Saturday 8 October 2022

Star imports trick

Star-imports (from typing import *) in Python are a handy, but dangerous. They are meant for quick coding, i.e. like on a jupyterlab notebook. However they are bad as they can mask other variables and cause issues down the line. They are ubiquitous online as are guides explaining why they are bad, here I just want to share a handy snippet to iron out star-imports.

Saturday 1 October 2022

Move aside coIP Westerns, ColabFold has got this!

Recently AlphaFold2 released a new batch of models, this time covering all of the Trembl sequences in Uniprot, resulting in a huge number, which got hashtag-academic-twitter and some news editors very excited for the stamp-collecting feat. Personally, I find it annoying, not because it's pointless, but as of writing this, it has made any search for a target by name swamped by irrelevant sequences.
However, AlphaFold is great for other feats.
I have blogged about it a few times (e.g. link), which gives away my positive view of it! It can predict oligomers, with a lot more precision and confidence than docking. It does not always work either technically or meet the hypothesis. I did a long series of experiments with a hypothesis in mind which wasn't valid in the end (here), but revealed novel science and took a few minutes to set up and a few hours to run, which would have taken years if done by Western blot of a co-immunoprecipitation or cross-linking mass-spec.