Publishing Original Research on Blogs - Part 1

This is a repost (with some edits) of an introduction to publishing original research on blogs -- a series I am reintroducing. The original entry can be found here.

In April of last year, Bora pushed the idea of publishing original research (hypotheses, data, etc) on science blogs. As a responsible researcher, I would need to obtain permission from any collaborators (including my advisor) before publishing anything we have been working on together. But what about small side projects or minor findings that I don't expect to publish elsewhere? As it turns out, such a project has been laying dormant since I first started working on it as a class project a few years ago. I will reveal more information about this project in subsequent posts, but suffice it to say this research is far from earth shattering. My primary objective is not to present any important findings, but rather to give my readers insight into how easy it is to study molecular evolution. After reading this series (I hope) someone will be able to download some sequences from the NCBI database and perform their own analyses. That being the case, all of the software I use will be freely available and easy to run on a PC (sorry Mac users, but that's my current environment).