BOL: Related items

The 5 reasons to mistakes at bioinformatics work !!!

Jit — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 02:51:41 -0500

When you're just starting out with biological programming, it's easy to run into complex problems that make you wonder how anyone has ever managed to write a program. There are some problems that trip up nearly every bioinformatician--everything from getting started understanding the biological problems to dealing with program design. Some random mistakes are so prominent that even experienced biological programmers do it. The 8 years in bioinformatics and my few random observations, most of them are snarky. These reasons will always take longer than expected and compel you to postpone your project deadline.

1.Stupid for biologist: Biology is so complex that it will make bioinformatician feel stupid. There are no any universal fixed rules; it can surprise you any time. So be nice to biologists who ask questions and resolve your biological puzzles. Sometime you will have no idea what the hell you were doing either.

2.Puzzling why: Do not hesitate to ask question. Especially. at the beginning of project you will have to ask a lot of questions. Instead of puzzling it out at end check out and clear your doubt even for a single error. It may can leads to wrong conclusion.

3.Running marathon: The most of the biological software’s documentation is always incomplete. In other word they are no more than 95 percent complete. Sometime a single problem can halt your entire project for months. Compilation and running the pipelines in tedious because almost all are interdependent and need proper configuration. I face the same kind of problem with Evolver :( …

4.Folders missing: The pipelines generate lots of data, and we keep them in several folders for future use. But sometime we delete them by mistake and move to recovery…

5.Digging deeper: Digging deeper is fruitful, but some time it can be catastrophic. You may get frustrated or direction less. So keep a biologist with you for rescue …. Sometime an expert computer programmer to handle your server. Remember, the server will always go down when you need it the most.

The most common frustrating common line: Why do we do this again?

gggenes: a ggplot2 extension for drawing gene arrow maps.

BioStar — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 11:43:34 -0500

Install the stable version of gggenes from CRAN:

install.packages("gggenes")

If you want the development version, install it from GitHub:

devtools::install_github("wilkox/gggenes")

More at https://github.com/wilkox/gggenes

Address of the bookmark: http://wilkox.org/gggenes

PhD opportunity at Université de Liège - Belgium

Sat, 02 Aug 2014 01:12:43 -0500

PhD opportunity at Université de Liège - Belgium

The Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Unit of Université de Liège (Belgium) is looking for a highly motivated master student with programming skills for a PhD thesis project (4 years, fully funded) with the goal of designing computational tools that use literature, genomic and structural data in order to infer regulatory and metabolic networks.

Applicants are invited to send their resume and a recommendation letter to Prof. Patrick Meyer (more details at www.biosys.ulg.ac.be )

For more information : www.biosys.ulg.ac.be

MEGADOCK 4.0

Suleman Khan — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 18:08:54 -0500

An ultra–high-performance protein–protein docking software for heterogeneous supercomputers

Summary: The application of protein–protein docking in large-scale interactome analysis is a major challenge in structural bioinformatics and requires huge computing resources. In this work, we present MEGADOCK 4.0, an FFT-based docking software that makes extensive use of recent heterogeneous supercomputers and shows powerful, scalable performance of over 97% strong scaling.

Availability and Implementation: MEGADOCK 4.0 is written in C++ with OpenMPI and NVIDIA CUDA 5.0 (or later) and is freely available to all academic and non-profit users at: http://www.bi.cs.titech.ac.jp/megadock.

Contact: akiyama@cs.titech.ac.jp

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/06/bioinformatics.btu532.short

Public Databases for Bioinformatics !

Jit — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 05:32:15 -0500

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17155-y

Server Infrastructure:

File Server:

dhara: Synology 3614 Storage Appliance
4 Core Xeon
108TB disk storage
10Gb ethernet to SCG3
Access atx: dhara:5000
Has btsync server (try it - its much better than dropbox)

Compute Servers:

nandi: Kundaje and Phi Server
24 intel cores
256GB RAM
500GB of SSD storage 
36TB RAID6 local storage
4 Intel Phi's (space for 4 more GPU's)


durga: Montgomery and sensitive data
24 intel cores
256GB RAM
500GB of SSD RAID0 storage 
60TB RAID6 local storage

mitra: Bassik and Web/DB Server
24 core
256GB RAM 
500GB of SSD RAID0 storage 
36TB RAID6 local storage

vayu: Kundaje GPU server
4 core
64GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
8TB RAID10 local storage
4 Nvidia GTX 970 4GB GPUs

amold: Bickel and SGE server
32 AMD core
128GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
12TB RAID5 local storage

wotan: Bickel and SGE server
64 AMD core
256GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
12TB RAID5 local storage

Filesystem:

/users/$USER
default home directory
full backups nightly 
nfs mount to dhara
should store code, papers, and other highly processed data here

/mnt/data/
globally accessible data
should store common data here
e.g. genomes and indexes, annotations, ENCODE data  
if you dont want this to count towards your quote you must chown

/mnt/lab_data/$LAB/
lab accessible data
should store lab project data here 
e.g. ATAC-seq prediction data, enhancer prediction, motif calls

/srv/scratch/$USER
fast local storage
not backed up, but on raid and data will never be deleted
most analysis should be performed here

/srv/persistent/$USER
fast local storage
synced nightly, but not backed up
       ie if the hard drives fail or you delete something and notice 
       within 24 hours we can recover. Otherwise not. (vs home which is 
       properly backed up )  
intermediate analysis products that would be hard to recover should be stored here 
       e.g. stochastic analysis results that need to be kept so that paper 
       results can be reproduced

/srv/www/$LABNAME/
web accessible from mitra.stanford.edu
*NOT BACKED UP*

Some parallel programming patterns:

# gzip a bunch of files
parallel gzip -- *.FILESTOGZIP

# fork example in python:
(for more detailed examples look at 
 https://github.com/nboley/grit/ grit/lib/multiprocessing_utils.py)

import os
import time
import random

import multiprocessing

class ProcessSafeOPStream( object ):
    def __init__( self, writeable_obj ):
        self.writeable_obj = writeable_obj
        self.lock = multiprocessing.Lock()
        self.name = self.writeable_obj.name
        return
    
    def write( self, data ):
        self.lock.acquire()
        self.writeable_obj.write( data )
        self.writeable_obj.flush()
        self.lock.release()
        return
    
    def close( self ):
        self.writeable_obj.close()

def worker(queue, ofp):
    # Try without this
    random.seed()
    while True:
        i = queue.get()
        if i == 'FINISHED': return
        # simulate an expensive function
        x = random.random()
        time.sleep(x/10)
        print i, x
        ofp.write("%i\t%s\n" % (i, x))

NSIMS = 10000
NPROC = 25

# populate queue
todo = multiprocessing.Queue()
for i in xrange(NSIMS): todo.put(i)
for i in xrange(NPROC): todo.put('FINISHED')

ofp = ProcessSafeOPStream( open("output.txt", "w") )

pids = []
for i in xrange(NPROC):
    pid = os.fork()
    if pid == 0:
       worker(todo, ofp)
       os._exit(0)
    else:
       pids.append(pid)  

for pid in pids:
    os.waitpid(pid, 0)

ofp.close()

print "FINISHED"

For use case 1 we obtained the following ENCODE and ROADMAP datasets https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF446WOD/@@download/ENCFF446WOD.bed.gz, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF546PJU/@@download/ENCFF546PJU.bam, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF059BEU/@@download/ENCFF059BEU.bam. Blacklisted regions were obtained from http://mitra.stanford.edu/kundaje/akundaje/release/blacklists/hg38-human/hg38.blacklist.bed.gz. The human genome version hg38 was obtained from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg38/bigZips/hg38.fa.gz.

For use case 2 we used the set of narrowPeak files summarized in https://github.com/wkopp/janggu_usecases/tree/master/extra/urls.txt (archived version v1.0.1). The human genome version hg19 was obtained from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg19/bigZips/hg19.fa.gz

For use case 3 we used the ENCODE datasets https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF591XCX/@@download/ENCFF591XCX.bam, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF736LHE/@@download/ENCFF736LHE.bigWig, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF177HHM/@@download/ENCFF177HHM.bam as we as the GENCODE annotation v29 from ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/gencode/Gencode_human/release_29/gencode.v29.annotation.gtf.gz.

Address of the bookmark: http://mitra.stanford.edu/

GrapheR !!!

John Parker — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 14:02:17 -0500

What a wonderful gem GrapheR is.... Oh yes it is. GrapheR is a GUI for base graphics in R by http://www.maximeherve.com/. The package provides a graphical user interface for creating base charts in R. It is ideal for beginners in R, as the user interface is very clear and the code is written along side into a text file, allowing users to recreate the charts directly in the console.

Adding and changing legends? Messing around with the plotting window settings? It is much easier/quicker with this GUI than reading the help file and trying to understand the various parameters.
Here is a little example using the iris data set.

library(GrapheR)
data(iris)
run.GrapheR()

This will bring up a window that helps me to create the chart and tweak the various parameters.

Finally, I find the underlying R code in a file created by GrapheR. For more details read also the package vignette, which is available in English, French and German!

Genomicus: genome browser that enables users to navigate in genomes in several dimensions

Jit — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 16:10:16 -0600

Genomicus is a genome browser that enables users to navigate in genomes in several dimensions: linearly along chromosome axes, transversaly across different species, and chronologicaly along evolutionary time.

Once a query gene has been entered, it is displayed in its genomic context in parallel to the genomic context of all its orthologous and paralogous copies in all the other sequenced metazoan genomes. Moreover, Genomicus stores and displays the predicted ancestral genome structure in all the ancestral species within the phylogenetic range of interest.

All the data on extant species displayed in this browser are from Ensembl.

Address of the bookmark: http://genomicus.biologie.ens.fr/genomicus-90.01/cgi-bin/search.pl

pybedtools

Shruti Paniwala — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 01:03:41 -0500

pybedtools is a Python wrapper for Aaron Quinlan's BEDtools programs (https://github.com/arq5x/bedtools), which are widely used for genomic interval manipulation or "genome algebra". pybedtools extends BEDTools by offering feature-level manipulations from with Python. See full online documentation, including installation instructions, at http://pythonhosted.org/pybedtools/.

More at http://pythonhosted.org/pybedtools/

A powerful toolset for genome arithmetic.http://code.google.com/p/bedtools/

Scripts for the analysis of HGT in genome sequence data.

Jit — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 16:44:10 -0600

Scripts for the analysis of HGT in genome sequence data

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/reubwn/hgt

Roderic Guigó Lab

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 17:13:00 -0500

Research in our group focuses on the investigation of the signals involved in gene specification in genomic sequences (promoter elements, splice sites, translation initiation sites, etc…). We are interested both in the mechanism of their recognition and processing, and in their evolution. In addition, but related to this basic component of our research, our group is also involved in the development of software for gene prediction and annotation in genomic sequences. Our group also actively participates in the analysis of many eukaryotic genomes and it in involved in the NIH-funded ENCODE project. Furthermore we are members of two large cancer-studies consortia (chronic lymphocytic leukemia "CLL" and Breast Cancer -Hospital del Mar/CRG/Roche-).

More at http://big.crg.cat/computational_biology_of_rna_processing