Category Archives: Lab blog

AlphaFold of all Phage Lambda Proteins

DeepMind’s AlphaFold is winning at predicting tertiary structures from primary amino acid sequences. We thought it would be fun to investigate how it performed on phage Lambda.

We took the NCBI version of λ and extracted all the proteins, and then ran them through AlphaFold. It was able to make a prediction for all the proteins except for three proteins: NP_040594.1 (144 amino acids), NP_040597.1 (232 amino acids), and NP_040645.1 (158 amino acids).

Click to see a larger version

As you can see, many of the structures are just predicted to be long alpha helices with little order, but some of the structures are complex and closer representation to the predicted structures.

There are, of course, a heap of caveats to this analysis, including the fact that we did not (at this time) filter out any of the existing phage λ structures so one would hope that those are really good!

You can download all the best ranked structures for phage Lambda so you can view them in your favorite structure viewer

Fast correlations with turbocor

We often want to calculate Pearson correlation between different datasets, for example, we have used it to identify the hosts of different phages. Often, we want to calculate Pearson on really large matrices, and so our usual solution is to use crappy code and be patient!

However, recently Daniel Jones released turbocor, a fast, rust-based implementation, of pairwise Pearson correlations, and so we are intrigued to work with it. Here is a brief guide to making correlations using turbocor.

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minimap2 hints

Here are some tips and tricks for minimap2 that I keep forgetting!

–split-prefix

If you have a large (>4 GB) multisequence index file, there are two options.

The first is to increase the value of -I when you build the index (preferred) so that the whole index is kept in memory. Note: This must be done when you build the index, you can’t build the index and then change -I during runtime.

The second is to use --split-prefix with a string. For snakemake, there are two options:

  1. You can use "{sample}" as your prefix like so:
params:
    prfx = "{sample}"
...
shell:
    """
         minimap2 --split-prefix {params.prfx} ...
    """

2. You can use a random 6 character string like so:

import random, string

params:
        pfx = ''.join(random.choices(string.ascii_uppercase + string.digits, k=6)) 
...
shell:
    """
         minimap2 --split-prefix {params.prfx} ...
    """

The trick is here, things will probably break if your index file is small. If you see the errorr: [W::sam_hdr_create] Duplicated sequence it is probably because you have split a small index sequence, and the sequence IDs are being duplicated. Remove the --split-prefix option and you should be good.

Primer Trimming Challenge

In DNA sequencing, we add primers and adapters to the ends of sequences. These are short (typically <50bp) known sequences, that we use so we can identify different kinds of sequences. You can find out more about the adapters in this YouTube video.

This challenge is to write software to efficiently detect and remove the primers and adapters from a fastq format file.

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Global Distribution of Crassphage Map

How to make beautiful maps

Making maps is hard. Even though we’ve been making maps for hundreds of years, it is still hard. Making good looking maps is really hard. We published a map that is both beautiful and tells a story, and this is the story of how we made that map.

But a figure like this does not appear immediately, it takes work to get something to look this good, and needless to say it wasn’t me that made it look so great!

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