BOL: Related items

The Cat: evolution, domestication and Genome 10k

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 14:33:56 -0600

A public lecture by Dr Stephen J O'Brien at the UCD Earth Institute, University College Dublin, Ireland. Dr O'Brien is a world leading molecular biologist and dedicated conservationist who uses the tools of molecular biology to help protect endangered species and understand devastating diseases such as cancer and AIDS. He received his PhD in Genetics from Cornell University, USA, in 1971. He then joined the prestigious National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health as a post-doc in 1971 and, there, served as Founder and Chief of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity from 1986-2011. In December 2011, he joined the Theodosius Dobzhansky Center for Genome Bioinformatics, St. Petersburg State University, Russia, as Chief Scientific Officer. Convinced of the utility of exploring diverse species to advance our understanding of the human genome, Dr O'Brien and his team have assembled over 62,000 animal and 424,000 human tissue/DNA specimens, facilitating wide-ranging studies of disease gene associations, species adaptation and natural history. His research interests and expertise span human and comparative genomics, genetic epidemiology, HIV/AIDS, retro-virology, bioinformatics biodiversity and species conservation. Dr O'Brien is best known for documenting the remarkable genetic uniformity of African cheetahs, resolving the mammalian tree of life, describing heretofore unrecognized species of Orangutans, African forest elephants, and Bornean clouded leopards. He is credited with the discovery of CCR5 delta 32, the first of 20 human AIDS restriction genes, which imparts natural immunity to HIV. He is the one of the founders of the Genome 10K initiative, has published over 750 leading research papers, written multiple books and is adjunct professor in over 12 international leading universities. The UCD Earth Institute, University College Dublin, is a multidisciplinary research and education centre with a focus on creating and sharing new knowledge. We aim to contribute to sustainable solutions for many of the pressing Earth-related problems affecting societies now and in the near future.

Monitor running jobs on Linux server

Jitendra Narayan — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 16:18:43 -0500

You as a bioinformatican run lots of program on your servers. Sometime the shared server is also used by your colleague. If server is busy you sometime need to check the running programs and want to monitor the running programs as well. The "top" command will come in handy when you need to find out if things are still running, how long they’ve been running, or how much memory is being used.

‘top’ is very simple to run: type

%% top

You’ll get a screen that looks like this, and is updated regularly:

Simple, right? Heh.

First! Note that you can use ‘q’ or ‘CTRL-C’ to exit from ‘top’.

Now let’s read and understand at each line independently.

The first line:

top - 23:00:48 up 39 days, 2 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

The first line tells you the current time, how long the machine has been up, how many users are logged in, and the short/medium/long-term compute load on the machine. If you run something for a long time, you’ll see these numbers go up. Right now, the machine is basically just sitting there, so these are all close to 0.

The second line:

Tasks: 239 total,   1 running, 238 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie

This line tells you how many processes are running. If you are using laptops machines it’s not so interesting because you really are the only one using this machine.

Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st

This line contains the CPU load. The first two numbers are how busy the system is doing computation (“us” stands for “user”) and how busy the system is doing system-y things like accessing disks or network (“sy” stands for “system”). We’ll talk more about this later.

Mem:   49457320k total,    3492174k used, 14535596k free,    1435148k buffers

This should be easy to understand – how much memory you’re using!

Swap:   539356k total,   28332k used,   836562k free,    29862014k cached

Swap is just on-disk memory that can be used to “swap” out programs from main memory. Again, we’ll talk about this later.:

PID USER      PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+ COMMAND
1 root      39 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0   246:57.22 kipmi0
2 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S 0.0 0.0   0:00.00 migration/0

And... finally! What’s actually running! The two most important numbers are the %CPU and %MEM towards the right, as well as the COMMAND. This tells you how compute- and memory-intensive your program is. Right now, nothing’s running so the numbers aren’t very interesting, but just wait until we run something...

Online resources on must-read papers in evolutionary biology

BioStar — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 01:39:14 -0500

Online resources on must-read papers in evolutionary biology, for a literature club.

Below is a summary of all answers that we received.

