Category: Scientific Communication

AlphaFold2 on Macintosh M1

Summary This post is a summary of installation of AlphaFold2 onto a Macintosh with an M1 style (arm64) computer chip (i.e. not an Intel/AMD Chip.) This post started with the blog post Installing Alphafold2 on Apple Silicon. The installation will require about 8Gb of space. Installing AlphaFold2 AlphaFold2 is a trained Machine Learning set of …

Augmented Reality of Molecules – episode 1

What is Augmented Reality? Augmented Reality (AR) is an exciting technology that overlays virtual elements on top of the real world, allowing for a unique and immersive user experience. The Apple AR platform only uses the web browser “Safari” and does not require any plug-in or specialized software, only that portable electronics (iPhone, iPad) have …

Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology – 2022 proceedings

Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology – in Madison The International Society for Computational Biology (ISMB) Conference held the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) in Madison in July 2022. Conference details are still available online, but more importantly a special “Bioinformatics” journal issue has been compiled from the proceedings of this conference: Most articles link to …

3D Molecular Structures Analysis with NCBI iCn3D

NCBI tutorial: iCn3D hands-on workshop “I see in 3D” (iCn3D) Structure Viewer is not only a web-based 3D viewer, but also a structure analysis tool interactively or in the batch mode […] – (Longer description.) This workshop is designed for life scientists with some (intermediate) expertise in structural biology. The topics of structure prediction, molecular …

PyMOL Stereo viewing

  PyMOL Stereo viewing PyMOL can display stereo in many ways. Unless special equipment is available, the method is to split the PyMOL 3D view area in two with the command stereo on (and stereo offto turn it off.) The alternative is to use the menu cascade: Display > Stereo. However, there are 2 ways …

Learn Markdown – Episode 6. Convert Word to Markdown with pandoc

Summary Pandoc is a document converter for multiple type of files. Converting example Format conversion is a chore that often takes a lot of time. I recently wanted to convert a long MSWord document into a version of Markdown that I could use to update a software documentation. Pandoc can convert many documents types into …

Python for the Life Sciences – A Gentle Introduction

Summary This book will be used to learn Python in workshop settings. For Biologists, Life Scientists There are many books, even free books, with the objective to teach Python or other programming languages. I previously wrote a list of free books on the post Free Data Science Books. This book “Python for the Life Sciences …

Do yourself a favor: learn Markdown – Episode 5. BibTeX interface for PubMed

Summary A web site to create BibTex entries for bibliography in R Markdown. R and Markdown This is a follow-up on 4 “Episodes” in previous posts titled “Do yourself a favor: learn Markdown…” To add bibliographical information it is necessary to write the information of a paper in the BibTex format. BibTeX-files may contain four …

Chateaubriand STEM Fellowship

Note: Updated November 30, 2022 Chateaubriand Fellowship The Chateaubriand Fellowship allows PhD students registered in an American university the opportunity to spend 4–9 months in France. The fellowship aims to initiate or reinforce collaborations or join projects between French and American research teams. US citizenship is not required (see eligibility (slow archived link) and guidelines.) …

Visual introduction to CryoEM

Cryo-Electron Microscopy Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a cryomicroscopy technique applied on samples cooled to cryogenic temperatures (i.e. very cold!.) For biological specimens, the structure is preserved by embedding in an environment of vitreous ice.  (See more on the Wikipedia article Cryogenic electron microscopy.) The following links are videos meant to present cryo-EM visually. Unfortunately, …