so how was the trip?

is what everyone asks... and no matter how many adjectives i say it still wouldnt do any justice to what transpired those fwe days from the 6th to 14th of april...

so i am going to direct people to this blog and then let them work out thier favourite parts...

let me start at the very beginnig.. a very good place to start. [SOM reference :)]

When Dr.Sulagna Banerjee initially told us that there is a conference in delhi which we would be attending, i had my doubts. If anything this was CSIR, supposedly the countrys top scientific concern, why they would concern themselves with us? and i was proved wrong.. thanks to ma'am. After putting up a proposal of annotating the glycoprotiens of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis genome she selected around 30 people country wide to do the job. Fortunatley i got in! making up for my bio-informatics skills by my talking [incessantly]. With able help from J.Lakshmanan i learnt a lot and pretty much worked all i could on it. We had Madhura Rajagopal from Anna Uni as part of the group too and the incomparable Rajadurai. The Man. When it comes to bioinfo no one can beat him. He is just phenomenal!
so this small band put in thier time, effort and energy and with 20 other people from around teh country finished off quite a bit!
well that was a short sentence.. but whew.. what it encompasses only we know... innumerous mails, invisible chats, annonymous phone calls, hung skype calls, overcrowded gmail chats and soap opera type arguments, fights, break ups and make ups. And Priyansha Singh. :D

After a hundred color coded excel sheets were exchanged, filtered, quality checked, chaged from Xl to XLX to PDF to DOC to XLS and every other format imaginable we suddenly realized that we had annotated close to 4000 proteins! whew. then run a check, get to next stage, filter out the glycosyl related ones, study them and then work out thier fold recognition... and in the middle of all this a colleague from IIT mumbai confirms that one of our hits [rv3242c] is indeed a hitherto unknown glycosyl protein! yay! bingo!

now we with confidence set out sharing our results. and the next thing i know we get a call from Anshu Bharadwaj 'hey Glycomics team! good work, pack your bags. Your off to Delhi!'