WormBase-Caltech Weekly Calls April 2021

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April 1, 2021

Antibodies

  • Alignment of the antibody class to Alliance:
    • Propose to move possible_pseudonym (192) and Other_animal (37) to remarks. Those tags are not currently used for curation.
      • Other animal is sometimes used for older annotations, e.g. authors say that the antibodies were raised both in rats and rabbits. Standard practice would create 2 records, one for the rat antibody and one for the rabbit.
      • Possible pseudonym was used when a curator was not able to unambiguously assign a previous antibody to a record. (we have a Other name -synonym- tag to capture unambiguous ones). When moving to remarks we can keep a controlled vocabulary for easy future parsing, e.g. “possible_pseudonym:”
    • Antigen field: currently separated into Protein, peptide, and other_antigen (e.g.: homogenate of early C.elegans embryos, sperm). Propose to use just one antigen field to capture antigen info.

All changes proposed above were approved by the group

textpress-dev clean up

  • Michael has asked curators to assess what they have on textpresso-dev as it will not be around forever :-(
  • is it okay to transfer data and files we want to keep to tazendra? and then to our own individual machines?
  • Direct access may be possible via Caltech VPN
  • Do we want to move content to AWS? May be complicated; it is still easy and cheap to maintain local file systems/machines

Braun servers

  • 3 servers stored in Braun server room; is there a new contact person for accessing these servers?
  • Mike Miranda replacement just getting settled; Paul will find out who is managing the server room and let Raymond know

Citace upload

  • Next Friday, April 9th, by end of the day
  • Wen will contact Paul Davis for the frozen WS280 models file


April 8, 2021

Braun server outage

  • Raymond fixed; now Spica, wobr and wobr2 are back up

Textpresso API

  • Was down yesterday affecting WormiCloud; Michael has fixed
  • Valerio will learn how to manage the API for the future

Grant opportunities

  • Possibilities to apply for supplements
  • May 15th deadline
  • Druggable genome project
  • Visualization, tools, etc.
  • Automated person descriptions?
  • Automated descriptions for proteins, ion channels, druggable targets, etc.?

New WS280 ONTOLOGY FTP directory

Odd characters in Postgres

  • Daniela and Juancarlos discovered some errors with respect to special characters pasted into the OA
  • Daniela would like to automatically pull in micropublication text (e.g. figure captions) into Postgres
  • We would need an automated way to convert special characters, like degree symbols ° into html unicode \&deg\;
  • Juancarlos and Valerio will look into possibly switching from a Perl module to a Python module to handle special characters


April 15, 2021

Special characters in Postgres/OA

  • Juancarlos working on/proposing a plan to store UTF-8 characters in Postgres and the OA which would then get converted, at dumping, to HTML entities (e.g. α) for the ACE files
  • There is still a bit of cleanup needed to fix or remove special characters (not necessarily UTF-8) that apparently got munged upon copy/pasting into the OA in the past
  • Note: copy/paste from a PDF often works fine, but sometimes does not work as expected so manual intervention would be needed (e.g. entering Greek characters by hand in UTF-8 format)
  • Would copy/pasting from HTML be better than PDF?
  • For Person curation it would be good to be able to faithfully store and display appropriate foreign characters (e.g. Chinese characters, Danish characters, etc.)
  • Mangolassi script called "get_summary_characters.pl" located here: /home/postgres/work/pgpopulation/grg_generegulation/20200618_summary_characters
    • Juancarlos will modify script to take a data type code as an argument on the command line and return all Postgres tables (and their respective PGIDs) that have special characters, e.g.
      • $ ./get_summary_characters.pl exp
      • $ ./get_summary_characters.pl int
      • $ ./get_summary_characters.pl grg
    • or could pass just the datatype + field (postgres table). e.g.
      • $ ./get_summary_characters.pl pic_description
    • Juancarlos will email everyone once it's ready. It's ready, email sent. Script is at /home/postgres/work/pgpopulation/oa_general/20210411_unicode_html/get_summary_characters.pl Symlink this to your directory and run it from there, it will create files in the directory you are at when running it.
  • Action items:
    • Juancarlos will update the "get_summary_characters.pl" script as described above
    • Curators should use the "get_summary_characters.pl" to look for (potentially) bad characters in their OAs/Postgres tables
    • Need to perform bulk (automated) replacement of existing HTML entities into corresponding UTF-8 characters
    • Curators will need to work with Juancarlos for each OA to modify the dumper
    • Juancarlos will write (or append to existing) Postgres/OA dumping scripts to:
      • 1) Convert UTF-8 characters to HTML entities in ACE files
      • 2) Convert special quote and hyphen characters into simple versions that don't need special handling

