BOL: Related items

Bioinformatics Web Application Development with Perl

Jit — Tue, 26 Dec 2017 18:14:11 -0600

Perl's second wave of adoption came from the growth of the world wide web. Dynamic web pages—the precursor to modern web applications—were easy to create with Perl and CGI. Thanks to Perl's ubiquity as a language for system administrators and its power to manipulate text, it was the default choice for web programming. Its presence everywhere made it popular and, in some ways, the duct tape of the Internet.

Web Application Development

The old days of CGI programs and the simple development style that represented seem clunky. Web pages have become web applications. Development has moved from generating static HTML to both client and server side programming, with rich client interfaces and powerful backends.

Perl is still well suited for developing modern web apps. The language grows more powerful and easier to use every year, the available libraries are wonderful and keep getting better, and the inventions and discoveries available in modern Perl are unsurpassed.

In particular, a modern Perl developer can do amazing things with modern Perl tools. If you still think of Perl web development as a cgi-bin directory full of messy scripts that spew warnings to STDERR, you're a decade out of date. Better yet, you can replace that mess piecemeal, thanks to the new tools and techniques of modern Perl. See, for example, the ever-growing list of technologies Built in Perl.

Modern Perl Web Frameworks

While the old wave of web development may have made the CGI.pm module central, modern Perl web programming follows a stricter separation of business logic, URL and request routing, and output. The days of slinging a string here, an array there, a Perl hash yonder, declaring every variable at the top of the program, and maybe making a subroutine are gone. The Perl world has seen the value of abstraction and ways to mechanize away boilerplate. Perl has dozens of frameworks and toolkits designed to make web development and deployment simpler.

Any of a dozen of these frameworks will help you do great things, but three in particular stand out. You can build web sites and web applications of tremendous value with all three. These are neither the only good possibilities (think of POE or Jifty or Continuity or...) nor the only mechanisms for web programming with Perl (see Mechanize or LWP or Mojo::UserAgent for more). Yet if you want three good options to choose between, start here.

Catalyst

The Catalyst framework is a flexible and powerful system for building small to large web apps. It uses the Moose object system to provide great APIs for extension and further development. It's the most mature of the modern top Perl web frameworks, yet it retains its flexibility and vibrancy. In particular, its plugin and extension ecosystem allows it to evolve to provide new and essential features.

Catalyst has embraced the Plack/PSGI standard for Perl web deployment and recent versions are exploring high-scalability, event-based request handling models.

Dancer

The Dancer framework is deliberately minimal in syntax and scope, but it also has a vibrant plugin ecosystem. Dancer particularly excels for smaller sites and applications, though good programmers can build larger things with it.

The first version of Dancer was easy to use. Dancer 2 continues that ease while improving the internals and robustness of applications.

Mojolicious

The Mojolicious (Mojo) framework has a real-time design based on high performance event handling. Its focus is solving new and interesting problems in simple and effective ways, and the project has produced a lot of new code that does old things in better ways.

In particular, Mojolicious goes to great lengths to support new web standards, such as CSS 3, web sockets, and HTTP 2.

Where Catalyst embraces the CPAN fully, Mojolicious by design provides most of what an average app might need in a single download. It's still fully compatible with the CPAN, but the intention is to provide good working defaults in a package that's easy to start with. Mojo's fans are quick to praise it as fun to develop.

A modern Perl web developer should be familiar with at least one of these frameworks.

Modern Perl Storage Mechanisms

Perl's venerable DBI module has been the focal point of database access since its invention. Its design allows it to provide the same interface to huge relational databases and flat files alike through its DBD extension mechanism. Yet the DBI by itself isn't the be-all, end-all of data storage and access in Perl.

DBIx::Class

DBIx::Class sits on top of DBI to provide an API to your database based on the concept of queries and results. This is often sufficient to remove all but the most complicated of SQL from your code, leaving you to manipulate your business models instead of the small details of how a relational database works. The power and maintainability you receive is well the small cost of the learning curve.

Even better, DBIC can manage (and even generate) your database schema for you.

Recent versions of DBIC have demonstrated that a well-written ORM can perform much better than even clever hand-written code. Because it builds on the Perl DBI, it scales everywhere from SQLite to PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and more.

Rose::DB

The lesser-known but no less powerful Rose::DB::Object builds on Rose::DB to provide an object-relational mapper for Perl. While its high level features most directly compare to those of DBIx::Class, it's often measurably faster.

NoSQL on the CPAN

Of course the CPAN has modules for almost any NoSQL database or job queue or persistence mechanism you could name, and several you have never heard of. Everything you need is a quick CPAN or cpanm away!

