1. Illumina, Inc. (U.S.)

Illumina, Inc. was founded in 1998 and is headquartered at San Diego, U.S. Illumina, Inc. is one of the leading players in DNA sequencing and array-based technologies, serving customers in the research, clinical, and applied markets. The company offers products for applications in the life sciences, oncology, reproductive health, agriculture, and other emerging segments. The company serves government laboratories, genomic research centers, academics institutions as well as pharmaceutical, biotechnology, agrigenomics, commercial molecular diagnostics laboratories and consumer genomics companies. Illumina, Inc. has its geographic presence in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia-pacific, and others.

2. QIAGEN N.V. (Netherlands)

QIAGEN N.V. was incorporated in 1986 and is headquartered at Venlo, The Netherlands. The Company is engaged in providing Sample to Insight solutions that transform biological samples into molecular insights. QIAGEN provides its workflow to customers in molecular diagnostics, assay technologies, bioservices and automation systems.  The company’s genome services are suitable for custom/tailored projects that allow access to genomic sequence information.  The Company market its products in more than 100 countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Middle-East &Africa through its subsidiaries and channel partners.

3. PerkinElmer, Inc. (U.S.)

PerkinElmer, Inc. was founded in 1947 and is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, the U.S. PerkinElmer, Inc. offers its products & services and solutions for the diagnostics, food, environmental, industrial, life sciences research and laboratory services markets. The company offer comprehensive genetic testing solutions that help to provide insight into the complex nature of rare and inherited diseases. Some of the subsidiaries of the company are Caliper Life Sciences, Improvision, Viacell Inc., ViaCord LLC, among many others. The company has its facilities located in Europe (France, Germany, and Belgium), U.S. and Asia (China, India, and Japan).

4. Eurofins Scientific SE (Luxembourg)

Eurofins Scientific SE was founded in 1987 and is headquartered in Luxembourg, Europe. The company offers a portfolio of over 130,000 analytical methods and more than 150 million assays performed each year to establish the safety, identity, composition, authenticity, origin, traceability, and purity of biological substances and products, as well as carry out human diagnostic services. The company has its geographic presence across 39 countries in Europe, North and South America, and Asia-Pacific.

5. GATC Biotech AG (Germany)

GATC Biotech AG was founded in 1990 and is headquartered in Constance, Germany. The company provides DNA and RNA sequencing and bioservices solutions to academics and industrial areas. It also provides next generation sequencing services including genomes, targeted (re)-sequencing, human sample sequencing, transcriptomes, metagenomes, regulomes, pre-sequencing, NGS barcode labels, and next generation sequencing technologies; and bioservices services, including bioservices tools, pipelines and workflows, compute resources, data analysis reports, and case studies. GATC Biotech AG operates as a subsidiary of Eurofins Scientific SE. It offers its products through distributors in Italy, Japan, Portugal, Spain, and the Czech Republic.

6. Macrogen, Inc. (South Korea)

Macrogen, Inc. was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea. Macrogen, Inc. provides next generation sequencing services such as whole genome, de novo, exome, targeted, transcriptomics, metagenome, and epigenome sequencing.  The company also provides a variety of services such as oligo synthesis, database construction, genome research, and bioservices analysis system consulting services. Macrogen, Inc. provides genome research services in Korea and internationally.

7. Genotypic Technology Pvt. Ltd. (India)

Genotypic Technology Pvt. Ltd. was incorporated in 1998 and is headquartered in Bangalore, India. Genotypic Technology is the first Genomics service provider in India providing Microarray, Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), Bioservices and solutions to domestic/ international pharma, biotech companies and academia. The company provides its services for protocol optimization, probe designing, array layouts, project designing, and nucleic acid analysis to in-depth analysis. Genotypic Technology has its geographic presence in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, and Latin America.

8. GENEWIZ, Inc. (U.S.)

GENEWIZ, Inc. was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in South Plainfield, New Jersey, the U.S.; The company is a leading provider of research service in the field of Next Generation Sequencing, Sanger DNA sequencing, sequencing of bacteria and phage, gene synthesis, DNA cloning, genomics including mutation analysis, single nucleotide polymorphism, and bioservices. GENEWIZ, Inc. has its geographic presence in U.S., China, Germany, France, Japan, and the U.K.

9. Beijing Genomics Institute (China)

Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) is the world’s largest genomics organization and non-profit research institution that was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Shenzhen, China. The Company provides a wide range of commercial next generation sequencing services and genetic tests for medical institutions, agricultural and environmental applications. The Company operates all across the globe through its subsidiaries, namely, BGI China (Mainland), BGI Asia Pacific, BGI Americas (North and South America) and BGI Europe (Europe and Africa).

10. SciGenom Labs Pvt. Ltd (India)

SciGenom Labs Pvt. Ltd was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Cochin, India with offices in Chennai & Hyderabad in India, and San Francisco in the U.S. It is a Genomics R&D services company that provides genomic sequencing and NGS services to life sciences and healthcare businesses globally as well as academic and government institutions in India.

Popular mentions – MedGenome (India), DNA Link, Inc. (South Korea), Otogenetics Corporation (U.S.), Novogene Corporation (China), LGC Limited (U.K.), CD Genomics (U.S.), SeqLL, LLC (U.S.)

The vital metaphase stage of cell division, when the sister chromatids migrated to the centre and lined up in a row, and pulled apart using attached microtubules in such a way that half the DNA ends up in each daughter cell. However, before the mitotic spindle‐mediated movement gets start and pulled DNA apart, the chromosomes are free to undergo recombination which involves the exchange of genetic material either between multiple chromosomes or between different regions of the same chromosome.