All the best,

Jana and Xiaoyan

1.       *Nick Barton:*

- The textbook "Evolution" by Nick Barton, with resources for
  exploring the literature: Barton, N. H., Briggs, D. E. G., Eisen, J.
  A., Goldstein, D. B., & Patel, N. H. (2007). Evolution. Cold Spring
  Harbor Laboratory Press.

- Papers from a course named "Classics in Evolutionary Biology":

Evolutionary Synthesis
1. Haldane, J. B. S. 1932. The causes of evolution. Longmans. New York.
   (esp. Ch. IV).
2. Fisher, R. A. 1930. The genetical theory of natural selection. Oxford
   University Press, Oxford. Selected Sections - Fundamental Theorem.

Genetic Variation
1a. Lewontin, R. C., and J. L. Hubby. 1966. A molecular approach to
the study of genic heterozygosity in natural populations. II. Amount
of variation and degree of heterozygosity in natural populations of
Drosophila pseudoobscura. Genetics. 54:595-609.

1b. Sachidandam et al. 2001. A map of human genome sequence variation
containing 1.42 million single nucleotide polymorphisms. 409: 928-33.

2. Wright S., Dobzhansky T., Hovanitz W. 1942 Genetics of natural
populations VII The allelism of lethals in the third chromosome of
Drosophila pseudoobscura. Genetics 27: 363-394.

Recombination and evolution
1. Hill, W. G., and A. Robertson. 1966. The effect of linkage on limits
to artificial selection. Genet. Res. 8:269-294.

2. Maynard Smith and Haigh. 1974. The hitch-hiking effect of a favourable
gene. Genet. Res. 23: 23-35.

Understanding sequence variation
1. Begun D. J., Aquadro C. F., 1992 Levels of naturally occurring DNA
polymorphism correlate with recombination rate in Drosophila melanogaster.
Nature 356: 519-520.

2. Green R. E., Reich D., Pääbo S., 2010 A draft sequence of the
Neandertal genome. Science 328: 710-722.

Quantitative Genetics:  variation in complex traits
1. Galton F., 1877 Typical laws of heredity. Nature 15: 492-495-
512-514- 532-533.

2. Turelli M., 1984 Heritable genetic variation via
mutation-selection balance: Lerch's Zeta meets the abdominal
bristle. Theor. Popul. Biol. 25: 138-193.

Quantitative Genetics:  finding the genes
1. Shrimpton A. E., Robertson A., 1988 The Isolation of polygenic factors
controlling bristle score in Drosophila melanogaster II Distribution of
third chromosome bristle effects within chromosome sections. Genetics
118: 445-459.

2. Boyle E. A., Li Y. I., Pritchard J. K., 2017 An expanded view of
complex traits: from polygenic to omnigenic. Cell 169: 1177-1186.

Neutral Evolution
1. Kimura, M. 1968. Evolutionary rate at the molecular level. Science.
217:624-626.

2a. Kern A. D., Hahn M. W., 2018 The Neutral Theory in Light of Natural
Selection. Molecular Biology and Evolution 110: 21077-6.

2b. Jensen J. D., Payseur B. A., Stephan W., Aquadro C. F., Lynch M.,
Charlesworth D., Charlesworth B., 2018 The importance of the Neutral Theory
in 1968 and 50 years on: a response to Kern and Hahn 2018. Evolution 112:
2109-4.

2c. Ellegren & Galtier. 2016. Determinants of genetic diversity. Nature
Reviews Genetics.

Mutation and Genetic Variability
1. Luria, S. E., and M. Delbrück. 1943. Mutations of Bacteria from Virus
Sensitivity to Virus Resistance. Genetics. 28(6):491-511.

2. Hill, W G. 1982. "Rates of Change in Quantitative Traits From Fixation
of New Mutations." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.A.)
79: 142-45.

Testing for selection
1. McDonald & Kreitman. 1991. Adaptive protein evolution at the Adh locus
in Drosophila. Nature.

2. Begun, et al. Mol. Biol. Evol. 16, 1816-1819 (1999).

3. Siddiq et al. 2016. Experimental test and refutation of a classic case
of molecular adaptation in Drosophila melanogaster.  Nature Ecology &
Evolution.

