Question: What is the best invention that you have made

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 13 Nov 2014:

During my last job as a research assistant in University College cork, I was given a few hundred megabytes of DNA sequences, and I was asked to find out which of them were from plasmids. Plasmids are like little loops of DNA found in bacteria. While most living things have one or more chromosomes that contain all their DNA, bacteria can also have tiny little “mini-chromosomes” that they can swap freely with other bacteria, those are plasmids.

There were nearly 35,000 sequences to check through, and using the computer to look at them one by one would have taken forever. So I used Python, a programming language, to make a program that would do it for me, I got it to scan every sequence in an online database, see if the results might belong to a plasmid, and make a note for me if it did before moving on to the next.

Using that program I could just start the program on Friday and let it run all weekend, and come in to work Monday to find all my results waiting for me. It took a few false starts, but I had the program up and running without bugs before I would have gotten through 100 of the sequences myself, never mind 35,000 of them.

I’m really proud of that little program. I still use it sometimes, only I upgraded it to look for more than just plasmids 🙂