rapidly growing medium for allowing listeners to keep up to date on different topics, and whilst there are general podcasts on bioinformatics and microbiology, there are none for microbial bioinformaticists. The Micro Binfie Podcast aims to fill that gap. It grew out of an online Slack group where the researchers were all in daily contact.

“We did the academic thing and produced a joint review paper together on a topic, but that is inflexible.  We felt that going down the podcasting route allowed us to give back more knowledge to the community.”

The Micro Binfie poscast is available at SoundCloud (https://soundcloud.com/microbinfie)

or you can subscribe via iTunes:

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/microbinfie-podcast/id1479852809

or Spotify:

or your favourite podcast software.

The first episode takes a look at what bioinformatics software shouldn’t be written (because its already well served).

“In future episodes, we chat about the history of the humble FASTQ file, and how it evolved into what it is today. We also go in depth into the history of genotyping, looking at why it came about, and how techniques have rapidly changed within a few short years. And we wrap up the season with an interview with A/Prof Torsten Seemann on writing good bioinformatics software.”