FND-Journal

Your Journal

 

Keywords:  How to keep a course- or lab journal

 

 

 

Abstract

Keeping a journal is an essential task in a laboratory. A significant part of your term grade will be given for your detailed Course Journal in which you document your learning as you are working thorugh the material. This unit introduces components and best practice for lab- and course journals and includes a wiki-source template to begin your own journal on the Student Wiki.

 

This unit ...

Prerequisites

You need the following preparation before beginning this unit. If you are not familiar with this material from courses you took previously, you need to prepare yourself from other information sources:

• Inquiry: The scientific method; evidence based reasoning; how to design, execute and document an experiment; Conjecture, hypothesis and theory.
• Writing: Basic essay and report writing skills. How to format your submitted materials, how to quote, cite and avoid plagiarism.

You need to complete the following units before beginning this one:

• FND-Wiki_editing

 

Objectives

• Introducing components and best practice of lab- and course journals
• Presenting sample wiki-text for Journal entries

 

Outcomes

Upon concluding this unit you should be able to ...

• Begin a structured course journal on the Student Wiki using proper wiki text;
• Write your own journal entries, including media images and code as required;
• Cross-reference journal entries with links;
• Link to external sources and deliverables on internal pages as appropriate;
• Start a habit of estimating the time you need for tasks, to grow and improve your time-management skills.

 

Deliverables

• Your Journal: Your entire journal will be evaluated at the end of the course. Refer to the marking rubrics for details.
• Insights: If you find something particularly noteworthy about this unit, make a note in your insights! page.

 

Evaluation

Evaluation: NA

This unit is not evaluated for course marks.

 

Contents

 

Computational research embraces the same best-practice principles as any wet-lab experiment. We ensure our work is reproducible, we take great care that our conclusions are supported by data, and we keep notes to document our objectives, activities and how we arrived at our results. Those notes are more than just a handy collection of information: they need to become a robust, testable record of activities.

Paper notes are not very useful for bioinformatics work because they can't be cross-referenced easily with computer files. Ideally, bioinformatics journals will document results, and link to data files, code repositories, Webpages and other resources. Thus a technical solution needs to support incorporating or linking to results, data, code, workflow scripts, documentation, and much more. In this course, we use the open source Media Wiki software to support journal keeping.

To practice keeping a journal, create a record of activities for future reference, and provide a basis for evaluation of your progress at the end of the course, you will keep a course journal. This journal will be evaluated for credit at the end of the course. Keeping a journal will help you work with other learning units effectively, because the units are integrated over the entire course, and later units often make use of earlier results which you should have easily accessible. But journal-keeping is also excellent practice for "real" research.

Remember: you are writing a lab notebook—not a formal lab report: a point-form record of your actual activities. Write such documentation as notes to your (future) self. Write your notes immediately, in parallel with your actual activities, don't draft them elsewhere and expect to enter and revise them later. That is bound to create an unmanageable burden - and it will also leave the impression that your notes did not actually accompany your work. It is best to always have an editing page open, while you work. Record everything that's necessary, but be light and agile about your writing.

Obviously, the first step is to create a journal page in the User space of the Student Wiki - you have already done this in the Wiki editing unit.

 

Header

• Write a header and give it a unique number.

This is useful so you can refer to the header number in later text. Obviously, you should "hard-code" the number and not use the Wiki's automatic section numbering scheme, since the numbers should be stable over time, not change when you add or delete a section. It is useful to add any new contents at the top of the page. Keeping the page in reverse chronological order, prevents you having to scroll to the bottom of the page every time you add new material. Note though, that the sections do not actually have to be in strict chronological order, like we would have them in a paper notebook. Typically you would number in a decimal system - like 1, 1.1, 1.2, 2, 3 etc. - so you can easily accomodate additions.

It may be advantageous to give different subprojects their own numbering space - by adding a prefix to the section number. This depends on how related the projects are. Everything you keep on the same page is easy to find with your browser's search function. But if search results come from different projects, that may be inconvenient. To decide what to put on the same page and what should go in different subpages, imagine what material you would search for and what search terms you might use.

Incidentally: the material in such a notebook is "permanent", since earlier versions of pages are always available via the history function. The Wiki never forgets. As well, they are automatically time-stamped. And that's actually a step beyond paper labnotes.

 

Objective

• State the objective.

In one brief sentence, restate what your activity is supposed to achieve.

• Estimate duration

The learning units in this course require you to estimate beforehand how long you will take, and to record how much time you actually took. Record your initial estimate (work-hours), how many hours you took, and how much time elapsed between start and end of your task. Make this a habit in your future coursework as well as in your future labwork. You will quickly note that you will become much better at time-management. The sample journal template that is included below contains wikitext to format a time estimate.

 

What to document

• Document the procedure.

