BOL: All site bookmarks

GenomeScope: open-source web tool to rapidly estimate the overall characteristics of a genome, including genome size, heterozygosity rate, and repeat content from unprocessed short reads

Jit — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 05:46:43 -0500

Summary: GenomeScope is an open-source web tool to rapidly estimate the overall characteristics of a genome, including genome size, heterozygosity rate, and repeat content from unprocessed short reads. These features are essential for studying genome evolution, and help to choose parameters for downstream analysis. We demonstrate its accuracy on 324 simulated and 16 real datasets with a wide range in genome sizes, heterozygosity levels, and error rates. Availability and Implementation: http://qb.cshl.edu/genomescope/, https://github.com/schatzlab/genomescope.git

Address of the bookmark: http://qb.cshl.edu/genomescope/

Shinyheatmap

Jit — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 05:12:11 -0500

Background: Transcriptomics, metabolomics, metagenomics, and other various next-generation sequencing (-omics) fields are known for their production of large datasets. Visualizing such big data has posed technical challenges in biology, both in terms of available computational resources as well as programming acumen. Since heatmaps are used to depict high-dimensional numerical data as a colored grid of cells, efficiency and speed have often proven to be critical considerations in the process of successfully converting data into graphics. For example, rendering interactive heatmaps from large input datasets (e.g., 100k+ rows) has been computationally infeasible on both desktop computers and web browsers. In addition to memory requirements, programming skills and knowledge have frequently been barriers-to-entry for creating highly customizable heatmaps. Results: We propose shinyheatmap: an advanced user-friendly heatmap software suite capable of efficiently creating highly customizable static and interactive biological heatmaps in a web browser. shinyheatmap is a low memory footprint program, making it particularly well-suited for the interactive visualization of extremely large datasets that cannot typically be computed in-memory due to size restrictions. Conclusions: shinyheatmap is hosted online as a freely available web server with an intuitive graphical user interface: http://shinyheatmap.com. The methods are implemented in R, and are available as part of the shinyheatmap project at: https://github.com/Bohdan-Khomtchouk/shinyheatmap.

More at http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/09/21/076463

Address of the bookmark: http://shinyheatmap.com/

Ribbon !!

Jit — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 04:54:30 -0500

Visualization has played an extremely important role in the current genomic revolution to inspect and understand variants, expression patterns, evolutionary changes, and a number of other relationships. However, most of the information in read-to-reference or genome-genome alignments is lost for structural variations in the one-dimensional views of most genome browsers showing only reference coordinates. Instead, structural variations captured by long reads or assembled contigs often need more context to understand, including alignments and other genomic information from multiple chromosomes. We have addressed this problem by creating Ribbon (genomeribbon.com) an interactive online visualization tool that displays alignments along both reference and query sequences, along with any associated variant calls in the sample. This way Ribbon shows patterns in alignments of many reads across multiple chromosomes, while allowing detailed inspection of individual reads (Supplementary Note 1). For example, here we show a gene fusion in the SK-BR-3 breast cancer cell line linking the genes CYTH1 and EIF3H. While it has been found in the transcriptome previously, genome sequencing did not identify a direct chromosomal fusion between these two genes. After SMRT sequencing, Ribbon shows that there are indeed long reads that span from one gene to the other, going through not one but two variants, for the first time showing the genomic link between these two genes (Figure 1a). More gene fusions of this cancer cell line are investigated in Supplementary Note 2. Figure 1b shows another complex event in this sample made simple in Ribbon: the translocation of a 4.4 kb sequence deleted from chr19 and inserted into chr16 (Figure 1b). Thus, Ribbon enables understanding of complex variants, and it may also help in the detection of sequencing and sample preparation issues, testing of aligners and variant-callers, and rapid curation of structural variant candidates (Supplementary Note 3). In addition to SAM and BAM files with long, short, or paired-end reads, Ribbon can also load coordinate files from whole genome aligners such as MUMmer. Therefore, Ribbon can be used to test assembly algorithms or inspect the similarity between species. Supplementary Note 4 shows a comparison of gorilla and human genomes using Ribbon, highlighting major structural differences. In conclusion, Ribbon is a powerful interactive web tool for viewing complex genomic alignments.

Script at https://github.com/MariaNattestad/ribbon

Address of the bookmark: http://genomeribbon.com/

Entrez Direct: E-utilities on the UNIX Command Line

Anjana — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 08:06:24 -0500

Entrez Direct (EDirect) is an advanced method for accessing the NCBI's suite of interconnected databases (publication, sequence, structure, gene, variation, expression, etc.) from a UNIX terminal window. Functions take search terms from command-line arguments. Individual operations are combined to build multi-step queries. Record retrieval and formatting normally complete the process.

