Computational biology and genomics
I have used BLAT to align full-length mRNA sequences a long time ago. Since BLAT has been out for over 20 years, I was wondering what modern day alignment tool I could use as a replacement. Minimap2 came to mind and in this post I use it to map some known transcript sequences to the…
In this post, I outline an approach for retrieving weather conditions from the command line. There are websites and widgets that provide weather details but I like using the command line because I find that it’s more efficient than pointing and clicking on stuff. In addition, this approach enables us to program specific tasks. For…
In this post, I describe a simple workflow for identifying Omicron variants from some sequencing data shared by the Kwazulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP) and the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation (CERI). To follow the workflow, you need to have Docker installed and an Internet connection. To get started, run a container…
I was updating my BAM to CRAM post spurred on by a recent comment and then I wondered whether I could store my FASTQ files as unaligned CRAM files to save space. I thought it wouldn’t be possible because the reads are unaligned and therefore we can’t make use of a reference to save space…
In my last post I outlined an approach for automatically creating reproducible documentation using GitHub Actions. I have now updated my Docker documentation using the same approach but without using a container because then I’d have to run Docker inside a Docker container (which is actually possible using GitLab’s CI/CD platform but I haven’t tried…
I had previously written about my workflow for creating reproducible documentation for SAMtools. The main idea was to generate the documentation via a R Markdown document that includes the documentation and the SAMtools commands to be executed on the command line (I do not know of another tool that can achieve this but if you…
The grep command-line utility is a commonly used tool for searching plain text files for lines that match a pattern. For example, you could search a gene or SNP ID in a BED/GFF/GTF file to find out its coordinates. In this post, I will demonstrate how you can search for a list of things in…
When I was an honours student (in Australia an honours degree is a one year [in practice, it’s about ten months] undergraduate research program you can take after your Bachelor’s and has nothing to do with the traditional meaning of the word “honours”), I literally jumped into the deep end of bioinformatics. I recall joining…
Sometime in the past this blog was called “Musings from a PhD candidate”, despite hardly writing any blog posts that were of the contemplative sort. It later evolved to “Musings from an unlikely candidate” because I had received my PhD, which I thought was quite an unlikely event given my background. However, this carried a…
Docker has been around for 8 years and it has become a very popular platform for developing software. In the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 39.2% of professional developers (total of 44,705) reported that they have done development work using Docker. Docker is only behind Linux and Windows! For the full list check out Stack…