Bioconductor: open software development for computational biology and bioinformatics

The Bioconductor project is an initiative for the collaborative creation of extensible software for computational biology and bioinformatics. The goals of the project include: fostering collaborative development and widespread use of innovative software, reducing barriers to entry into interdisciplinary scientific research, and promoting the achievement of remote reproducibility of research results. We describe details of our aims and methods, identify current challenges, compare Bioconductor to other open bioinformatics projects, and provide working examples.

Metabolite profiling in biomarker discovery, enzyme substrate assignment, drug activity/specificity determination, and basic metabolic research requires new data preprocessing approaches to correlate specific metabolites to their biological origin. Here we introduce an LC/MS-based data analysis approach, XCMS, which incorporates novel nonlinear retention time alignment, matched filtration, peak detection, and peak matching. Without using internal standards, the method dynamically identifies hundreds of endogenous metabolites for use as standards, calculating a nonlinear retention time correction profile for each sample. Following retention time correction, the relative metabolite ion intensities are directly compared to identify changes in specific endogenous metabolites, such as potential biomarkers. The software is demonstrated using data sets from a previously reported enzyme knockout study and a large-scale study of plasma samples. XCMS is freely available under an open-source license at http://metlin.scripps.edu/download/.

Endogenous metabolites have gained increasing interest over the past 5 years largely for their implications in diagnostic and pharmaceutical biomarker discovery. METLIN (http://metlin.scripps.edu), a freely accessible web-based data repository, has been developed to assist in a broad array of metabolite research and to facilitate metabolite identification through mass analysis. METLINincludes an annotated list of known metabolite structural information that is easily cross-correlated with its catalogue of high-resolution Fourier transform mass spectrometry (FTMS) spectra, tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) spectra, and LC/MS data.

We have recently completed a full re-architecturing of the Rosetta molecular modeling program, generalizing and expanding its existing functionality. The new architecture enables the rapid prototyping of novel protocols by providing easy to use interfaces to powerful tools for molecular modeling. The source code of this rearchitecturing has been released as Rosetta3 and is freely available for academic use. At the time of its release, it contained 470,000 lines of code. Counting currently unpublished protocols at the time of this writing, the source includes 1,285,000 lines. Its rapid growth is a testament to its ease of use. This document describes the requirements for our new architecture, justifies the design decisions, sketches out central classes, and highlights a few of the common tasks that the new software can perform.

SummaryIncorporation of effective backbone sampling into protein simulation and design is an important step in increasing the accuracy of computational protein modeling. Recent analysis of high-resolution crystal structures has suggested a new model, termed backrub, to describe localized, hinge-like alternative backbone and side chain conformations observed in the crystal lattice. The model involves internal backbone rotations about axes between Cα atoms. Based on this observation, we have implemented a backrub-inspired sampling method in the Rosetta structure prediction and design program. We evaluate this model of backbone flexibility using three different tests. First, we show that Rosetta backrub simulations recapitulate the correlation between backbone and side-chain conformations in the high-resolution crystal structures upon which the model was based. As a second test of backrub sampling, we show that backbone flexibility improves the accuracy of predicting point-mutant side chain conformations over fixed backbone rotameric sampling alone. Finally, we show that backrub sampling of triosephosphate isomerase loop 6 can capture the ms/µs oscillation between the open and closed states observed in solution. Our results suggest that backrub sampling captures a sizable fraction of localized conformational changes that occur in natural proteins. Application of this simple model of backbone motions may significantly improve both protein design and atomistic simulations of localized protein flexibility.