• 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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:
  • BioHackathon Europe 2021 #1: CiTO annotations in BioHackrXiv

    Serendipity. I did not plan this hack at the BioHackathon Europe 2021 but it happened anyway. Based on earlier work in the Journal of Cheminformatics, extending on the work by Krewinkel et al. I looked into the idea of using the Lua filter for BioHackrXiv, a preprint server for BioHackathons. Actually, I started by looking at the Citation Styling Language file used by the BioHackrXiv tools. But that was just wrong.
  • Scholarly journals should use "Archived on" instead of "Accessed on"

    Publishing habits changes very slowly, too slowly. The whole industry is incredibly inert, which can lead to severe frustration as it did for me. But sometimes small changes can do so much.
  • Downloading all currently released BridgeDb identifier mapping databases

    The BridgeDb project (doi:10.1186/1471-2105-11-5) (and ELIXIR recommended interoperability resource) has several aims, all around identifier mapping: