Finally I can lift the curtain of silence and tell the reason why I've been very busy before Christmas: it all lies in the publication of a paper, "Using Pathway Signatures as Means of Identifying Similarities among Microarray Experiments", which is finally out on this week's issue of PLoS ONE. It's different from [the previous paper I mentioned]({{ site.url }}/2008/01/phd) (which was not my first publication, either), for two main reasons:

• It's a bioinformatics paper;

• I am first author there.

The second point is very important because usually for a person doing bioinformatics is more difficult to end up as first author in a paper, since most we do is "something in the middle" like data analysis. Therefore, this paper is quite important for me. Also, it deals with an interest of mine, mainly analysis of biological networks using high-throughput platforms such as microarrays. Actually I'm also interested in network reconstruction, but I need to study far more than what I'm doing right now.

In any case, let's hope this is the first of a (hopefully long) series!