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Cell colony counter called CoCoNut

Publishing date: 2018-12-20 Published on: PLOS ONE summary: CoCoNut removes the need for slow and eye-straining manual counting of viable colonies under a microscope. It’s a semi-automated, image-based cell colony counting setup that combines 3D-printed hardware and an ImageJ plugin.

Open-source sensor for measuring oxygen partial pressures below 100 microbars

Publishing date: 2018-12-20 Published on: PLOS ONE summary: This nifty device measures partial pressure of oxygen in a similar manner to commercial devices, yet at substantially reduced cost. In a nutshell, a sinusoidally modulated LED excites a luminescent dye over time, while a photodiode picks up the spectrally shifted emission light from the dye.

A large-scale analysis of bioinformatics code on GitHub

Publishing date: 2018-12-10 Published on: PLOS ONE summary: In recent years, the explosion of genomic data and bioinformatic tools has been accompanied by a growing conversation around reproducibility of results and usability of software.

An open-source k-mer based machine learning tool for fast and accurate subtyping of HIV-1 genomes

Publishing date: 2018-12-10 Published on: PLOS ONE summary: The classification of infections is a routine component of clinical management. Kameris is an open source toolkit for a supervised and alignment-free subtyping method which operates on HIV-1 sequences.

Assessing a novel way to measure step count while walking using a custom mobile phone application

Publishing date: 2018-12-10 Published on: PLOS ONE summary: Walking speed has been associated with many clinical outcomes (e.g., frailty, mortality, joint replacement need, etc.). Accurately measuring walking speed (stride length x step count/time) typically requires significant clinician/staff time or a gait lab with specialized equipment (i.

Feeling generous? Open source software community gives shelter to code

Publishing date: 2018-12-10 Published on: JAXENTER summary: Are you looking for a new project to work on? Do you have some code that you’d like to donate? In this piece, Sarah Schlothauer presents a shortlist of free and open source communities dedicated to the world of FOSS.

Is Open Source Project Participation Worthwhile?

Publishing date: 2018-12-10 Published on: Forbes summary: Matthew Barlocker is the Founder and CEO of AWS monitoring software startup “Blue Matador”, and discusses here the specific benefits of contributing to an open source project.

Viridot: An automated virus plaque (immunofocus) counter for the measurement of serological neutralizing responses with application to dengue virus

Publishing date: 2018-12-10 Published on: PLOS NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES summary: Although the plaque reduction neutralization test (PRNT) is an important assay for measuring neutralizing antibody responses against many viruses, no free, open-source programs specifically designed for virus plaque counting and neutralizing antibody titer estimation are available.

Design and validation of an open-source modular Microplate Photoirradiation System for high-throughput photobiology experiments

Publishing date: 2018-11-19 Published on: PLOS ONE summary: This paper presents a useful open-source Microplate Photoirradiation System (MPS) for use in standard 96- and 24-well microplates that allows photobiologists to conduct a variety of experiments in a high-throughput format, inlcuding inside incubators.

Spikeling: A low-cost hardware implementation of a spiking neuron for neuroscience teaching and outreach

Publishing date: 2018-11-19 Published on: PLOS Biology summary: Spikeling provides an in silico model of a spiking neuron that can be used to illustrate their biophysical behaviour through sound and light inputs and outputs as well as a custom oscilloscope interface.