In this paper, Alice Brankin calculates how different mutations in the DNA gyrase affect the binding of an antibiotic, moxifloxacin, and thereby potentially whether those mutations confer resistance or not. She calculates the relative binding free energy using thermodynamic integration, a method that is derived from classical statistical mechanics. To accompany these results, Philip Fowler, […]
Category: computing
ReadItAndKeep is a new human-read decontamination algorithm that works by mapping the reads in a FASTQ file to the reference SARS-CoV-2 genome. This works because SARS-CoV-2 genetic variation is not so high as to lead to reads being incorrectly discarded and means the algorithm, which relies on minimap2, is both fast and has a low […]
You can listen to Philip Fowler talk about the Global Pathogen Analysis System (GPAS) as part of the ORACLE Road Show by clicking here. We hope in the long term to translate into GPAS the predictive models we are creating for tuberculosis.

In this preprint, which Alice has been working on for several years, we show how alchemical free energy methods can predict whether an amino acid mutation confers resistance to an antitubercular, but only in cases where the change in binding free energy is large. This is mainly because the confidence limits on the change in […]

Through the CompBioMed2 EU Centre of Excellence project I have funding to appoint a postdoctoral researcher to develop machine-learning models to predict whether an infection is susceptible to an antibiotic. The need for predictive methods, such as these, will grow in the coming years as more of clinical microbiology transitions to using genetics to infer […]

I’ve been working on this for the last few months and very happy that we can now share our plans. Through a very generous donation by ORACLE, a group of researchers led by ModMedMicro at Oxford, are developing a cloud-based clinical microbiology genetics processing service, called the Global Pathogen Analysis System (GPAS). GPAS is still […]