Using Au Scripts To Automate Topspin

Automation scripts in Topspin are coded as C language based scripts. This differs from python style scripts significantly, and has its advantages and drawbacks like any programming language. Without making too many comments on preferences, I will say that I do not know much about C languages, except some basic differences (such as having to define what kind of value a variable will stand for, explicitly). As is the case with python and macro scripts, you will need to navigate to the edit screen to find these codes - but this time with edau.

• Commands are typed in bold - edpy/edmac/edau

• Variables are in italics - i1

The good news is that much like the macros and python, many commands that you would use in topspin are already coded in as commands you can call directly. This means that if you wanted to clone our macro into an automation script, you can do that! In fact, a few of the commands you may already use already ARE automation scripts! As an example, lets pull up one of the many provided scripts, multizg.

If you are using a spectrometer without IconNMR or the spooler service activated, you may be familiar with multizg.. but what does it actually do? Navigate to the Burker script directory with edau and find the multizg script.

From the description in the au file, you can see that multizg program written by Rainer Kerssebaum contains a few blocks of code to allow for multiple experiment acquisition. If you have set up experiments beforehand (10 -1H , 11-HSQC, 12-TOSY) then when you activate multizg and enter in the correct number of experiments, it will read each file and run the acquisition. If you haven’t set up the experiments beforehand though, it will simply copy the open acquisition and run that many of that particular experiment – this has caught me a couple of times...

If you look at the way it iterates through the experiments, it prompts the user for the value of ‘i1’ which can be thought of as the number of experiments to be run. If i1 > 0, as it should be, then it calculates the number of experiments that are queued up and the experiment time for each. Once that has been completed, it iteratively runs through the experiments until all of them have been completed. Pretty cool right? Now, this is a very advanced script, and it looks pretty dense to a new user – DON’T PANIC. Lets try to write a very simple Au script to do some 1D processing. As you get more comfortable, try writing some more cleaver Au scripts to perform your tasks for you!

Sticking to the command line arguments, simply write a new Au script called 1D_ZG. Assuming we’ve set up the experiment correctly and it is open, let’s write a script to set the receiver gain and then acquire the data.

Unlike Macros and Python scripts, Au scripts must be compiled before they can be executed. Select “Compile” and after a few seconds, you will get a prompt that tells you it’s ready to go! If you have errors or language in there that confuses the system, it will give you a kickback message that tells you something is incorrect. Au scripts offer the users who are familiar with C based languages a chance to put their skills to work for them, and it’s a fantastic option. Try looking through some other provided scripts, such as the pulsecal script, to get a better idea of how to interact with Topspin.

If you were lucky enough to catch the advanced Topshim webinar by Bruker, you might have seen how you can further expand our script to include specific shimming steps as well, further automating your acquisition step. As is the case with all three types of automation, once you have these scripts established in your directory, you can simply call them up using the command line - or even code in your own buttons!

Getting Started With Macros In Topspin

Macros are the most basic processing schemes available to a user in Topspin, and provide a great level of automation with very basic skills. Simply put, a well designed macro could automate a large portion of your workflow, allowing you to process data in your sleep.

It is overly simplistic, but for the sake of this quick start guide, think of each line of a macro as the command line at the bottom of Topspin. When you open your data, you use commands in this line for basic transformations of the data, editing processing variables, and even adjusting the viewing window. These commands can have variables passed to them in the command line as well, which is how we should think about them in a processing macro.

Lets take a simple example of 1D data – using only the command line to process it. Then, we’ll write a macro which will do the same transformations on the data, and finally, we’ll link it to the Topspin “serial” command to automate processing for multiple datasets.

(Find the dataset here)

Command Line Processing

When we open this dataset, we need to transform it first. For this, we use the line command “ft”. Once we have a spectrum, we can see that we need to apply phase correction. If we use automated phase correction, the command for 1D data is “apk”. Next, we perform baseline correction without integration by “absn”. Following these three commands, we have processed our data to the point an investigator might begin looking at the spectrum for peaks of interest. There are, of course, other commands and combinations – depending on what your processing scheme might be. As an example, if you wish to include integration into this scheme, you have three choices. You can either change the commands fed into the system – replacing “absn” with “abs” which uses automatic integration, you can implement integration in another step, or you can choose to integrate the spectra yourself. Hopefully, you can see the flexibility of having all three options available, depending on your application.

Since you have to perform these basic functions on every spectra, why not construct a macro that would do it for you with an easier command? These few seconds you save may not seem like much, but with even a 3 second savings per spectra, a sample size of 100 samples processed could save you more time than you spend writing the macro: so lets do that.

