Bioinformatics blog

2024

Pixi basics Permalink

less than 1 minute read

I wrote a post on the microbifie blog on how to get started with Pixi.

Call for action: bioinformatics conferences

less than 1 minute read

Every fiscal year, we have to predict where we are going to travel over the whole next year. However, conferences mainly post on their own website, making no...

Hash collision experiment

11 minute read

I have talked a bit about hashes with MLST but one crucial issue with hashes is whether they have collisions. In other words, if we have two sequences, there...

Hash MLST analysis

3 minute read

With EToKi and perhaps future MLST callers, we are possibly looking at a new class of MLST databases 1. I’m not sure which caller was actuall...

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2023

List of bioinformatics conferences

16 minute read

Every fiscal year, we have to predict where we are going to travel over the whole next year. However, conferences mainly post on their own website, making no...

Converting a set of VCFs to distances

5 minute read

I think that converting a bunch of VCF files to an alignment is still an artisinal thing. I made this sort of task in the Lyve-SET pipeline back in 2013 and ...

Open source alternatives

1 minute read

BioNumerics is sunsetting in December 2024. This is an issue especially in the PulseNet community where the network relies on this software to do many things...

MLST with colorid

2 minute read

I am pleasantly surprised by how well ColorID works with MLST. For some background, please see my previous post on cgMLST.

Benchmark datasets

1 minute read

Over the last several years, we have been generating benchmark datasets.

The memories

less than 1 minute read

I was cleaning out my office and found a flag that was given to me a few years ago. The legendary Peter Gerner-Smidt had become a citizen and had given some ...

How to be a good citizen on Linux

8 minute read

This is a short tutorial on how to be a good citizen in a shared Linux environment. At my own institution, there are many users per computer and we all have ...

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2022

mstdn.science

less than 1 minute read

I am using my site to verify me on Mastodon. Nabil and Duncan spun up a Mastodon server at https://mstdn.science a few weeks ago and it has been wildly succe...

GenBank CV

less than 1 minute read

I was inspired by Andrey Kislyuk’s post about 15 years ago on his personal website where he formatted his personal website to look like a GenBank file. I rec...

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2021

NFT of BRCA1

1 minute read

I’ve been sort of amazed ever since I heard about NFTs from Planet Money and now the New York Times.  Basically you associate a place on the blockchain with ...

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2020

Downloading the breadth of SARS-CoV-2

1 minute read

I was trying to figure out how to download the breadth of all of SARS-CoV-2 genomes and so I started out with the two major repositories: NCBI and GISAID.

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2019

Minimizer perl module

1 minute read

I looked all over cpan but did not find a module to make Minimizers.  Therefore I went ahead and made it in Bio::Minimizer.

Cluster detection using Mash

2 minute read

I have been racking my brain on what the command line version of a rapid cluster detection should be.  As in, how can I rapidly figure out if two random geno...

Fixing the R package manager

less than 1 minute read

R’s package manager is broken.  I present to you my solution for it. $HOME is your home directory. 1) mkdir -pv $HOME/R/tmp 2) Edit $HOME/.Renviron and ad...

Mash perl module

1 minute read

Hey y’all, I made a new perl module to read and write Mash files.  I made it a complete package, adding it to CPAN with documentation and adding unit testing...

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2017

Sampling the taxonomy database

1 minute read

I was a little frustrated that every time I wanted to try out my new Bio::DB::Taxonomy-based script, it would take a few minutes to run…. and then I would fi...

Custom Kraken database

2 minute read

Like many labs around the world, we use Kraken for contamination detection.  This isn’t its intended purpose however because it is supposed to be a taxonomic...

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2016

Tree To Reads

less than 1 minute read

It looks like Tree To Reads is online in a preliminary draft!  I encourage everyone to try it out! http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/01/22/037655 Using...

Perl writing style

6 minute read

I’m taking a moment to reflect on a post that Torsten Seemann wrote a couple of years ago called “Minimum standards for bioinformatics command line tools.”  ...

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2015

Krona snippet

less than 1 minute read

I couldn’t find any kind of conversion Kraken and Krona recently and so I wrote up a little pipeline.  Full script is available at lskScripts: https://github...

Edirect snippets

less than 1 minute read

I have been really excited by the new-ish edirect utilities.  I thought I’d put out my snippets and encourage anyone to show theirs too.  I haven’t found a l...

Blog posts

less than 1 minute read

A few blog posts that I’ve really liked for my niche of public health and bioinformatics.  I think one purpose of this blog can be to start gathering these p...

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