s/Twitter/Mastodon/g

Yeah, it has been hard to miss it (see e.g. Should I join Mastodon? A scientists’ guide to Twitter’s rival). Twitter is experiencing some turbulence and Mastodon has become a very attractive, open source, community-driven, inclusive alternative. It’s been around since 2016 and there is some research literature about it already. I got my account in 2018, but did not start actively using it until earlier this year. 1 minute read

Is your research cited by a Nobel prize winner?

Forget the journal impact factor and the H-index. You want your research being used. A first approximation of that is getting cited, sure. So, with the Nobel Prize week over (congrats to all winners! the Neanderthaler prize actually helped my work in Maastricht this week), let’s figure out of you are cited by a Nobel Prize winner. Wikidata allows us to figure this out with a SPARQL query (created together with Adriano): 1 minute read

Wikidata now escapes SMILES and CXSMILES!

In the end it was a very simple change today (huge thanks to Nikki!), but Wikidata now escapes SMILES and CXSMILES (P10718) with the formatter URL (P1630)! less than 1 minute read

Biology, ACPs, lipids, cheminformatics, and Dagstuhl

Already 3 months ago I visited Dagstuhl for the second time. The weather was much better than in the January right before the start of the pandemic. The first I attended the Computational Metabolomics meeting, with the focus From Cheminformatics to Machine Learning, one of the things we concerned ourselves with was how to do computation with compound classes (see Section 3.6 and this online book). We know how to handle SMILES and we know how to the substructure searching with SMARTS, but what if you have compound classes or lipid classes? Biology is a greasy business. 1 minute read

new: "Providing Adverse Outcome Pathways from the AOP-Wiki in a Semantic Web Format to Increase Usability and Accessibility of the Content"

I am a bit behind with tweeting about new published papers, but let that not reflect that these papers are not very exciting. The first paper is by Marvin an almost-finished PhD candidate in our group and now working as postdoc on the VHP4Safety project. He has been working on linking adverse outcome pathways (AOPs) with molecular pathways, such as in WikiPathways. This work was mostly done as part of the EU projects OpenRiskNet and EUToxRisk , during which he disseminated his research in many directions (e.g. the second paper in this post). Talking about impact. 1 minute read

BridgeDb NWO grant update #2: building up momentum

Last month I reported on the start of the NWO Open Science grant and it is time for an update. First, our grant now has a grant number, 203.001.121. For a project that is about identifiers, having a project identifier is a big deal. 1 minute read

BridgeDb NWO grant update #1: first steps

Last year, Denise, Tina, Marvin, and I received an NWO Open Science grant (203.001.121) to improve the long running BridgeDb project, originally developed by Martijn van Iersel (see doi:10.1186/1471-2105-11-5). Helena joined our group as research software engineer and will work part-time on this grant. We started two weeks ago, so time for an update of results: 1 minute read