Biology subjects

Holmes, I. H.

Publications and source records attributed to Holmes, I. H..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2016

BioMake: a GNU Make-compatible utility for declarative workflow management

The Unix \"make\" program is widely used in bioinformatics pipelines, but suffers from problems that limit its application to large analysis datasets. These include reliance on file modification times to determine whether a target is stale, lack of support for parallel execution on clusters, and restricted flexibility to extend the underlying logic program. We present BioMake, a make-like utility that is compatible with most features of GNU Make and adds support for popular cluster-based job-queue engines, MD5 signatures as an alternative to timestamps, and logic programming extensions in Prolog. BioMake is available from https://github.com/evoldoers/biomake under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 US license. The only dependency is SWI-Prolog, available from http://www.swi-prolog.org/. Contact: Ian Holmes ihholmes+biomake@gmail.com or Chris Mungall cmungall+biomake@gmail.com.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2016

Historian: accurate reconstruction of ancestral sequences and evolutionary rates

Reconstruction of ancestral sequence histories, and estimation of parameters like indel rates, are improved by using explicit evolutionary models and summing over uncertain alignments. The previous best tool for this purpose (according to simulation benchmarks) was ProtPal, but this tool was too slow for practical use. Historian combines an efficient reimplementation of the ProtPal algorithm with performance-improving heuristics from other alignment tools. Simulation results on fidelity of rate estimation via ancestral reconstruction, along with evaluations on the structurally-informed alignment dataset BAliBase 3.0, recommend Historian over other alignment tools for evolutionary applications. Historian is available at https://github.com/ihh/indelhistorian under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 US license. Contact: Ian Holmes ihholmes+historian@gmail.com.

bioinformatics↗