Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend and present at GSK’s PhD and Postdoc workshop in Siena, Italy. The workshop spanned two days and I had a brilliant time there – Siena itself is beautiful, I ate fantastic food, and I learnt a huge amount about all stages of vaccine production.
Unfortunately, due to confidentiality, I can’t go into great detail about others’ current research, however I have provided a short overview of the five main areas the workshop focused on below.
Continue readingI recently found myself in the Oxford Blackwells’ Norrington Room browsing the shelves for some holiday reading. One book in particular caught my eye, a blend of evolution — a topic that has long interested me — and cancer biology, a topic I’m increasingly exposed to in immune repertoire analysis collaborations but on which I am assuredly “non-expert”!
The Cheating Cell by Athene Aktipis provides a theoretical framework for understanding cancer by considering it as a logical sequitor of the advent of successful multicellular life.
Continue readingIn this blog post, I’ll show you guys how to make your own shiny container for your tool! Zero fuss(*) and in FOUR simple steps.
As an example, I will show how to make a singularity container for one of our public tools, ANARCI, the antibody numbering tool everyone in OPIG and external users are familiar with – If not, check the web app and the GitHub repo here and here.
(*) Provided you have your own Linux machine with sudo permissions, otherwise, you can’t do it – sorry. Same if you have a Mac or Windows – sorry again.
BUT, there are workarounds for these cases such as using the remote singularity builder here, for which you only need to sign up and create an account, and the use of Virtual Machines (VMs), as described here.
One of the recurrent problems I used to have when writing argument parsers is that after refactoring code, I also had to change the argument parser options which generally led to inconsistency between the arguments of the function and some of the options of the argument parser. The following example can illustrate the problem:
def main(a,b):
"""
This function adds together two numbers a and b
param a: first number
param b: second number
"""
print(a+b)
if __name__ == "__main__":
import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("--a", type=int, required=True, help="first number")
parser.add_argument("--b", type=int, required=True, help="second number")
args = parser.parse_args()
main(**vars(args))
This code is nothing but a simple function that prints a+b and the argument parser asks for a and b. The perhaps not so obvious part is the invocation of the function in which we have ** and vars. vars converts the named tuple args to a dictionary of the form {“a":1, "b":2}, and ** expands the dictionary to be used as arguments for the function. So if you have main(**{"a":1, "b":2}) it is equivalent to main(a=1, b=2).
Let’s refactor the function so that we change the name of the argument a to num.
Continue readingPeople who run molecular simulations quickly become familiar with all of the things about a PDB file – missing residues, missing heavy atoms in residues, missing hydrogens, non-standard amino acids, multiple conformations, crystallization ligands, etc. – that might need to be fixed before setting up a simulation. This blog post is a reminder to check, after you have “fixed” your PDB, if you have accidentally introduced aberrant cis peptide bonds into your structure during rebuilding.
Continue reading