My wonderful soon-to-be-wife just had her PhD viva and we were struck by the similarity between PhDs and Frodo’s journey in the Lord of the Rings. Turns out this guy got there first, but I think our theory still brings something to the table. The main parallel is that there are, like, a million endings!!!…
The other day at PHE we were investigating use of MASH sketches to find closest isolates. If you don’t already know about MASH, it’s a MinHash algorithm implemented by Adam Phillippy’s group (@aphillippy). It is fast and pretty neat, but the resulting distance is directly related to the errors in the sequencing. On one hand,…
Kat Holt’s lab have a nice set of scripts that wrap around ete2 which makes it nice ‘n’ easy to annotate trees – plotTree! It works out the box! They have some great installation and usage instructions on the github, and some examples for the R half of the code, but the examples for the python bit are…
I’m leaving PHE today, and thought I would try and reflect on my time spent here, and one way of doing that is to put some numbers on things. None of the below should be taken as an official PHE statistic 🙂 Number of years – 8 Number of organisational names – 2 Number of…
Say you have an age-sex breakdown and you want to summarise it in the usual way (as below). how do you do this in excel? this is definitely a post from the annals of ‘so ridiculous i had to write it down’. So, you have to give one of your sexes minus values, and then…
I bought a kindle in January 2014, and I love it. One of the main things I love about it, is that whenever i finish a book, I can just go to amazon and buy whatever I feel like reading. I find this is vastly preferable to having to have a bunch of books on…
I’m at IMMEM 2016 and there have been some great talks. However, some of them have been hampered by delivery, so i thought i would write a quick post on some things i try to do (a lot stolen from matt might and jen gardy). I used to have a job selling windows (made of…
Path-o-gen is a handy tool from Andy Rambaut’s group ‘for investigating the temporal signal and ‘clocklikeness’ of molecular phylogenies’. It is a common pre-cursor to the more involved BEAST analysis, to see whether there is any clock-like signal (i.e. SNPs accumulating with time) in the phylogeny. I wanted to do this today to look at…
This is a guest post from Anthony Underwood. ——————– I’ve been exploring the use of IQ-TREE for rapid ML tree calculation. I’ve had reservations for a while when using RAxML since even with multi-threading it can take hours to run and have often instead submitted them to the CIPRES supercomputing facilities at phylo.org where the…
TL;DR I have run Torsten’s MLST script on the NCTC PacBio genomes, here are the results. I’m a massive fan of the NCTC3000 project, a collaboration between the National Collection of Type Cultures and the Wellcome Trust, to PacBio sequence 3000 bacterial type strains from the NCTC collection. One of the reasons I like the…
Bits and Bugs 