CeNGEN pictures

  • Model change went in to accommodate images from the CeNGEN project
  • Want gene page images for CeNGEN data; have the specifications for such images been worked out? Maybe not yet
  • Raymond and Daniela will work with data producers to acquire images when ready

Supplement opportunities

  • Money available for software development to "harden" existing software
  • Might be possible to make Eduardo's single cell analysis tools more sustainable
  • Could make WormiCloud adapted to Alliance?
  • Put Noctua on more stable production footing? (GO cannot apply as they are in final year of existing grant)

Student project for Textpresso

  • Create tool to allow user to submit text and return a list of similar papers
  • Use cases:
    • curator wants an alert to find papers similar to what they've curated
    • look for potential reviewers of a paper based on similar text content


April 22, 2021

LinkML hackathon

  • Need to consider who works on what and how to coordinate
  • Need to practice good Git practice
    • Merge main branch into local branch before merging back into main branch to make sure everything works
  • How will we best handle AceDB hash structures? likely use something like Mark QT demonstrated
    • Do we have any/many hash-within-hash structures? #Molecular_change is used as a hash and tags within that model all reference the #Evidence hash
  • GO annotation extensions offer an interesting challenge

IWM workshop

  • Need to submit a workshop schedule (who speaks about what and when) by next Thursday April 29th
  • An initial idea was to promote data in ACEDB that may be underutilized or many users may be unaware of
    • An example might be transcription factor data: the ?Transcription_factor class and the modENCODE TF data
    • Single cell data and tools? CeNGEN, Eduardo's single cell tools
    • RNA-Seq FPKM values for genes and related data; Wen will write script to pull out FPKM values from SRA data and send to Magdalena
  • In addition to WB data types, we will cover Alliance, AFP, and community curation
  • Google doc for workshop here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H9ARhBRMKBNuOhjyxVQ_1o6cysvpppI7uA-TJrO_UZ4/edit?usp=sharing

WB Progress Report


April 29, 2021

IWM Workshop Schedule

  • Schedule format due today (April 29th)
  • Tentative schedule here
  • Format proposal is 4, 15-minute talks followed by 30 minutes of open discussion / Q&A
  • Still need someone to speak (~15 minutes) about the Alliance

WB Progress Report

OpenBiosystems RNAi clone IDs

  • User looking to map Open Biosystems RNAi clone names to WB clone names
  • We may need to get a mapping file from Open Biosystems

FPKM data

  • Wen has produced a csv file of FPKM values; can generate as part of the SPELL pipeline
  • May be better to generate at Hinxton

OA Dumpers

  • Daniela and Juancarlos have been working on the Picture OA and Expr OA dumpers
  • Inconsistencies have accumulated for all OA dumpers as each has been made separately
  • Juancarlos is working on a generalized, modular way to handle dumping
  • Should we handle historical genes in the same way across OAs?
    • Sure, but we need the "Historical_gene" tag in the respective ACEDB model
    • Decision: we will continue to only dump historical genes for specific OAs, with a plan to maybe make consistent across OAs in the future
  • Could we retroactively deal with paper-gene connections? We could possibly look in Postgres history tables to see which genes had been replaced previously (by Kimberly)

Gene name ambiguities

  • Jae noticed that some gene names associated with multiple WBGene IDs (e.g. one public name is the same as another gene's other name) have the same references attached
  • May require updating the paper-gene connections for some of these
  • One example is cep-1 gene. It associates with 3 diff WBgeneID and sharing papers in the reference widget.

NIH Supplement for AI readiness

  • Could we set up curation for neural circuits using a knowledge graph (e.g. GO-CAM)?
    • Maybe we could convert the anatomy function model to LinkML -> OWL statements?
    • Maybe setup a graphical curation interface?
  • Transcriptional regulation
    • Would be good to establish a common model (for the Alliance?)
    • CeNGEN project produced lots of predictions of TF binding sites based on single-cell expression data; Eduardo: these models should be able to be regenerated each time new data sets are published, but this requires greater integration in a central, sustainable resource
  • Paul S can send a link for the supplement

Variant First Pass Pipeline

  • Valerio: Are there any existing pipelines to make allele-paper and/or strain-paper associations?
  • Not sure, should ask Karen
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