RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) is a powerful technique to study the transcriptome of an organism at a given moment. As its name suggests, RNA-Seq is sequencing the RNA molecules from the sample. But how are the samples prepared? Here I will present a summary of this process:
Disclaimer: This post is not a guide or protocol to perform RNA extraction for RNA-Seq. The objective giving an overview of the process, highlighting the most important steps.
Continue readingWhile my own research focuses mainly on what happens in an antibody before it binds its antigen, I recently came across a paper by Akbar et al [1] that examines antibody-antigen interactions using an elegant approach to identify a set of structural motifs that antibodies use to interact with their epitopes. Since I am interested in emergent properties that arise when a sequence is mapped onto an antibody structure, this paper was very exciting. I will also shamelessly admit that I’m a sucker for a pretty figure and this paper has many! Regardless, on to the findings!
Recent work in Natural Language Processing (NLP) indicates that the bigger your model is, the better performance you will get. In a paper by Kaplan, Jared, et al., they show that loss scales as a power-law with model size, dataset size, and the amount of compute used for training.
