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NERD

NERD (Nucleic acid Energetics from Reactivity Data) is a unified toolkit for extracting nucleotide-level thermodynamic and kinetic information from chemical probing experiments. It streamlines sample registration, mutation-count processing, and kinetic/melt-fit analysis, providing an organized path from raw sequencing data to time-course and temperature-gradient energetics.

Quick Start

# create a virtual environment (recommended)
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

# install NERD
pip install nerd-pipeline

# initialize a project from an example config
nerd run create demo_folder/01_create_samples/configs/create_meta.yaml

# execute a probe timecourse fit
nerd run probe_timecourse demo_folder/05_probe_tc_kinetics/configs/probe_tc.yaml

Key Features

  • Unified SQLite backbone linking constructs, buffers, reactions, fits, and artifacts
  • CLI-based execution with consistent logging, caching, and reproducibility guarantees
  • Pluggable fitting engines for probe timecourses, Arrhenius, and two-state melt models
  • Rich filtering (construct, buffer, probe, nt_id, base) and outlier management in configs
  • Automated metadata ingestion from CSVs and lab notebooks
  • Portable outputs (JSON artifacts, logs, database entries) for downstream visualization
  • Local and remote execution modes (local CPU, SLURM, SSH)
  • Tutorial notebooks and guides for sample organization, NMR kinetics, probe analyses, and tempgrad fits

Documentation Map

How It Works

[Pipeline diagram here: sample CSVs & raw data → NERD CLI tasks → SQLite database → fit engines → JSON/plots]

  1. Register constructs, buffers, reaction groups, and traces with nerd run create.
  2. Quantify sequencing or NMR data via task-specific runners (mut_count, nmr_*).
  3. Execute probe timecourse fits to derive kinetic parameters per nucleotide.
  4. Run tempgrad_fit to combine kinetics across temperatures with Arrhenius or two-state models.
  5. Visualize results using bundled notebooks or your own data science stack.

Example Output (Optional)

manuscript_pipeline/05_probe_tempgrad_fit/tempgrad_fit/latest/results/tempgrad_result.json

Citation

Please cite the NERD pipeline as: [placeholder—add citation here].