EDirect also provides an argument-driven function that simplifies the extraction of data from document summaries or other results that are returned in structured XML format. This can eliminate the need for writing custom software to answer ad hoc questions. Queries can move seamlessly between EDirect commands and UNIX utilities or scripts to perform actions that cannot be accomplished entirely within Entrez.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK179288/

PHYMMBL

Jit — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 08:56:34 -0500

Metagenomics sequencing projects collect samples of DNA from uncharacterized environments that may contain hundreds or even thousands of species. One of the main challenges in analyzing a metagenome is phylogenetic classification of raw sequence reads into groups representing the same or similar species. Such classification is a useful prerequisite for genome assembly and for analysis of the biological diversity present in a sample. The newest sequencing technologies have simultaneously made metagenomics easier, by making the sequencing process faster, and more difficult, by producing shorter read lengths than previous technologies. Methods for classifying sequences as short as 100 base pairs (bp) have until now been relatively inaccurate, requiring metagenomics projects to use older, long-read technologies. Phymm, a new classification approach for metagenomics data which uses interpolated Markov models (IMMs) to taxonomically classify DNA sequences, can accurately classify reads as short as 100 bp. Its accuracy for short reads represents a significant leap forward over previous composition-based classification methods. PhymmBL (rhymes with "thimble"), the hybrid classifier included in this distribution which combines analysis from both Phymm and BLAST, produces even higher accuracy.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/software/phymm/

VirMet

Jit — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 08:27:19 -0500

Watch out: only a few files are counted in coverage statistics.

Full documentation on Read the Docs.

A set of tools for viral metagenomics.

virmet is called with a command subcommand syntax: virmet fetch --viral n, for example, downloads the bacterial database. Other available subcommands so far are

fetch download genomes
update update viral/bacterial database
index index genomes
wolfpack analyze a Miseq run
covplot plot coverage for a specific organism

A short help is obtained with virmet subcommand -h.

More at https://github.com/ozagordi/VirMet

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ozagordi/VirMet

BBMap help

Shruti Paniwala — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 06:29:03 -0500

BBMAP • a solution for everything

That content has been reformatted and it is being expanded to include more information.

There are common options for most BBMap suite programs and depending on the file extension the input/output format is automatically chosen/set.

Using BBMap

Mapping Nanopore reads

BBMap.sh has a length cap of 6kbp. Reads longer than this will be broken into 6kbp pieces and mapped independently.

More at https://www.biostarhandbook.com/tools/bbmap/bbmap-help.html

Address of the bookmark: https://www.biostarhandbook.com/tools/bbmap/bbmap-help.html

AccNET

Jitendra Narayan — Fri, 07 Oct 2016 05:22:11 -0500

AccNET is a Perl application that presents a new way to study the accessory genome of a given set of organisms. Using the proteomes of these organisms, AccNET create a bipartite network compatible with common network analysis platforms. AccNET collects phylogenetic and functional information in a network improving the analysis capability. Networks offer a new perspective of organism organization through elements acquired by horizontal gene transfers and not constricted by hierarchical structures.

More at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdGuy1GAJrQ

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/accnet/

MIRO : miRNA omics

Jit — Tue, 04 Oct 2016 14:50:48 -0500

The MIRO (the miRNA omics) pipeline is a flexible and powerful tool for the analysis of miRNA (or more generall short RNA) expression using short-read deep sequencing data. In its present implementation MIRO is especially adapted for the analysis of reads generated with the Illumina sequencing platform. MIRO allows to preprocess the Solexa-reads, map them flexibly to several reference genomes using one of four different mappers, create differential gene (miRNA) expression profiles and cluster reads using one of several algorithm. MIRO output is furthermore compatible with software such as genome browsers and miRDeep.

Address of the bookmark: http://seq.crg.es/download/software/Miro/

GeneBreak: a tool to systematically identify genes recurrently affected by the genomic location of chromosomal CNA-associated breaks by a genome-wide approach

Jit — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 15:15:29 -0500

Development of cancer is driven by somatic alterations, including numerical and structural chromosomal aberrations. Currently, several computational methods are available and are widely applied to detect numerical copy number aberrations (CNAs) of chromosomal segments in tumor genomes. However, there is lack of computational methods that systematically detect structural chromosomal aberrations by virtue of the genomic location of CNA-associated chromosomal breaks and identify genes that appear non-randomly affected by chromosomal breakpoints across (large) series of tumor samples. ‘GeneBreak’ is developed to systematically identify genes recurrently affected by the genomic location of chromosomal CNA-associated breaks by a genome-wide approach, which can be applied to DNA copy number data obtained by array-Comparative Genomic Hybridization (CGH) or by (low-pass) whole genome sequencing (WGS). First, ‘GeneBreak’ collects the genomic locations of chromosomal CNA-associated breaks that were previously pinpointed by the segmentation algorithm that was applied to obtain CNA profiles. Next, a tailored annotation approach for breakpoint-to-gene mapping is implemented. Finally, dedicated cohort-based statistics is incorporated with correction for covariates that influence the probability to be a breakpoint gene. In addition, multiple testing correction is integrated to reveal recurrent breakpoint events. This easy-to-use algorithm, ‘GeneBreak’, is implemented in R (www.cran.r-project.org) and is available from Bioconductor (www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/GeneBreak.html).

Address of the bookmark: http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/GeneBreak.html