Writing and Editing Macros

First, you have to open up the Macro menu in Tospin by typing the command “edmac”. This launches the Macro menu, likely populated with a lot of Bruker provided scripts that automate a large chunk of processing. First, lets look one of the provided examples, the example_efp macro – open this up by highlighting the script and selecting edit.

By selecting edit, you launch the macro edit utility, which is similar to a idle processor/notepad. By looking at this example, we can see that – much like python – we can write notes alongside commands by using the # sign before writing in a line. As the program moves down the line, these lines are ignored completely, allowing you to leave a detailed explanation of each step – or slip in some user information or metadata about the sample sets you are writing the macro for. Keeping highly detailed coding notes is a VERY SMART MOVE. The line structure of the Macro allows you to command the program to do one task, and when it is complete, it moves on to the next task. Dissecting the example script above, we can see that it uses a similar approach to basic processing:

·       Perform exponential window multiplication with “em”

·       Perform Fourier transformation with “ft”

·       Perform phase correction with “pk”

For the sake of this quick start, we’re going to start fresh and write our own script. In order for us to edit or create a new macro, we need to change the source directory where topspin is looking for our macros. By default, this normally opens to the bruker directory (C:…..expt\stan\nmr\lists\mac) – to navigate to your directory, simply select the drop down menu and select the (…mac\user) version of the directory. If you’ve never experimented with Macros, this will be empty. Select File > New. Here, you’ll be prompted for a name, which can change later. For now, let’s name this something easy – ‘JE_tut1’.

Lets try writing a quick macro to do the commands we outlined on our 1D data – ft, apk, absn. Once we’re done, you can simply click execute to test the command – if it processes without flagging an error, it worked!

If you’re satisfied with the macro, you can save it and recall it any time with a variety of different methods. My favorite, is the ability to call on a macro/script/python script by simply using it’s name in the command line. Try it by saving the script, exiting out of the macro window, and typing “JE_tut1” in the command line. Alternatively, you can launch the macro by using the command “xmac[space]name_of_macro” – this is helpful if you have different versions of a script floating around – such a Macro and Python script both called ‘process 1D’.

Partnering Macros with serial

Macros, scripts, and python scripts are great time savers, but the real power comes when you can automate processing on more than one spectra at a time. Topspin has a built in function to do this called serial that allows you to perform a single task on many spectra at a time.

Step 1: Define the list of samples to process

In topspin 3, select process spectrum > advanced > serial (or simply type ‘serial’ into the command line). From there, you’ll see all three options: define list, define command, execute. For ease of use, we’ll be using the option to ‘build dataset list using find’.

Step 2: Using “find” to build a dataset list

Launching this window, you’ll see lots of different methods of filtering data; name, experiment number, pulse program, etc.. we’ll start by applying our 1D NMR quick script to a large sample subset of 1D data. To do this, we filter all of the data in our data directory using the pulse program ‘zg’. This returns a list of all the experiments in the selected directory(ies) that fit that pulse program – however, you may notice it does a simple string search and you will get results from any pulse program that contains the characters you searched for. Be sure you only select the datasets that use the ‘zg’ pulse, not – for instance – a ‘zgpg’. Once you hit ‘ok’ you’ll see a message at the bottom telling you where it saved the list – if you’d like, you can recall this list later – but you should copy it from the TEMP folder and rename it something easier to remember.  

Step 3: Define Command

The last thing to do is define the command you wish to execute on all of the selected data sets. Since we wrote a macro to process all of the 1H spectra using zg, we will apply this macro here by typing JE_Tut1 as the command – remember, you can call scripts/macros directly by name!

Execute the macro – and watch it work! If you’re sitting on 100 spectra, it will chug through these in order until it’s complete. Perfect to set up right before that meeting you have down the hall.

Expanding Macros to suit your needs

You can add other features into the macros as well, such as the ability to zoom into certain regions of a spectra, peak picking in only one region, and more. Lets look at a more complex example here – NUS 2D HSQC data. There are a few more things we need to consider when looking at 2D data, as well as NUS data processing. For the purposes of this tutorial, I’m not going to get into things like linear prediction or zero filling – but these are completely automatable using macros. Instead, there are a few complications with these data having been NUS collected, so we will keep those in and you can read up on linear prediction on your own.

