<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">I too agree that the class cluster architecture is a good idea. Let me throw out a few random thoughts, mainly me just thinking about different ways that sequences can be used.<div><br><div><br></div><div>* I think the mutable sequence is useful. It isn't very common though as typically sequence data is considered to be ground truth but I think it will become more so as people start doing in silico experimentation, asking "what if" questions when the sequence is mutated. This can be tricky to handle efficiently, but maybe we would want to design the interface around the biological, i.e. SNPs, insertions, deletions, inversions, duplications, etc.</div><div><br></div><div>* I'm not very enamored with the BCSequenceArray class. I'm not sure how it is any better than just using a standard NSArray, I tried looking in the archives for discussion but didn't really find anything. However my guess is that BCSequenceArray would somehow provide additional sequence specific functionality? Personally, I don't really want to treat BCSequence objects in any special way. I think its best if users can include into standard collections (NSArray, NSDictionary, NSSet) instead of having to use specialized collections. Thoughts?</div><div><br></div><div>* Craig makes a good point about being able to do -sequenceWithId: to lookup a sequence. One issue to be aware of is that the id's in the FASTA files are not necessarily unique. In fact, the definition of the sequences often lie outside of the fasta file. Now if you download from NCBI then you have a good chance of getting unique id's, but take UCSC's goldenPath for example. If you download the human genome from there, the id just says chr1, chr2, etc. Mix and match with another organism and you can quickly forget which chr goes with whom.</div><div>So from this perspective, we need to be careful not to rely upon the id's being unique. Typically id's are unique within a file, but this would really have to be a contract that the user enforces, it is not part of the FASTA format.</div><div><br></div><div>* While I can understand why one would want to maintain the order of sequences in a file when reading them into an array, I think we should avoid relying upon that order being maintained. For example, a BCGenome class is something I've been thinking about adding. It combines together all of the chromosome sequences together (or for some organisms it would just be scaffolds from the assembly); an organization that then could be input to various comparative genomics algorithms. It could be all of the chromosome sequences are in one file, or each chromosome could be in its own file; it is really up to the user. Now if each chr was in its own file, we don't want to manage a set of arrays. We would likely want to pull out all of the sequences from multiple arrays and put them together into a single array.</div><div><br></div><div>* Down the road (which is only about a block away :-), we won't be talking about just one genome for an organism but many individual genomes (aka 1000genomes.org). Users probably won't have all of these genomes residing on their disk, they are gonna be compressed against a reference genome maybe like we recently published:</div><div><br></div><div><div><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18996942">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18996942</a></div><div><br></div></div><div>So I see in the future having a special BCSequence class which doesn't hold the actual sequence, but only the variations (possibly in a compressed form) from a reference sequence. This should allow hundreds to thousands of genomes to be "loaded" into memory and help alleviate those programs from being I/O bound.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>cheers</div><div>Scott</div><div><br><div><div>On Feb 27, 2009, at 12:39 PM, Craig Bateman wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>After looking at this for a while, I agree that a protocol would do it, and would be consistent with using an Interface in many other languages, but a BCSequence class cluster (and probably a BCSequenceArray cluster that included a sequenceWithId: method since many file formats support multiple sequences) might be a bit more elegant. Especially if we're serious about wanting a BCMutableSequence.</div> <div><br></div><div><div>This pattern is common in objective-c when you have multiple classes that all implement the same interface and the actual class to use is discernible at the time of construction. It's a little harder to implement, but then consumers of the library don't need to worry about which class(es) they need for a given purpose.</div> <div><br></div></div><div>The pseudo-code to use them would then be something like: (Sorry about the naming here, I don't have the source in front of me as I write this)</div><div><br></div><div>BCSequenceFile *myFile = [BCCachedSequenceFile fileWithContentsofFile:@"Whatever.fs"];</div> <div>BCSequenceArray *myArray = [BCSequenceArray arrayWithSequenceFile:myFile];</div><div>BCSequence *first = [myArray sequenceAtIndex:0];</div><div>or </div><div>BCSequence *mySeq = [myArray sequenceWithId:@"GYS2"]</div> <div><br></div><div>The end user would be given an instance of BCCachedFastaFile in myFile, BCCachedSequenceArray in myArray and BCCachedSequence for the two sequence calls. This would all happen transparently behind the scenes and they wouldn't necessarily need to know what class they were using. Externally the memory vs file sequences look the same. Internally the memory BCSequence utilizes an NSData while the file-based one utilizes an NSFileHandle with an NSRange over the sequence (at lesat that's how FASTA would work, other format implementations would vary significantly).</div> <div><br></div><div>I'm pretty sure this can be done without introducing any breaking changes. Does anyone object to me attempting to implement these this way?</div><div><br></div><div>On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 4:01 PM, Scott Christley <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:schristley@mac.com">schristley@mac.com</a>></span> wrote:</div> <div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div class="Ih2E3d">Hey Craig,<br><br>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.<br> <br>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.<br><br><a href="http://genome.cse.ucsc.edu/" target="_blank">http://genome.cse.ucsc.edu/</a><br> <a href="http://www.ensembl.org/index.html" target="_blank">http://www.ensembl.org/index.html</a><br><br>There is also a project that I'm involved with, VectorBase, which also uses the Ensembl browser.<br><br><a href="http://www.vectorbase.org/index.php" target="_blank">http://www.vectorbase.org/index.php</a><br> <br>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.<br> <br>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.<br> <br>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.<br> <br>cheers<br>Scott<br></div><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>On Feb 24, 2009, at 2:31 PM, Craig Bateman wrote:</div><br><blockquote type="cite">I accidently dropped the list in my reply, so Scott was the only one that got it.<br> <br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Craig Bateman</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:craig@batemanspace.com" target="_blank">craig@batemanspace.com</a>></span><br> Date: Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 2:01 AM<br>Subject: Re: [Biococoa-dev] Introducing myself<br>To: Scott Christley <<a href="mailto:schristley@mac.com" target="_blank">schristley@mac.com</a>><br><br><br>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...<br> <br> 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.<br> <br> 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.<br> <br> 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.<br> <br> 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.<div><div></div><div><br> <br> <br> On Feb 22, 2009, at 11:16 PM, Scott Christley wrote:<br> <br> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left:1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;padding-left:1ex"> Hello Craig,<br> <br> 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.<br> <br> 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.<br> <br> 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.<br> <br> 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.<br> <br> cheers<br> Scott<br> <br> On Feb 21, 2009, at 12:43 PM, Craig Bateman wrote:<br> <br> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left:1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;padding-left:1ex"> 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.<br> <br> 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?<br> <br> Anyway, to whoever is still alive on this project, let me know how and where I can help and I'll be glad to.<br> <br> Thanks,<br> Craig Bateman<br> <br> _______________________________________________<br> Biococoa-dev mailing list<br> <a href="mailto:Biococoa-dev@bioinformatics.org" target="_blank">Biococoa-dev@bioinformatics.org</a><br> <a href="http://www.bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/biococoa-dev" target="_blank">http://www.bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/biococoa-dev</a><br> </blockquote> <br> <br> <br> </blockquote> <br> </div></div></div><br></blockquote></div><br></div></div></div></blockquote></div><br></div></blockquote></div><br></div></div></body></html>