Note what you have done, as concisely as possible but with sufficient detail. "What is sufficient detail?" The answer is easy: detailed enough so that someone can reproduce what you have done. In practice that "someone" will often be you, yourself, in the future. I hope that you won't be constantly cursing your past-self because of omissions!

• Document your results.

You can distinguish different types of results -

• • Static data does not change over time and it may be sufficient to note a reference to the result. For example, there is no need to copy a GenBank record into your documentation, it is sufficient to note the accession number, the refSeq ID, or the UniProt ID, or even better, to link to the relevant page on the external database server.
  • Variable data can change over time. For example the results of a BLAST search depend on the sequences in the database. A list of similar structures may change as new structures get solved and deposited in the PDB database. In principle you want to record such data, to be able to reproduce at a later time what your conclusions were based on. But be selective in what you record. For example you should not paste the entire set of results of a BLAST search into your document, but only those matches that were important for your conclusions. Indiscriminate pasting of irrelevant information will make your notes unusable. Incidentally, the technology to expand and collapse paragraphs that we demonstrated in the Wiki editing unit can be put to excellent use to record data but keep it out of sight when not needed.
  • Analysis results

The results of sequence analyses, alignments etc. in general get recorded in your documentation. Again: be selective. Record what is important.

 

Conclusions

• Note your conclusions.

An analysis is not complete unless you conclude something from the results.

• Are two sequences likely homologues, or not? Just pasting the BLAST output is not enough. It's your call - record it.
• Does your protein contain a signal-sequence or does it not? SignalP will give you a probability, but you must make the final call.
• Is a binding site conserved, or not? The programs can only point out sections of similarity or dissimilarity. You are the one who interprets these numbers in their biological context.

The analysis provides the data. In your conclusion you provide the interpretation of what the data means in the context of your objective. Were you expecting a signal-sequence but there isn't one? What could that mean? Sometimes your task will explicitly include to elaborate on an analysis and conclusion. But this does not mean that when analysis is not explicitly mentioned, you can skip the interpretation. In general you can never expect full marks if analysis and conclusions are missing.

• Outlook for the next tasks

What's the next step? Note it here. Also include a link to the logically next entry - this way you can quickly hop through consecutive entries for a theme.

 

Cross references

• Add cross-references.

Cross-references to other information are supremely valuable as your documentation grows. It's easy to see how to format a link to a section of your Wiki-page: just look at the link under the Table of Contents at the top. But you can also place "anchors" for linking anywhere on an HTML page: just use the following syntax. <span id="{some-label}"><\span> for the anchor, and append #{some-label} to the page URL.

 

Media

 

Images

• Use discretion when uploading images

Don't upload irrelevant images, don't upload copyrighted images, keep the size reasonable.

• Prepare your images well

Don't upload uncompressed screen dumps. Save images in a compressed file format on your own computer. Then use the Image Upload link in the left-hand menu to upload images. The Wiki will only accept .jpeg, .png, .gif, or .svg images.

• Use the correct image types.

In principle, images can be stored uncompressed as .tiff or .bmp, or compressed as .gif or .jpg or .png. .gif is useful for images with large, monochrome areas and sharp, high-contrast edges because the LZW compression algorithm it uses works especially well on such data; .jpg (or .jpeg) is preferred for images with shades and halftones such as the structure views you should prepare for several assignments, JPEG has excellent application support and is the most versatile general purpose image file format currently in use; .tiff (or .tif) is preferred to archive master copies of images in a lossless fashion, use LZW compression for TIFF files if your system/application supports it; The .png format is an open source alternative for lossless, compressed images.

.bmp is not preferred for really anything, it is bloated in its (default) uncompressed form and primarily used only because it is simple to code and ubiquitous on Windows computers. Accordingly we don't support it here.

Image dimensions and resolution

Stereo images should have equivalent points displayed approximately 6cm apart. It depends on your monitor how many pixels this corresponds to. The dimensions of an image are stated in pixels (width x height). My notebook screen has a native display resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels/23.5 x 21 cm. Therefore a 6cm separation on my notebook corresponds to approximately 260 pixels. However on my desktop monitor, 260 pixels is 6.7 cm across. And on a high-resolution iPad display, at 227 ppi (pixels per inch), 260 pixels are just 2.9 cm across. If your assigment or learning unit ask you to prepare stero images: adjust your images so they are approximately at the right separation and are approximately 500 to 600 pixels wide. Also, scale your molecules so they fill the available window and - if you have depth cueing enabled - move them close to the front clipping plane so the molecule is not just a dim blob, lost in murky shadows.

Considerations for print (manuscripts etc.) are slightly different: for print output you can specify the output resolution in dpi (dots per inch). A typical print resolution is about 300 dpi: 6 cm separation at 300dpi is about 700 pixels. Print images should therefore be about three times as large in width and height as screen images.

Preparation of stereo views

When assignments or leartning units ask you to create images of molecules, always create stereo views.

