The ChEMBL-og

This was the first proper programming book that I studied, and it is an old one too, written before the web, web-services, and networking - good old fashioned UNIX programming computation. Few words, lots of concepts, and merits revisiting now and then - the prose in Kernighan's books is just excellent, perfect pace, and combines advice with examples of little code snippets. Probably the best thing about the book (for me) is the use of ratfor - a derivative of Fortran that looks a lot like C, and has some of the best elements of both languages. It is also incredibly quick to code in. I have just downloaded some updated versions of ratfor for my mac, so expect some pretty unusual looking Open Source protein analysis tools anyday soon! Anyway, although ratfor is used, for almost everyone, the code there will just be pseudocode for implementation and inspiration of code in a more fashionable language. If anything, using a non-current language forces thinking more deeply about the...

A brief link to a developing project under the ESRF Research Infrastructure Roadmap - EU-OPENSCREEN . The basic idea is to develop and establish an underpinning infrastructure in a pan-European setting to allow screening and chemical tool identification for new, therapeutically/commercially unvalidated protein targets. This is a fantastically important project at the current time, both scientifically and economically, so I hope you also are interested in it's progress.

We are going to present at an Open Source Drug Discovery Session at the National Meeting of the German Chemical Society, Held in Frankfurt am Main, August 30th to September 2nd 2009. Further details of the meeting are here

A brief alert to a Wellcome Trust course being held here on campus this July. And while we are on the subject of conferences, the RSC is organising a meeting on the 1st October 2009 on 'Chemical Tools and Challenges in Systems Biology' to be held in Stevenage in the U.K.. jpo is speaking at this meeting on the ChEMBL project. There is nothing on the RSC website yet, but it looks like it should be a good meeting.

You know what it's like - you have a deadline, stuff that's really important to do, you get your work area ready, and then you browse your bookcase for something interesting. Four hours later, it's time to do something else. Well that was yesterday, and I spent those hours re-reading this old classic. Fairly recently released in a reprinted, and cheaper form. In my opinion, this is one of the best books in sequence comparison, it is full of interesting ideas, has good coverage of related fields of computer science, and a coverage of the algorithms that are deep enough to allow you to go away and start messing around with code. %D 2000 %E David Sankoff & Joseph Kruskal %T Time Warps, String Edits, and Macromolecules: The Theory and Practice of Sequence Comparison %I Cambridge University Press %O ISBN 978-1575862170

I thought I would post a note on the EMBL-EBI's Industry Programme . This is a forum open to all life-science companies to network and understand the tools, resources and direction of the EMBL-EBIs activities, and also encourage discussion of pre-competitive and collaborative activities between life-science companies. Given the increasing demands for cost-reduction, data integration and knowledge representation within the sector this activity is becoming increasingly important. Details of how to join the can be found on the EMBL-EBI web-site (link above). An analogous group exists for smaller companies (SME/SMBs).