Posts in Tech
BIOVIA Pipeline Pilot in Docker – Good or Bad Idea? Discngine’s journey of containerizing Pipeline Pilot in Docker

In this article, we take a look back and explain how containerizing BIOVIA Pipeline Pilot in Docker allowed us to transform our deployment strategy and develop our new Discngine Cloud Infrastructure.

We are sharing the story of our journey through containerization, from building our first images to performing non-regression tests and release into production.

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How to prettify Oracle Cloud Infrastructure notifications with Microsoft Power Automate?

Oracle Notification Subscription is a powerful cloud-native tool to export your Oracle Topics outside the OCI console. But receiving a notification in the raw JSON format is not really User Friendly!

This post shows how we went from Slack Oracle Notification Subscriptions with a raw JSON sent in a Slack channel to a well-formatted slack message in a few clicks, using Microsoft Power Automate.

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Five major obstacles to Cloud shift for life science R&D - and how to overcome them...

Over the last two years, we observed a significant mindset change in life science research organizations towards the cloud technologies landscape. Less fear and skepticism, a better understanding of the capabilities, and rising expectations. Nevertheless, some obstacles specific to our business remain.
In this article, we explore five of the most common obstacles to Cloud shift for life science R&D and how to overcome them.

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Discngine & UserStudio: Uplifting User Experience in life science research applications

Recently, our collaborative platform, 3decision, just saw itself complemented with two new features (subpocket search & interaction search) and a radically different User Experience (UX). This new UX, with an updated User Interface (UI), is the result of months of collaborative work between UserStudio and the 3decision team.
In order to tell the story of this project, we gathered people from both companies to answer a few questions.

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SARS-Cov-2 - part 3 - nsp1: A hopefully more detailed analysis of the cellular saboteur

My German cartesian mind (here we go with stereotypes) asks me to start with the first protein expressed by the viral genome of SARS-Cov-2, nsp1. That is, by far, not the low hanging fruit. But it is interesting to learn more about the roles of the different constituents of the virus. Nsp1 actually has also a few very interesting roles to facilitate the viral lifecycle in its host environment.

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TechGuest UserComment
SARS-CoV-2 - part 2 - From the viral genome to protein structures

The bread and butter of every structure based drug design or drug ID effort is the need for 3D structural information of a target of interest related to the phenotypic outcome we want to alter. In the case of SARS-Cov-2 several experimental structures are already available in the RCSB PDB. Other a large scale fragment screens from the Diamond Light Source are slowly becoming available (available in the 3decision protease project for now) on public resources likes the RCSB PDB. Popular homology modelling services also already started to provide several high quality models for some of the yet not resolved structures of the viral proteome.

But let’s first have a look what the viral genome actually contains and what are currently pursued efforts.

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TechGuest UserComment
SARS-CoV-2 - part 1 - Thriving for a systematic target and hit ID effort

Gabriella outlined in previous posts (part I & part II) a few things about SARS-Cov-2. Back at the time the crisis was still far away from our daily lives but things have changed dramatically during the last weeks. After our initial communication to make 3decision.discngine.cloud freely available for all Covid-19 related collaboration projects we were contacted independently by several volunteers from academic and industrial groups to collaborate on a global effort. At the mean time a lot of novel initiatives have seen the day and everybody is publishing blog posts (like I am right now), linkedIn articles, chemarxiv or bioarxiv preprints etc. It’s a little bit a scientific wild-west happening right now on a global scale.

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Using Adobe XD for Scientific Web app development - do your mockups

This time around you won’t see any source code. Sorry about that, next time maybe.

Here I’ll talk more about sometimes overlooked aspects when developing applications for R&D in life sciences. So I guess this post might be useful to our competitors or people developing applications within large corporations in the life science & pharma industry … anyway ;)

I’ll take the example of our current 3decision developments. You might have heard or read about 3decision already before. If not, check it out - 3decision .. it’s super cool!

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OpenForcefield 0.4.0 parametrization tests on XChem Data

I love MOE, it’s a great piece of software, but unfortunately it’s not free and now that I’m nor in academia, nor in a pharma company I find myself unable to further develop an approach I implemented in the past which is kind of frustrating to put it politely. The same goes for Amber.
So I started to look for alternatives, also under a gentle demand from Anthony (poking me regularly) who wanted to apply the whole approach in his fragment screening pipeline. That’s in the scope of the crazy impressive XChem project. If you haven’t heard / read about that check it out - it gives you a bit of an insight on what will be possible very near future in xray crystallography!

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TechGuest UserComment
Tethered minimization of small molecules with RDKit

I think that’s my first RDKit post! So reason to celebrate!

Here' I’ll focus on a very nice feature available in Open Source Software and very useful in daily structure based but even ligand based drug design tasks.

The problem

How can I dock small molecules into a receptor and avoid as much as possible the “what is the right pose” problem?

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