BOL: Related items

Bioinformatics Workshops - NO CODING REQUIRED

eliabrodsky — Mon, 09 Apr 2018 13:06:01 -0500

Pine Biotech, Inc., a US-based startup working with the Tauber Bioinformatics Research Center is offering a full curriculum online preparing students without any technical background for real-life challenges with large scale biomedical data. Workshops on processing, analysis and biomedical interpretation of Next Generation Sequencing data cover important up-to-date algorithms and machine learning approaches. The most important thing is that there are virtually no pre-requisites such as coding, biostatistics or advanced medical skills. If you know what gene is and how the genes are expressed, you are ready to take the courses or join our workshops. Learn more: https://edu.t-bio.info/workshops/

Bionics, Transhumanism, and the end of Evolution (Full Documentary)

Fri, 27 Sep 2013 11:54:17 -0500

Bionics, Transhumanism, and the end of Evolution (Full Documentary) . 2013 This documentary and the rest of the documentaries presented relate to important times and figures in history, historic places and sites, archaeology, science, conspiracy theories, and education. The Topics of these video documentaries are varied and cover ancient history, Rome, Greece, Egypt, science, technology, nature, planet earth, the solar system, the universe, World wars, Battles, education, Biographies, television, archaeology, Illuminati, Area 51, serial killers, paranormal, supernatural, cults, government cover-ups, corruption, martial arts, space, aliens, ufos, conspiracy theories, Annunaki, Nibiru, Nephilim, satanic rituals, religion, strange phenomenon, origins of Mankind

Manolis Kellis Lab

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 20:51:06 -0600

A major focus of our lab is understanding the effects of genetic variation on molecular phenotypes and human disease. We develop methods for integrating diverse functional genomic datasets of transcription, chromatin modifications, regulator binding, and their changes across multiple conditions to interpret genetic associations, identify causal variants, and predict the effects of genetic perturbations.

More at http://compbio.mit.edu

Blaxter Lab

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 08:05:28 -0600

Using these high quality genomes we explore

the evolutionary history of genes and species, building phylogenetic trees of life
the contrasting roles of horizontal gene transfer and introgression in shaping evolution
the biology of symbioses, especially symbioses between eukaryotes and bacteria, and between parasites and their hosts
the processes that drive the evolution of pattern in the structure of chromosomes
the diversity of meiofauna, particularly tardigrades, nematodes and other Ecdysozoa
the genomics of extremophilia

More at https://www.sanger.ac.uk/group/blaxter-group/

Internship program with ArrayGen Technolgies

Sun, 22 Jun 2014 23:18:31 -0500

Internship Program for Bioinformatics / Biotechnology Professionals Currently we offer positions to outstanding students interested in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data analysis. Applications are accepted throughout the year. Accepted students will be listed on web with their schedules. Accepted students can attend our future workshops and trainings freely at the specified venue.

Interested candidates may email their resume along with a cover letter to careers@arraygen.com

Official website: http://www.arraygen.com/

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))

Ancestral sequence reconstruction (ASR) or ancestral gene/sequence reconstruction/resurrection tools to study molecular evolution

Jit — Tue, 30 May 2017 04:20:05 -0500

Ancestral sequence reconstruction (ASR) – also known as ancestral gene/sequence reconstruction/resurrection – is a technique used in the study of molecular evolution. The method consists of the synthesis of an ancestral gene and expression of the corresponding ancestral protein. The idea of protein 'resurrection' was suggested in 1963 by Pauling and Zuckerkandl. Some early efforts were made in the eighties-nineties, led by the laboratory of Steven A. Benner, showing the potential of this technique – one that only started to be fulfilled in the post-genomic era. Thanks to the improvement of algorithms and of better sequencing and synthesis techniques, the method was developed further in the early 2000s to allow the resurrection of a greater variety of and much more ancient genes. Over the last decade, ancestral protein resurrection has developed as a strategy to reveal the mechanisms and dynamics of protein evolution.