This script also uses arguments, which are simply provided by following the command with a space and then the argument value you are setting. As an example, if we were changing the “SI” of a processed spectrum, we can set it by:

“Command value1 value2”

“SI 4k 1024”

When working with NUS data, there are ‘holes’ in the data – it needs a special kind of reconstruction. Since Topspin 3.5pl6, there are reconstruction algorithms that are provided for use without a special license. However, if you’ve been processing NUS data, and have seen a little error message that pops up telling you only have access to the free reconstruction techniques, we can get rid of that in our macro.

We’ve woven in a couple of small QOL features in this macro that save us a few clicks and a few seconds per spectra. For instance, we are not able to phase correct the spectra if we do not have the imaginary part of the spectrum, which we do not collect in NUS data – so we calculate it with the Hilbert transformations for each axis. Once that is done, it’s simple to do phase correction and have a good starting point for analysis.

So there you have a quick entry into the world of Topspin macros and two small examples to get you going. Remember, there’s extensive documentation on how to automate your processing with topspin in the manuals section. By combining these simple macros with the serial command, you can quickly optimize your NMR processing for many datasets at a time.

Automating with Topspin - A Primer

If you’ve ever had to get figures ready for a paper, present data to your group, or even just process a large amount of NMR data, you’ve probably found a lot of NMR data processing to be… repetitive. Luckily, you’re not the only one! Automating the small tasks - like FT, or zero-filling, or peak picking a specific region in your data could take minutes to set up and save you hours of work. As an added bonus, if you hard code these in as Macros, your processing will be specific for your data and consistent across all data you’re working with.

So, the first question when processing is, “Can I automate this”. For a good 80% of processing, absolutely. Many labs have their own Macros set up for automatic FT, phase correction, and NUS reconstruction for 2D+ data - but this all is specific to who your facilities manager is, what tasks they saw fit to automate, and so on. If your looking at a pile of metabolomics 1D data, you’d be hard pressed to find a justification for doing these basic commands individually.

Before we jump in - there is a limit. I found this limit, repeatedly, when I was attempting to peak pick metabolomics 2D data. If you asked me if it could be done, I’d say yes - but I’d also say that it involves a lot more than what you may consider. For that reason, I have largely abandoned this single task in my automation pipelines and have opted for hand picking my data. However, if you’re working with pure molecules in a reasonable concentration, this is a much easier task. When I was originally looking into ways to make this a feasible task, a discussion between Clemens Anklin and John Hollerton put forth the idea of 80:20 confidence - that for around 80% of cases of automation, it’s possible to get great results, the other 20%, however, might prove challenging. For this reason, you should always manually check your data after an automated pipeline. In fact… you could even automate this…. but I digress.

Over the next few posts, I hope to shed some light on how to automate your NMR processing using Topspin. There exists some automation documentation in the Topspin Manual, but for the average user, the information can be overwhelming and it can take days of working through it to automate your first task. This is NOT a criticism! They are highly detailed and contain a lot of information that might be of interest. After these small blog posts, my hope is that you’ll be able to get started with automation in under 30 minutes and then progress to the manuals to fill in the gaps - once you know what you’re looking for, it’s easier to find.

Types of Automation

Topspin contains (at least) 3 different ways to automate your processing - and it’s accessible to all users, even on an academic license.

They are:

• Macro Scripts

• Python (Yes, REAL Python!)

• Au Scripts/Macros

For the average user who knows nothing of coding, the simplest way to get started is by using Macros. I say this because when you program a macro in Topspin, you simply replace the human with a series of commands - if you already type things into the command line in topspin, you already know how to do it.

Other users, such as myself, who are familiar with Python will rejoice to learn that the python scripting in topspin can be used to read/write files - such as peak lists - or perform calculations on data and export the results. This can save you a massive amount of time in ensuring you have the right peak lists saved with the right file names in the right places, and if you already know basic python, Topspin’s python is really easy to use.

The last type, Au Scripts, are higher level programming scripts that must be compiled before execution. The code used recognizes topspin commands and C-language functions. The benefit, of course, is that it is extremely adaptable and very fast when compared head to head with python and it carries the same ability to export data easily. However, if you’ve not used a C based language, it can take some getting used to.

There are other factors that play into what to decide to automate with, but I find that people use the tools they’re already familiar with - we all have a toolbox filled with screwdrivers, but we all have a favorite (mine happens to be an old Craftsman given to me by my grandfather). MestreNova has it’s own scripting ability, but I will not be going into this toolchest - it’s someone else’s set.

I hope to create a post every Tuesday for the next 3 weeks to highlight each of these options, how to use them, and some simple scripts to get you started.