Imagine you're sitting with a genomic dataset of some sort (thousands of SNPs), a set of plant phenotypes and the one very simple question: can we predict what these plants will become? The first thing you'd probably do is reach for machine...
Over millions of years, evolution has shaped all life on Earth, leaving clues in the DNA of every organism. While different species look and act very differently, their genomes still hold signs of a shared evolutionary past. These connections show...
Consider a scenario in which a patient's genome has been sequenced. Among billions of DNA bases, a structural alteration may explain the patient's disease. Multiple advanced algorithms analyze the data, yet only one detects the variant, while the...
Every newly sequenced genome contains thousands of proteins, but identifying what each protein does is a much harder task. Among these proteins are protein kinases, important molecular regulators that control processes such as cell growth,...
Benchmarking a new metagenomic pipeline often begins with a fundamental challenge. Imagine a bioinformatician preparing to benchmark a new metagenomic pipeline. There is no shortage of real sequencing data, but one problem quickly appears: the exact...
A creature smaller than a grain of sand has discovered a surprising method of surviving damage that can break its DNA apart. It lives in the mosses and lichens, in the thin films of water that show up after rain and disappear when the area dries...
Modern sequencing technologies have turned biology into a data-heavy science. The human genome has about three billion DNA base pairs, and sequencing can produce massive datasets quickly. Bioinformatics helps organize and interpret this information,...
Metagenomics is rapidly moving beyond short-read sequencing. With the increasing adoption of long-read technologies, researchers can generate more contiguous assemblies—but converting these reads into reliable metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs)...
This idea, known as phylogenetic profiling, is the foundation of Profylo (https://github.com/MartinSchoenstein/Profylo), an open-source Python toolkit developed for comparing evolutionary profiles and discovering co-evolving genes. Profylo brings...
Imagine looking through thousands of microbial genomes and discovering two genes that repeatedly appear together. The obvious conclusion is that they must somehow be connected—that perhaps they work together, participate in the same pathway, or...