Modern Perl Deployment Strategies

In the early days of the web, deploying a Perl web application meant putting one or more .cgi or .pl files in a special directory and hoping that your system administrator had everything configured correctly. The execution model was often slow and cumbersome, and accessing shared resources such as databases was often tricky.

Modern Perl has better choices. While deployment strategies are the source of many arguments, the return on your investment from learning the modern way is impressive.

Plack/PSGI

The PSGI specification (as exemplified by Plack) describes a strategy for building Perl web apps independent of server and with the possibility to share custom processing behaviors.

In other words, it's a standard for writing Perl apps to take advantage of the huge ecosystem of Perl development available on the CPAN without tying yourself to a server like Apache, Apache 2, nginx, or anything else.

Any good modern Perl web framework (including those listed here) supports PSGI. Several deployment mechanisms exist to meet various business needs which also support PSGI. In particular, you can deploy the same application with a local testing server on your own machine as you can to your production server or servers without changing your application at all.

mod_perl

The older but still viable mod_perl Apache httpd module embeds Perl into the web server. This was the first widespread persistence mechanism for Perl web applications themselves and it's still popular to this day, though PSGI compliance is often the choice for new development. (PSGI handlers to use mod_perl as the backend are available.)

Modern Perl developers should familiarize themselves with PSGI and the wealth of available Plack middleware.

Perl Web Development

Of course no discussion of Perl web development would be complete without mentioning the strength of the CPAN. Almost any project will benefit from the wealth of freely available libraries built to solve real problems. These distributions run the gamut from full-blown web frameworks and content management systems to APIs for web services, development tools, testing systems, and interfaces to document formats and external resources.

For example, if you need to write a web service which accepts JSON data and produces Excel spreadsheets, you can glue together a few CPAN distributions and get the job done early. If you need to consume XML from a remote service and emit a PDF, you're in luck.

Perl's prowess as a general purpose programming language as well as its flexibility and power in managing text and gluing systems together make it a wonderful fit for web development. The community's adoption of modern Perl standards such as PSGI and Plack only enhance your power.

Web application development in Perl is still viable, and modern Perl tools and techniques and libraries make it more powerful and pleasant than ever.

SCFBio have developed Sanjeevini

Jit — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 07:55:49 -0600

SCFBio have developed a new android based application for drug design called Sanjeevini (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sanjeevini&hl=en). It is available free of charge. You can download it using Google play store. Just search for "Sanjeevini-SCFBIO-CADD" in Google play store. It contains all modules used by current Sanjeevini users. We have worked towards making a unified and easy to use interface. The app now supports all major small molecule file formats (pdb, mol, sdf, mol2 and xyz). The application contains inbuilt visualizer JSmol for easy analysis of results. Users can now directly download the protein files from PDB ("Get protein PDB file" in `FILE` Menu) and prepare it using the easy to use in-built module "Prepare protein/DNA".

SCFBio have worked towards making the process of Job retrieval more streamlined and user friendly. All jobs are now recorded in the "Job results". It can be accessed using the main page of the application. Job status can now be retrieved by clicking on the refresh button against the job ID.

SCFBio have also added a new feature of accessing Jobs run on different android application. Users can retrieve jobs run by other users by sharing the job ID and module name. This feature can be accessed using the Import Jobs option in File menu. We hope this feature will help collaborating groups stay in touch with each other.

The module contains all modules of Sanjeevini suite of software for structure based Drug design.

Sl No.	Module name	Activity
1	Prepare Protein/DNA	Prepares protein/DNA for other modules of Sanjeevini
2	Prepare ligand	Prepares ligands for other modules of Sanjeevini
3	Active site Prediction	Predicts biologically relevant sites in a protein
4	ParDOCK	Rigid Docking of Protein-Ligand complex
5	BAPPL	Binding affinity prediction of Protein-Ligand complex
6	BAPPL Z	Binding affinity prediction of Protein-Zinc-Ligand complex
7	DNA ligand Docking	Rigid Docking of DNA-Ligand complex
8	PreDDICTA	Binding affinity prediction of DNA-Ligand complex
9	SOM Prediction	Rigid Docking of Ligand and CYP proteins
10	Lipinski filters	Checks Lipinski's rule of five for ligand molecule
11	Molecular volume	Calculates volume of a ligand
12	RASPD	Virtual screening of protein molecule to yield hit molecules
13	AADS	Prediction and docking of top 10 biologically relevant sites on protein
14	Intercalate	Rigid Docking of DNA-Ligand complex in intercalation sites
15	DNA sequence to str.	Converts DNA sequence to DNA structure (A-DNA or B-DNA)
16	NRDBSM	Non-redundant database of small molecules
17	TPACM4	Partial charge calculator for small molecules
18	Wiener index	Wiener index calculator for small molecules