Keep your images uncluttered and expressive

Scale the molecular model to fill the available space of your image well. Orient views so they illustrate a point you are trying to make. Emphasize residues that you are writing about with a contrasting colouring scheme. Add labels, where residue identities are not otherwise obvious. Turn off side-chains for residues that are not important. The more you practice these small details, the more efficient you will become in the use of your tools.

 

Code

Always markup code using the GeSHi extension. For R-code this looks like:

>source lang="R"<
Code ...
>/source<

 

Documents

...

 

The section below contains Wiki-markup code that you can copy and paste for your course journal.

 

Wikitext Template

Expand for template code, copy the whole block of text, paste it into your "Journal" page on the Student Wiki and study it well. Then comment out code that should not appear on your Journal page, but keep it in the Wiki source so you can copy and paste for your own Journal entries.

<!-- HTML comments will not be rendered by the wiki. -->

<div class="b1">
Sample Journal
</div>

<!-- To position the table of contents at a particular position, include -->
<!-- the __TOC__ "magic text" -->

{{Vspace}}

__TOC__

{{Vspace}}

<!-- BEGIN template for one entry -->
== <my activity> ==

;Objective
: text ...

<div class="time-estimate">
Time estimated: XXX h; taken XXX h; date started: 2017-MM-DD; date completed: 2017-MM-DD
</div>

===Progress===

;Activity 1
: Notes ...

;Activity 2
: Notes ...

=== Conclusion and outlook===

Describe ...

{{Vspace}}

<!-- END of template for one entry -->


<!-- BEGIN sample entry -->

== (Example Journal Entry) Explore Cytoscape ==

;Objective
: Write R code to generate a random network. Explore it with Cytoscape.

<div class="time-estimate">
Time estimated: 2 h; taken 4 h; date started: 2017-09-16; date completed: 2017-09-18
</div>

===Progress===

;R code for a random network.
: Cytoscape can read networks in [http://wiki.cytoscape.org/Cytoscape_User_Manual/Network_Formats#SIF_format SIF format]. Wrote the following code to generate N random nodes with random interactions and write them to file.

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="width:800px">
My R code below ...
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

<source lang="R">
N <- 15  # number of nodes
nMin <- 1 # minimum number of edges
nMax <- 5 # maximum number of edges
OUT <- "myRandomSIF.txt"

set.seed(161803)

# Create N random strings from three uppercase characters
# First make more than we need, because some might not be unique ...
nodes <- character(2*N)
for (i in 1:(2*N)) {
  nodes[i] <- paste0(sample(LETTERS, 1),
                     sample(LETTERS, 1),
                     sample(LETTERS, 1))
}

nodes <- unique(nodes) # throw away duplicates ...
nodes <- nodes[1:N]    # ... and keep only N

# Create SIF output
mySIF <- character()
for (myA in nodes) {  # for each node
  for (i in 1:sample(nMin:nMax, 1)) { # for a random number of interactors ...
    myB <- sample(nodes, 1)           # ... randomly choose interactor ...
                                      # ... create record and apend to mySIF
    mySIF <- c(mySIF, sprintf("%s\tpp\t%s", myA, myB)) # myA, "pp", myB
                                                       # separated by tabs
  }
}

# write mySIF to file
writeLines(mySIF, OUT)
</source>

</div>
  </div>

;Install Cytoscape
: Straightforward installation of <b>Cytoscape 3.5.1</b> from http://www.cytoscape.org

;Visualize and explore options
*:Worked through an introductory tutorial from http://opentutorials.cgl.ucsf.edu/index.php/Tutorial:Introduction_to_Cytoscape_3.1-part2 Noteworthy: nodes can be coloured by attribute values.
*:Loaded my own SIF file with the File → Import → Network → File option. Explored various layout options and visualization styles. Manually added nodes and edges with the options one gets when ctrl-clicking on the canvas.

{{Vspace}}

=== Conclusion and outlook===

* Creating layouts, applying styles, adding nodes and edges with Cytoscape seems straightforward and creates evocative images.
* Analyzing and interpreting the network needs more thought. Need to explore ideas and tools for network analysis next - e.g. clustering tools, enrichment tools, motif discovery ...
* Next: write some code to create attribute values for nodes, import the values, and have Cytoscape style the nodes accordingly.

{{Vspace}}

----

<!-- Footnotes -->
==Notes and References==
<references />

{{Vspace}}

<!-- Category and Footer -->
[[Category:BCH441-2017_Journal]]

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Further reading, links and resources

 

Notes

 

Self-evaluation

 

 

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If in doubt, ask! If anything about this learning unit is not clear to you, do not proceed blindly but ask for clarification. Post your question on the course mailing list: others are likely to have similar problems. Or send an email to your instructor.

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About ...
 
Author:

Boris Steipe <boris.steipe@utoronto.ca>

Created:

2017-08-05

Modified:

2017-08-05

Version:

1.0

Version history:

• 1.0 First live version
• 0.1 First stub

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