The shifting balance
1. Wright, S. 1932. The roles of mutation, inbreeding, crossbreeding and
selection in evolution. Proceedings of the VI International Congress of
Genetics: 1. pp 356-366.

2. Coyne, J.A., N.H. Barton, and M. Turelli. 1997. A critique of Wright's
shifting balance theory of evolution.  Evolution 51: 643-671.

3. Barton. 2016. Sewall Wright on Evolution in Mendelian Populations and
the "Shifting Balance". Genetics.

Evolution of Sex
1.  Muller, H.J. 1964. The relation of recombination to mutational advance.
Mutation Res. 1(1):2-9

2. McDonald et al. 2016. Sex speeds adaptation by altering the dynamics of
molecular evolution. Nature.

Kin Selection, Cooperation, and Conflict
1. Hamilton, W. D. 1964. The genetical evolution of social behaviour I.
Journal of Theoretical Biology. 7:1-52.

2. Trivers, R. L. 1974 Parent-offspring conflict. American Zoologist.
14(1):249-264.

Sexual Selection
1. Zahavi, A. 1975. Mate selection - a selection of a handicap. J. Theor.
Biol. 53:205-214.

2. Kirkpatrick, M., and Ryan, M.J. 1991. The evolution of mating
preferences and the paradox of the lek. Nature. 350:33-38.

Fitness Landscapes
1. Dean, A. 1995. A Molecular Investigation of Genotype by Environment
Interactions. Genetics. 139:19-33.

2. Costanzo et al. 2010. The Genetic Landscape of a Cell. Science.

Speciation
1. Coyne, J. A., and H. A. Orr. 1989. Patterns of speciation in Drosophila.
Evolution. 43:362-381.

2. Corbett-Detig et al. 2013. Genetic incompatibilities are widespread
within species. Nature.

2.       *Marcos Antezana:*

Valen, L. v. 1975. Energy and Evolution. University of Chicago, Department
of Biology.

3.       *Remco Folkertsma:*

1. The work by Hopi Hoekstra on local adaptation and oldfield mice

2. Poelstra, J. W., Vijay, N., Bossu, C. M., Lantz, H., Ryll, B., Müller,
I., ... & Wolf, J. B. (2014). The genomic landscape underlying phenotypic
integrity in the face of gene flow in crows. Science, 344(6190), 1410-1414.

4.       *Joshka Kaufmann and Leslie Turner*

They offer us a link to 'papers every evolutionary biologist should read',
the papers are collected by Leslie Turner.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53e8cb7ce4b02c4bc3aeeee4/t/5ab8fcb670a6ad55c67fcdf4/1522072758665/EvoBioClassicsRefList.pdf

5.       *Sarah Stockwell*

Matt Ridley collected classic papers in evolutionary biology and printed
part of these papers in his book Evolution (see Matt Ridley. Evolution
(Univ. of Oxford Press, 2nd edition, 2004))

SOWDHAMINI Lab

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 09:19:12 -0500

Genome sequencing projects have enormous potential for benefiting human endeavors. However, just as acquiring a language's vocabulary does not enable one to speak it, databases that list the amino acid composition of proteins do not directly tell us much about these proteins' higher-level structure and function. The most productive way to indirectly exploit these databases has been to start with the small number of proteins that are fully-characterised and to assume that other "similar" proteins will have a related structure and function. Proteins with very similar amino acid sequence are "no-brainers", but the real test, which our group largely focuses on, is to detect the "essential" similarity in proteins whose non-critical sections have experienced random rearrangements during evolution. In such cases functionally similar proteins may have less than 25% sequence overlap.

More @ http://www.ncbs.res.in/sowdhamini/groups_sowdhamini.htm

MimicrEE2: Genome-wide forward simulations of Evolve and Resequencing studies

Jit — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 09:21:14 -0500

MimicrEE2, a multi-threaded Java program for genome-wide forward simulations of evolving populations. MimicrEE2 enables the convenient usage of available genomic resources, supports biological particulars of model organism frequently used in E&R studies and offers a wide range of different adaptive models (selective sweeps, polygenic adaptation, epistasis). MimicrEE2 runs on any computer with Java installed. It is distributed under the GPLv3 license at https://sourceforge.net/projects/mimicree2/.

