Seurat v4.3 dotplot algorithm

The default scaling of the dotplot function from Seurat is easy to use but the default options can make the plot difficult to interpret. The full set of options is available in their website manual and described in more detail in their code.

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Quickly making large DAGs with DAGitty

The software DAGitty is really useful for representing causal diagrams and has wonderful documentation. It also comes with a really handy R package accessible through CRAN which can be used to query the DAG for causal effect identification, such as d-separation of variables.

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GMT file import in R

As outlined in the GSEA wiki, GMT files store functional pathway information for genes. However, as the figure there makes clear, each line uses tabs as separators and there may be a different number of genes per line.

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R Markdown files

R Markdown files are a cross between markdown and R files since they can load and run chunks of code alongside markdown-formatted text.

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Moving between species in R

It’s often useful to compare data against a published dataset from another species. These are the most common tasks I complete for this purpose (and the corresponding libraries in R). Unfortunately converting between species always seems to introduce missing identifiers and so I have tried to choose the method which avoids this as much as possible.

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Moving to the US from Canada as a graduate student

I am a Canadian citizen and moved to the US with F1 status when I started my degree. I couldn’t find that many accounts of how to do this online at the time of writing, so I’ve written up some observations I made (primarily about financial considerations).

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