Richard Crooks's Website
Biology Index
As a biologist by training, I am interested in biology, which is the science of living organisms. Biologists sit on a spectrum. At one side are the ecologists, they look at ecosystems and the interactions between life forms and how the environment might affect them, they're the biologists who you'll see involved in climate science along with meteorologists, geologists and similar. On the other end of the scale there are the biochemists and molecular biologists who are interested in the complex machinery that makes living organisms and how these enable life to exist. They're the scientists who are involved in drug development, DNA profiling and other similar areas and will have a lot of interactions with chemists, physicists.
I'm very firmly at the biochemistry side of this spectrum, although nowadays I'm more into bioinformatics rather than wet lab biology, which spans this spectrum. I'm also interested generally in science, so science things will go in here too.
Biosciences Background
Some important background information about biosciences to help you understand other writings here, if you are not already familiar with them.
Biological systems are dependent on the function of biological macromolecules, which are molecules which have chemical reactions in living organisms.
Enzymes are biological catalysts made from proteins that make reactions occur faster than they would otherwise.
Genetics is the science that underpins how the information needed to construct an organism is stored in a sequence of DNA, and how the organism reads that DNA to retrieve those instructions.
Articles About Biology
Some writing by myself about various aspects of biological sciences.
What is clinical coding? And how is it used in healthcare?
How clinical genetics can aid in the deployment of personalised medicine.
How sharing genetics data helps with genetic medicine.
Different technologies that are used to sequence genes.
Do people die with or of COVID-19, and does it matter?
Covid-19 deniers like to use deceptive facts and figures to argue their points. In this case I found this deceptive graph which is a good example of how graphs can be used to mislead.
bCIPA Tools
Tools for the bCIPA leucine zipper prediction algorithm which I used during by PhD and post doctoral work in the Mason lab.
Predict the strength of all interactions between leucine zipper domains using the bCIPA algorithm.
Screen the interactions of one set of leucine zipper sequences against another using the bCIPA algorithm.
Screen the interactions of one set of leucine zipper sequences against a single target sequence using the bCIPA algorithm.
bCIPA multi sequence tools hosted at University of Bath (opens in new window).
Original bCIPA tool on Synthbio.net (opens in new window).
General Tools
Some general tools that are useful for biologists which I have written, particularly biochemists and geneticists.
Calculate the frequency of phenotypes in a population based on allele frequency according to the Hardy-Weinburg equilibrium.
Find the volume of stock solution you need to freeze dry in order to make a specified volume and concentration of a peptide solution for experiments.
Use this form to calculate receiver operator characteristics (ROCs), which will tell you about the analytical performance of a binary classifier.
Find degenerate codons for generating peptide libraries in with specified amino acid resides.
Generate all sequences in a specified peptide library.