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/mimicree2/

Faculty post at Zhejiang University

Tue, 10 Jun 2014 03:40:40 -0500

Zhejiang University (ZJU) is seeking faculty candidates for its newly launched, highly competitive and well funded “Hundred Talents Program”. This search covers all colleges and departments at ZJU. Applicants, expected to be about 35 years old, should hold PhD degree, and postdoctoral experiences are preferred for applicants in most fields. Applicants should have demonstrated commitment to excellence in teaching and research at a level comparable to the academic achievement of assistant professor or associate professor in world-renowned universities. Successful candidates must work full-time and are expected to establish internationally competitive and independent research program in cutting-edge areas of the relevant field at ZJU.

As one of the leading research-intensive universities in China, ZJU is located in the beautiful city of Hangzhou. Successful candidates will be employed as Principal Investigators and are qualified to supervise doctoral students. ZJU will offer an internationally competitive salary and the opportunity to purchase university's apartment at a price much lower than the market price, and will provide office and laboratory spaces as well as internationally competitive research startup packages.

Qualified applicants are strongly encouraged to submit their applications electronically to tr@zju.edu.cn. Applicants should include the following materials in pdf format: a comprehensive CV, a statement of research and teaching plan, and a list of 3 to 5 references with detailed contact information.

Contact：Talents Office, ZJU

Tel：+86-571-88981345, +86-571-88981390

Fax：+86-571-88981976

E-mail:tr@zju.edu.cn

ALF--a simulation framework for genome evolution.

Jit — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 22:05:58 -0500

Artificial Life Framework (ALF) simulates a root genome into a number of related genomes. Result files include the resulting gene sequences, true tree and true MSAs. A description of ALF can be found in the following article:

Daniel A Dalquen, Maria Anisimova, Gaston H Gonnet, Christophe Dessimoz: ALF - A Simulation Framework for Genome Evolution. Mol Biol Evol, 29(4):1115-1123, April 2012.
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/4/1115

Address of the bookmark: http://alfsim.org/#index

XAMPP: Starting Apache fail Ubuntu

Ram Yash Pal — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 05:52:35 -0500

Once you install XAMMP on linux, the most common problem you face is Apache failure. To fix the issues please use following command to first stop and then again start it.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

sudo /etc/init.d/proftpd stop

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

PhpMyAdmin “Wrong permissions on configuration file, should not be world writable!”

Once the Xammp is installed, it might be possible to set up the configuration file in writable mode. Try the following steps:

Just chmod 0755 the file

sudo chmod 0755 config.inc.php

"IdeasLab"* workshop !

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 06:13:48 -0600

A new, grant-funded opportunity seeks early career researchers interested
in life's origins: https://templetonideaslab.umbc.edu/

Applications are invited to an all-expenses paid position at a 5-day
"IdeasLab"* workshop to be held near Prague CZ in June 2022. Thirty
successful applicants will be drawn in equal number from the relevant
sectors biological evolution, A-Life anbd theoretical physics. The week's
activities will lead these thirty to form interdisciplinary teams which
each propose how they can advance frontiers of abiogenesis research. Up to
$5 million total funding will be available for developing these ideas
produced by the week's activities. Further details of the event,
including the online application form, are found at the link posted above

Synorth: exploring the evolution of synteny and long-range regulatory interactions in vertebrate genomes

LEGE — Mon, 06 May 2024 06:21:10 -0500

Genomic regulatory blocks are chromosomal regions spanned by long clusters of highly conserved noncoding elements devoted to long-range regulation of developmental genes, often immobilizing other, unrelated genes into long-lasting syntenic arrangements. Synorth http://synorth.genereg.net/ is a web resource for exploring and categorizing the syntenic relationships in genomic regulatory blocks across multiple genomes, tracing their evolutionary fate after teleost whole genome duplication at the level of genomic regulatory block loci, individual genes, and their phylogenetic context.

More at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2745767/

Address of the bookmark: http://synorth.genereg.net/