Interview in Nature Methods: Bench pressing with genomics benchmarkers

Lab News

Bench pressing with genomics benchmarkers

A journalist with Nature Methods recently interviewed Serghei on the increasingly important role that benchmarking studies play in biomedical and life science research.

Benchmarking studies, which rank bioinformatics software according to variables such as speed, accuracy, and precision, help researchers select the best tool for a given dataset and research question. However, benchmarking studies also point out when a tool is performing poorly—an unfortunate discovery for the lab that created the software package.

“In a review, Mangul and colleagues note that 72% of benchmarking studies they surveyed exclude information about how computationally efficient a method is. “I was really surprised,” says Mangul.”

Read the full article for our perspective on why benchmarking is so important!

  1. Read the “Technology Feature” interview in Nature Methods.
  2. Read our benchmarking study published by Nature Methods.

Serghei Mangul, Lana S Martin, Brian L Hill, Angela Ka-Mei Lam, Margaret G Distler, Alex Zelikovsky, Eleazar Eskin, Jonathan Flint: Systematic benchmarking of omics computational tools. In: Nature Communications, 10 (1393), pp. 1-11, 2019.