The results can be downloaded to the PC desktop for further analysis. For this you can use this accompanying website for this purpose:
http://www.scfbio-iitd.res.in/sanjapp/webSearch/Sanjeevini_webpage.html

On more information on how to use the application please visit: http://scfbio-iitd.res.in/sanjapp/webSearch/doc.html
or
http://scfbio-iitd.res.in/sanjeeviniapp/tut.html

Please email us your valuable comments and suggestions at iitd.scfbio@gmail.com

Dash: a web application framework that provides pure Python abstraction around HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Jit — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 06:39:48 -0600

Dash is a web application framework that provides pure Python abstraction around HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Dash Bio is a suite of bioinformatics components that make it simpler to analyze and visualize bioinformatics data and interact with them in a Dash application.

The source can be found on GitHub at plotly/dash-bio.

These docs are using Dash Bio version 0.1.4.

Address of the bookmark: https://dash.plot.ly/dash-bio

QUAST: quality assessment tool for genome assemblies

Jitendra Prajapati — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 18:23:33 -0500

QUAST evaluates genome assemblies. For metagenomes, please see MetaQUAST project.
It can works both with and without a given reference genome.
The tool accepts multiple assemblies, thus is suitable for comparison.

More at http://bioinf.spbau.ru/quast

http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/03/09/bioinformatics.btt086.long

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/03/09/bioinformatics.btt086.long

ANItools web: a web tool for fast genome comparison within multiple bacterial strains

Jit — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 04:34:23 -0600

ANItools is a software package written by PERL scripts that can be run in a Linux/Unix system. If you want to compare bacterial genomes and calculate their average nucleotide identity (ANI), you could download and run this program directly. Or you could send us the genome sequence by email. Then we will do the analysis work for you.

https://academic.oup.com/database/article/doi/10.1093/database/baw084/2630454

Address of the bookmark: http://ani.mypathogen.cn/

Genomic Scientist at UDSC

Thu, 28 May 2015 19:14:23 -0500

Centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants

Department of Genetics

University of Delhi South Campus

NEW DELHI – 110 021

WALK-IN-INTERVIEW FOR THE TEMPORARY POSITIONS OF RESEACH SCIENTIT & LAB / FIELD ATTENDANT

1 Research Scientist (RS) – 3

DBT, Ph. D.

Experience on DNA Markers, plant genome mapping and bioinformatics

Salary: 60,000 (Consolidated) + 5% annual increment

Date and time: 25.06.2015 at 10:30 AM

These temporary positions have been sanctioned in a DBT funded project for the Phase II on ‘Centre of Excellence on genome mapping and molecular breeding of Brassicas.’

The applicants are requested to register their names on the day of interview in the First Floor, Biotech Centre, Centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants, Department of Genetics before the stipulated time for the interview. Only the registered eligible candidates will be interviewed on the day in the Committee Room.

Applicants are requested to bring all related documents, in original and a set of photocopy, for verification.

No TA/DA will be paid for attending the interview.

www.du.ac.in/du/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=5492&cntnt01returnid=83

GRIDSS: the Genomic Rearrangement IDentification Software Suite

Rahul Nayak — Sun, 17 May 2020 10:27:44 -0500

GRIDSS is a module software suite containing tools useful for the detection of genomic rearrangements. GRIDSS includes a genome-wide break-end assembler, as well as a structural variation caller for Illumina sequencing data. GRIDSS calls variants based on alignment-guided positional de Bruijn graph genome-wide break-end assembly, split read, and read pair evidence.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/PapenfussLab/gridss

PeGAS: A Comprehensive Bioinformatic Solution for Pathogenic Bacterial Genomic Analysis

LEGE — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 01:18:10 -0500

This is PeGAS, a powerful bioinformatic tool designed for the seamless quality control, assembly, and annotation of Illumina paired-end reads specific to pathogenic bacteria. This tool integrates state-of-the-art open-source software to provide a streamlined and efficient workflow, ensuring accurate insights into the genomic makeup of pathogenic microbial strains.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/liviurotiul/PeGAS

SVfinder: Tool for detecting genomic rearrangement form DNA-seq data

Robert M Willioms — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 15:51:40 -0600

SVfinder provides genome-wide detection of structural variants from next generation paired-end sequencing reads.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/cauyrd/SVfinder

EuGI: a novel resource for studying genomic islands to facilitate horizontal gene transfer detection in eukaryotes

Surabhi Chaudhary — Sat, 12 May 2018 07:26:59 -0500

SWGIS v2.0 along with the EuGI database, which houses GIs identified in 66 different eukaryotic species, and the EuGI web-resource, provide the first comprehensive resource for studying HGT in eukaryotes.

https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-018-4724-8

Address of the bookmark: https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-018-4724-8