Computational biology and genomics
In this post, I will compare different tools for comparing VCF files. To create a reproducible example, I will make use of Docker and Conda. I highly recommend learning about these tools if you haven’t already; they make it easier to reproduce your work. I have written some notes on Docker and Conda that maybe…
This is an update on my original post Setting up Windows for bioinformatics that I wrote in 2011. I had switched over to the Mac operating system (Mac OS X) for work when my HP laptop was replaced with a MacBook Air sometime in 2012. A few years later, I wiped my Windows installation from…
The grImport package can be used to import vector images into R so that you can edit and/or combine it other plots. In this post, I will go through the grImport workflow and finally show how vector images can be incorporated with other graphical objects.
I’m a big fan of the book Bioinformatics Data Skills by Vince Buffalo and I highly recommend it to everyone who works in the bioinformatics field. The book introduces the reader to The Golden Rule of Bioinformatics, which is: Never ever trust your tools (or data). I am a strong proponent of this rule, which…
I haven’t been blogging as much as I’d like to due to other commitments but I wanted to write a post before 2018 ends. This post is on plotting Google Trends results with R. If you’ve never heard of or used Google Trends, it’s fun! You can see how certain keywords have trended over the…
Cell Ranger is a set of analysis pipelines that process Chromium single cell 3′ RNA-seq data. The pipelines process raw sequencing output, performs read alignment, generate gene-cell matrices, and can perform downstream analyses such as clustering and gene expression analysis. Cell Ranger includes four pipelines: cellranger mkfastq cellranger count cellranger aggr cellranger reanalyze You can…
The Chromium Single Cell 3′ Solution is a commercial platform developed by 10x Genomics for preparing single cell cDNA libraries for performing single cell RNA-seq. In addition, 10x Genomics have developed an entire software suite called Cell Ranger that can process the raw BCL files produced by an Illumina sequencer and output a final gene-barcode…
Interactive plots, as the name suggests, are plots that users can interact with. In my last post, I mentioned that for interactive heatmaps I use the d3heatmap package. To get started with this post, I’ll create the same heatmap as my last post but this time using the d3heatmap package.
For a while, heatmap.2() from the gplots package was my function of choice for creating heatmaps in R. Then I discovered the superheat package, which attracted me because of the side plots. However, shortly afterwards I discovered pheatmap and I have been mainly using it for all my heatmaps (except when I need to interact…
A quick guide to organizing computational biology projects has been published over 8 years ago but the main messages are still very relevant (perhaps even more so nowadays given the exponential increase in biological data). In a nutshell, computational biology projects need to be organised so that we can share and reproduce our work in…