During recombination, the precise breakage of each strand, exchange between the strands, and sealing of the resulting recombined molecules happens. The “chromosomal breakpoints” refers to these places where they break. Mostly, this process occurs with a high degree of accuracy at high frequency in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells. But occasionally this “break and sealing/ break and reattach” process goes wrong and the reattachment happens in the wrong place which usually create disaster (with few exceptions).These chromosome disaster or abnormalities involve the gain, loss or rearrangement of visible amounts of genetic material during cell division. These abnormalities are of two type, the first one is numerical abnormalities  where severe disorders are caused by the loss or gain of whole chromosomes, which affect the copy number of hundreds or even thousands of genes. The second are structural abnormalities which can be unbalanced or balanced. The former are similar to numerical abnormalities in that genetic material is either gained or lost. The natural defects in chromosome segregation are linked to cancer and several genetic diseases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders). Therefore, the enzymes involved in regulating cell division are still the attractive drug targets for many diseases.

Apart from certain chromosome abnormalities, these “crossing over” of segments of maternal and paternal chromosomes to form hybrid chromosomes have some evolutionary importance and considered as a driver of genetic variation. Moreover, the chromosome breakage in evolution is considered to be non-random in nature(http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.0020014). In addition the study of breakpoint regions and non-breakpoint (stable) regions of chromosomes indicates both the regions evolved in distinctly different ways ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2675965/). These breakage may lead to genetic diseases or participate to chromosomal rearranmgnets and contributed in development of new species.

I will try to explain the genome hotspots/Evolutionary Breakpoint Regions(EBRs)/fragile regions/weak fragments/  in my next blog.

Software for recombination detection:

RAT http://cbr.jic.ac.uk/dicks/software/RAT/

Breakpointer https://github.com/ruping/Breakpointer

DRP http://web.cbio.uct.ac.za/~darren/rdp.html

RB-finder http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18707535

LDhat2.0 http://ldhat.sourceforge.net/LDhat2.0/instructions.shtml

Reference:

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/genetic-recombination-514#

Image: Wikipedia , sciencelearn.org.nz

Recommended Articles:

http://www.friendshipcircle.org/blog/2012/05/22/13-chromosomal-disorders-youve-never-heard-of/

http://web.udl.es/usuaris/e4650869/docencia/segoncicle/genclin98/recursos_classe_%28pdf%29/revisionsPDF/chromosyndromes.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2775595/table/T2/

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/disorders/chromosomal/

http://www.ncert.nic.in/html/learning_basket/biology/cc&cd.pdf

Address of the bookmark: http://pacb.com/blog/the-hifi-difference-true-long-reads-vs-synthetic-long-reads/

• Whole-genome sequencing
• Whole-exome sequencing
• RNA-seq (speical mode available)
• ChIP-seq

Address of the bookmark: http://qualimap.bioinfo.cipf.es/

The prepint version is found on http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/08/09/173872

It uses the pyPaSWAS framework for sequence alignment (https://github.com/swarris/pyPaSWAS)

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/swarris/Pacasus

Computational methods used by the Shasta assembler include:

• Using a run-length representation of the read sequence. This makes the assembly process more resilient to errors in homopolymer repeat counts, which are the most common type of errors in Oxford Nanopore reads.
• Using in some phases of the computation a representation of the read sequence based on markers, a fixed subset of short k-mers (k ≈ 10).

More at https://chanzuckerberg.github.io/shasta/index.html

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/chanzuckerberg/shasta

More at https://github.com/ekg/mutatrix

./mutatrix -S sample -P test/ -p 2 -n 10 reference.fasta

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ekg/mutatrix

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/mattharrison/Tiny-Python-3.6-Notebook/blob/master/python.rst

What Is Julia Language?

Julia is a programming language that came into the limelight in 2012. It is a general-purpose programming language that was designed for solving scientific computations. Julia was meant to be an alternative to Python, R and other programming languages that were mainly used for manipulating data. This is because it has numerous features that can minimize the complexities of numerical computations. 

Julia optimizes on the best features of Python and R while at the same time overlooks their weaknesses. This explains why it is viewed as an alternative to these programming languages. For instance, it utilizes the readability and simplicity of Python then performs faster.

Julia is the most preferred programming language for data scientists and mathematicians. This is because its core features are similar to the ones that are used on most data software. Also, the language is ideal for these two subjects because its syntax is similar to the standard mathematical formulas.

Key Features Of Julia Language
Uses JIT Compilation
Parallelism
Dynamic Typing
Simple Syntax
Allows Metaprogramming
Accessible to Libraries
-1-Array Indexing

Julia Vs Python And R Programming Languages
1. Speed
Julia is faster than both Python and R. This is a very critical aspect that is given special attention in the big data programming. The high speed of Julia is because of JIT compilers. You will need to install external libraries on Python to achieve similar speed.

2. Syntax
Julia has a math-friendly syntax. The syntax of this programming language is similar to the mathematical formulas hence can be used to perform mathematical and scientific computations. This syntax makes it easier to learn than Python.

3. Parallelism
Although both Python and R use parallelism, Julia uses a top-level parallelism. Julia allows the processor to perform to the optimum level than what Python and R can achieve.

4. Versatility
Julia programming language is more versatile than Python and R. It allows a programmer to move from different codes and functions with ease.

The only area that Python and R are superior to Julia is in terms of community. Given that Julia is a new programming language, it has a small community as compared to others which have been around for years.

In overall Julia programming language is a better alternative that you can use to handle Big data projects. Despite having a small community, it is one of those programming languages that you can easily learn.

Other tools

https://github.com/shenwei356/taxonkit

• ETE, version: 3.1.1
• BioPython, version: 1.73
• taxadb, version: 0.10.1
• TaxonKit, version: 0.5.0

Address of the bookmark: https://pypi.org/project/ete3/3.1.1/