I’ve spent all week creating and running data processing pipelines that got no tangible results and I feel like lying facedown in the mud at this point.

So I discovered I had accidentally deleted the directory to a research project and only realized after every backup of it was gone.

I’ve been scrambling for the last few hours to redownload all the data files and tools, salvage whatever reports I had already sent to my professor, and rebuild as much of the codebase of the most immediately important things from what I can remember.

At this point, I can feel my heart about to explode and I feel like I’m about to puke.

*Sudden irrational terror that I emailed my fanfic WIP to my professor instead of my research report*

Been spending all day trying to get one bit of code to work right and it takes over an hour between attempt to confirm the outputs are right.

Been spending weeks trying to learn and work with a tool called cellranger to understand how to process fastq files into count matrices of chromatin access regions and I’ve just hit an impassible snag.

Cellranger is a processing tool that takes fastq files produced by an Illumina sequencer and it can only work if provided all the output files from the sequencer, including files about the primers which aren’t available in almost every publicly available dataset because they have no actual value for research purposes.

I was able to rebuild one of those primer files based on the headers of each read in the files I’ve been working with, but it’s impossible for me to figure out what the other file’s contents would have been.

So anyway, I’m going to have to start this thing all over. Hopefully I can find a similar tool that doesn’t have such frustrating specifications.

Learning a new Bioinformatics program is like learning to ride a bicycle if the bicycle came disassembled and it didn’t come with half the parts you needed and you have to use bolts that require a very specific type of wrench you can only get if you go to a specific store that demands you smelt the steel they need to make it and then the bicycle turns out to be useless because the wheels are square.