Recently, a Shiny-based research app that I run, called StrainHub.io, went down. It was previously hosted on a free service, but it was time for me to bite the bullet and host it myself on a more performant compute environment in Microsoft Azure. I realized that while it wasn’t that…

Microsoft Dev Box is an Azure-based is a managed service that allows developers to create on-demand workstations in the cloud. They’re designed to be “ready-to-code”, high performance, and secure for your projects. …

Just as things were seeming to return to normal from the COVID-19 pandemic, reports of monkeypox started being shared around the globe. Many people were vaccinated against smallpox (the variola virus) in the 1950s-70s. So, how does monkeypox differ and why might we care about these new infections? Cowpox, monkeypox…

Deploying Databricks in Azure is easy. Deploying Databricks in a super locked-down, ‘make your security group happy’ kind of way…not as easy. In some enterprise cloud architectures, it’s a common practice to deploy many cloud services behind private endpoints and ensure that your data isn’t traveling across the public web…

You may have heard that there are a couple of new Omicron subvariants that are causing alarm: BA.2.75 and BA.5. Is this alarm just something for the media blogs to write about or do they pose some real threat? …

Your feed may have recently been flooded with cool, AI-generated images rendered from tools like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 or other models. The concept of an AI system creating new information (rather than just interpreting it) is called “hallucination”. So, does this mean that we can cause other models like, say…

A deep-dive into building scalable architectures in Azure for bioinformatics workloads. — The following is an blog-friendly extract from my upcoming book, Genomics in the Azure Cloud. This post summarizes the overall purpose of the book, which provides design considerations for a genomics-centric architecture that harnesses the cloud’s power for organizing and scaling bioinformatics. Genomics has the power to unlock biological insights…

You may have gotten word of a new SARS-CoV-2 “subvariant” to Omicron. In fact, there are a currently two, called BA.1 and BA.2. (Yes, the terminology and nomenclature are really confusing…) I have taken a quick look at the predicted structures for the receptor-binding domains (RBDs) of each subvariant. …

Back in December, I published a couple posts here (post 1 and post 2) about using AlphaFold2 and RoseTTAFold to predict the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant. The motivation for this was due to fact that the actual structure of the RBD wasn’t yet available. (It…