Following are the list of Ancestral /sequence/ reconstruction (ASR) tools:

inferCars

Reconstructs contiguous regions of an ancestral genome. Given information about adjacencies between conserved segments in each modern species, our goal is to infer segment order in the ancestral genome. To get a clean and precise statement of the problem, we formalize it using graph theory. We develop an algorithm that identifies a most parsimonious scenario for the history of each individual adjacency, although the whole-genome prediction is not guaranteed to optimize traditional measures like the number of breakpoints. We introduce weights to the graph edges to model the reliability of each adjacency.

ANGES:reconstructing ANcestral GEnomeS maps

A suite of Python programs that allows reconstructing ancestral genome maps from the comparison of the organization of extant-related genomes. ANGES can reconstruct ancestral genome maps for multichromosomal linear genomes and unichromosomal circular genomes. It implements methods inspired from techniques developed to compute physical maps of extant genomes.

Cocos

Constructs phylogenies of multi-domain proteins. With a given species tree and domain phylogenies, the procedure infers the composition of ancestral multi-domain proteins. Cocos implements and extend a suggested algorithmic approach by Behzadi and Vingron in an easy-to-use program. Such method could be applied to reconstruction of partial homologous units such as bacterial operons or protein complexes.

MySSP

Constructs an initial DNA sequence at the root of the tree and simulates evolution across the tree using a variety of common models of DNA evolution. MySSP is a program for the simulation of DNA sequence evolution across a phylogenetic tree. It is designed for large-scale studies, including simulation of multiple replicates and outputs sequences into NEXUS, MEGA, or FASTA formats. MySSP has a fairly simple graphical user interface (GUI) for basic use, but also has a specialized batch script interpreter to allow for more complicated or large-scale simulations.

PARANA: Parsimonious Ancestral Reconstruction And Network Analysis

Performs parsimony based inference of ancestral biological networks. Given multiple extant networks and phylogenetic information relating extant nodes, PARANA finds a parsimonious set of ancestral interaction events (edge gains and losses) which explain the extant networks. The framework adopted by PARANA is able to represent network evolution under models that support gene duplication and loss and independent interaction gain and loss. The method works on both directed and undirected networks and can incorporate asymmetric interaction gain and loss costs. In contrast to previous approaches, PARANA does not require knowing the relative ordering of unrelated duplication events and thus, works on phylogenetic trees even where branch lengths are not provided.

GapAdj: Gapped Adjacencies

A synteny-based method that is flexible enough to handle a model of evolution involving whole genome duplication events, in addition to rearrangements, gene insertions, and losses. Ancestral relationships between markers are defined in term of Gapped Adjacencies, i.e. pairs of markers separated by up to a given number of markers. It improves on a previous restricted to direct adjacencies, which revealed a high accuracy for adjacency prediction, but with the drawback of being overly conservative, i.e. of generating a large number of contiguous ancestral regions (CARs).

ANCESTOR

A web server allowing one to easily and quickly perform the last three steps of the ancestral genome reconstruction procedure. Ancestors implements several alignment algorithms, an indel maximum likelihood solver and a context-dependent maximum likelihood substitution inference algorithm. The results presented by the server include the posterior probabilities for the last two steps of the ancestral genome reconstruction and the expected error rate of each ancestral base prediction.

ProCARs

Reconstructs ancestral gene orders as contiguous ancestral regions (CARs) with a progressive homology-based method. ProCARs runs from a phylogeny tree (without branch lengths needed) with a marked ancestor and a block file. This homology-based method is based on iteratively detecting and assembling ancestral adjacencies, while allowing some micro-rearrangements of synteny blocks at the extremities of the progressively assembled CARs. The method starts with a set of blocks as the initial set of CARs, and detects iteratively the potential ancestral adjacencies between extremities of CARs, while building up the CARs progressively by adding, at each step, new non-conflicting adjacencies that induce the less homoplasy phenomenon. The species tree is used, in some additional internal steps, to compute a score for the remaining conflicting adjacencies, and to detect other reliable adjacencies, in order to reach completely assembled ancestral genomes.

