SHEPHARD
SHEPHARD is a Python-based software framework for reading, annotating, and analyzing large protein datasets. It’s objective is to make it easy for people to perform reproducible, error-free analyses of large protein datasets with arbitrarily complex sequence annotations.
The general use-case for SHEPHARD would include scenarios such as:
Wanting to ask large-scale statistical questions about big protein datasets.
Asking how different types of sequence or protein annotations relate to one another.
Easily associating experimentally-generated data with extant sequence information.
Installation
SHEPHARD is distributed via the Python packaging index (PyPI). As such, the current public release candidate can be installed using:
pip install shephard
Alternatively, you can install the current bleeding-edge version from GitHub using
pip install shephard@git+git://github.com/holehouse-lab/shephard.git
This should install without issue, and once installed, SHEPHARD is available for import in any Python code you write when executed from within that conda environment.
To test if the installation has worked, open up the Python interpreter or a Jupyter notebook and run
import shephard
If this works, you should be good to go!
A note on Python environments
To install, we strongly recommend having a conda environment set up (the scope of conda setup is beyond that of this documentation). conda environments let you define a specific Python version and set of local packages that help isolate software tools away from your main system’s Python version. For more information there are many examples of conda introduction tutorials online, like this one here.
Demos and examples
Once installed, SHEPHARD makes it very easy to work with large protein datasets. As an example, we have a collection of basic notebooks showing functionality located at on the SHEPHARD GitHub supporting data page.
Colab notebook
If you don’t want to install SHEPHARD on your local computer, we also provide several Google colab notebooks with SHEPHARD pre-installed. Check out our colab notebook repository on GitHub.
About
SHEPHARD was developed and written by Garrett Ginell and Alex Holehouse in the Holehouse lab. For issues, bugs, or feature requests please raise an issue on GitHub.