[Biococoa-dev] Introducing myself

Wed Feb 25 19:01:18 EST 2009

Hey Craig,

Well that is great, really.  Sounds similar to my experience, I  
entered my PhD to do core computer science, software engineering, then  
got involved with a biology project, was hooked and been following  
every since.

One thing you might want to look at are the two main genome browsers  
that exist today, one by UC Santa Cruz and the other by Ensembl.

http://genome.cse.ucsc.edu/
http://www.ensembl.org/index.html

There is also a project that I'm involved with, VectorBase, which also  
uses the Ensembl browser.

http://www.vectorbase.org/index.php

The reason I point these out is because all of them are web-based,  
which is great, but a potential killer app "might be" to have a local  
application which would allow researchers to analyze their local  
data.  Reproducing the functionality of these genome browsers isn't  
the way to go, but there are many potential niches to be filled.

Yes, shotgun sequencing is exactly what it is called.  Humorous name  
for sure, but you are exactly right, the "shotgun" blasts the genome  
into many smaller bits, which are then assembled together afterward.   
It was quite controversial when Venter's company took the approach for  
the human genome project, in defiance of the public consortium which  
was doing it the expensive, slow, but more accurate way.  But now it  
is the standard way, though its not perfect, and assembly in general  
is a difficult problem.

So for the BC*Sequence classes, if you look in the BCSequenceIO group  
then you will find a BCCachedSequenceFile and BCCachedFastaFile  
classes, which handle the file I/O.  What is missing is a  
BCCachedSequence class, to correspond to BCSequence.  From a design  
perspective, the two classes should stay separate (memory-based versus  
file-based) but I think a protocol which defines a common interface is  
what is needed.

cheers
Scott

On Feb 24, 2009, at 2:31 PM, Craig Bateman wrote:

> I accidently dropped the list in my reply, so Scott was the only one  
> that got it.
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Craig Bateman <craig at batemanspace.com>
> Date: Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 2:01 AM
> Subject: Re: [Biococoa-dev] Introducing myself
> To: Scott Christley <schristley at mac.com>
>
>
> Well, unfortunately I can't state what, in particular interests me  
> about genetics, mostly because I know so little.  I read the blind  
> watchmaker and was intrigued by the author's explanation of how  
> genes work, and since then have read other books about the human  
> genome and the effects of certain genes on human development, etc.   
> I guess I'm just vaguely interested in genetics research because I  
> want to know.  I certainly can't state that I'm interested in any  
> one sub-topic over any other.  In short, I've barely scratched the  
> surface, and want to learn so much more...
>
> I am, however, an avid programmer, and was hoping that my vague  
> interest in the domain of genetics coupled with my years of writing  
> software (banking analysis software, but software all the same)  
> would combine to provide a great developer resource for the project.
>
> As far as a "killer app" goes, I couldn't even guess what something  
> like that would look like for BioCocoa...  If you have some ideas I  
> can certainly bring something to light, but honestly I haven't a  
> clue about how any of this sequence information is actually used and/ 
> or what features in such an app would be useful.
>
> Unifying the BC*Sequence classes is a good idea, maybe I'll look at  
> that first as a tooth-cutting exercise.  Aside from that, I read a  
> bit about "shotgun" sequencing, which may not be what it's actually  
> called, but where overlapping bits of a sequence are used to  
> assemble an entire sequence.
>
> So I've got a lot to learn, but anything I can contribute to this  
> project or genetics/proteins/cancer/whatever research in general is  
> a win in my book.
>
>
>
> On Feb 22, 2009, at 11:16 PM, Scott Christley wrote:
>
> Hello Craig,
>
> The coding I've been doing lately is primarily related to the  
> research I'm doing, so from this sense it doesn't necessarily go  
> fast.  My long-term goal is to add some advanced analysis techniques  
> into BioCocoa.
>
> One of the key things I would like to do is make the sequence and  
> cached sequence class correspond in their interface.  The cached  
> sequence class is important to do large scale analysis on large  
> genomes, because they are too big to load completely into memory.   
> This is something that BioCocoa can offer above other toolkits like  
> BioPerl and BioPython, high performance and large scale analysis.
>
> What interests you about genetics?  Much of the algorithms in  
> genetics, bioinformatics and so on are still being developed, even  
> things like assembly of genomes is not a "done" technology.  If you  
> have a  specific interest area, then I can help lay out a series of  
> tasks that would be both highly useful and be interesting  
> algorithmic work.
>
> Koen is right, the todo list is still accurate, and those are  
> certainly useful enhancements to make.  And the creation of a  
> "killer app" is definitely desired, especially to bring these  
> advanced analysis techniques together into an easy-to-use GUI and/or  
> command line applications that biologists can use.
>
> cheers
> Scott
>
> On Feb 21, 2009, at 12:43 PM, Craig Bateman wrote:
>
> I'm an experienced software engineer looking for an open source mac  
> project to contribute to, and I'm recently very interested in  
> genetics.  So BioCocoa seemed an obvious choice.
>
> I looked at the To Do list, and fear that 2+ years later it must be  
> out of date unless there's just nobody left working on this  
> project.  Is it officially dead?  There hasn't been a lot of  
> movement on this list in the past few months since the 2.1.0 "non"- 
> release.  I've checked out the source and will start digging now to  
> get a feel for what's here and how it works.  What/where are the  
> primary missing pieces? Has all the 1.x functionality been  
> incorporated to 2.1?  Is anything on the todo list still up for  
> doing?  Should I be looking at the framework itself or the  
> applications?
>
> Anyway, to whoever is still alive on this project, let me know how  
> and where I can help and I'll be glad to.
>
> Thanks,
> Craig Bateman
>
> _______________________________________________
> Biococoa-dev mailing list
> Biococoa-dev at bioinformatics.org
> http://www.bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/biococoa-dev
>
>
>
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.bioinformatics.org/pipermail/biococoa-dev/attachments/20090225/550edd22/attachment.html>