FastML

A user-friendly tool for the reconstruction of ancestral sequences. FastML implements various novel features that differentiate it from existing tools: (i) FastML uses an indel-coding method, in which each gap, possibly spanning multiples sites, is coded as binary data. FastML then reconstructs ancestral indel states assuming a continuous time Markov process. FastML provides the most likely ancestral sequences, integrating both indels and characters; (ii) FastML accounts for uncertainty in ancestral states: it provides not only the posterior probabilities for each character and indel at each sequence position, but also a sample of ancestral sequences from this posterior distribution, and a list of the k-most likely ancestral sequences; (iii) FastML implements a large array of evolutionary models, which makes it generic and applicable for nucleotide, protein and codon sequences; and (iv) a graphical representation of the results is provided, including, for example, a graphical logo of the inferred ancestral sequences.

maxAlike

Reconstructs a genomic sequence for a specific taxon based on sequence homologs in other species. The input is a multiple sequence alignment and a phylogenetic tree that also contains the target species. For this target species, the algorithm computes nucleotide probabilities at each sequence position. Consensus sequences are then reconstructed based on a certain confidence level.

MLGO: Maximum Likelihood for Gene Order Analysis

A web tool for the reconstruction of phylogeny and/or ancestral genomes from gene-order data. MLGO was designed for analysis of large-scale genomic changes including not only rearrangements but also gene insertions, deletions and duplications. MLGO can be used to infer a phylogeny from genome rearrangement and gene order data, and can also obtain an estimation of ancestral genomes, given an input tree. MLGO takes the advantage of binary encoding on gene-order data, supports a fairly general model of genomic evolution (rearrangements plus duplications, insertions, and losses of genomic regions), and successfully accommodates itself into the framework of maximized likelihood.

Image Reference : Wiki

Sidow Lab

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 09:06:30 -0600

We study mechanisms of cancer evolution by using state-of-the-art genomic approaches at the bench and in analysis. Accurate genome reconstruction is our other major area of interest. We also collaborate on important questions for which our expertise in genomics and computation is relevant. Arend's biosketch highlights some of our past contributions.

http://www.sidowlab.org/

The 8000 years old Tibetian gene mutation !!!

Neel — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 21:57:44 -0500

A new study has provided insight into how gene mutation around 8,000 years ago helped Tibetans' to survive in the thin air on the Tibetan Plateau, where an average elevation is of 14,800 feet.

A study led by University of Utah scientists is the first to find a genetic cause for the adaptation, a single DNA base pair change that dates back 8,000 years and demonstrate how it contributes to the Tibetans' ability to live in low oxygen conditions.

About 8,000 years ago, the gene EGLN1 changed by a single DNA base pair. Today, a relatively short time later on the scale of human history, 88 percent of Tibetans have the genetic variation, and it was virtually absent from closely related lowland Asians. The findings indicate the genetic variation endows its carriers with an advantage.

In those without the adaptation, low oxygen caused their blood to become thick with oxygen-carrying red blood cells, an attempt to feed starved tissues, which could cause long-term complications such as heart failure. The researchers found that the newly identified genetic variation protected Tibetans by decreasing the over-response to low oxygen.

Reference: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7513/abs/nature13408.html

Coronavirus Resources !

Neel — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 17:11:33 -0500

2019nCoVR features comprehensive integration of genomic and proteomic sequences as well as their metadata information from the GISAID, NCBI, NMDC and CNCB/NGDC. It also incorporates a wide range of relevant information including scientific literatures, news, and popular articles for science dissemination, and provides visualization functionalities for genome variation analysis results based on all collected 2019-nCoV strains.

Annotation

https://bigd.big.ac.cn/ncov/variation/annotation

Genome wharehouse

https://bigd.big.ac.cn/gwh/browse/index

Released Genome

https://bigd.big.ac.cn/ncov/release_genome

Download data

ftp://download.big.ac.cn/Genome/Viruses/Coronaviridae/

Raw data

https://bigd.big.ac.cn/gsa/browse/run/?tag=Coronaviridae

Address of the bookmark: https://bigd.big.ac.cn/ncov/about