BOL: Related items

Ancestral Genomes: a resource for reconstructed ancestral genes and genomes across the tree of life

Abhimanyu Singh — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 08:16:27 -0500

Ancestral Genomes (http://ancestralgenomes.org) is a resource for comprehensive reconstructions of these ‘fossil genomes’. Comprehensive sets of protein-coding genes have been reconstructed for 78 genomes of now-extinct species that were the common ancestors of extant species from across the tree of life.

Address of the bookmark: http://ancestralgenomes.org/

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/

ClueGO: a Cytoscape plug-in that visualizes the non-redundant biological terms for large clusters of genes

BioStar — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 10:24:29 -0500

ClueGO is a Cytoscape plug-in that visualizes the non-redundant biological terms for large clusters of genes in a functionally grouped network and it can be used in combination with GOlorize. The identifiers can be uploaded from a text file or interactively from a network of Cytoscape. The type of identifiers supported can be easely extended by the user. ClueGO performs single cluster analysis and comparison of clusters. From the ontology sources used, the terms are selected by different filter criteria. The related terms which share similar associated genes can be fused to reduce redundancy. The ClueGO network is created with kappa statistics and reflects the relationships between the terms based on the similarity of their associated genes. On the network, the node colour can be switched between functional groups and clusters distribution. ClueGO charts are underlying the specificity and the common aspects of the biological role. The significance of the terms and groups is automatically calculated. ClueGO is easy updatable with the newest files from Gene Ontology and KEGG.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ici.upmc.fr/cluego/

Orthoflow: workflow for phylogenetic inference of genome-scale datasets of protein-coding genes

LEGE — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 06:13:08 -0600

Orthoflow is a workflow for phylogenetic inference of genome-scale datasets of protein-coding genes. Our goal was to make it straightforward to work from a combination of input sources including annotated contigs in Genbank format and FASTA files containing CDSs. It uses several state of the art inference methods for orthology inference, either based on HMM profiles or de novo inference of orthogroups. Through the use of OrthoSNAP, many additional ortholog alignments can be generated from multi-copy gene families. For phylogenetic inference, users can choose a supermatrix approach and/or gene tree inference followed by supertree reconstruction. Users can specify a range of alignment filtering settings to retain high-quality alignments for phylogenetic inference. The workflow produces a detailed report that, in addition to the phylogenetic results, includes a range of diagnostics to verify the quality of the results.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/rbturnbull/orthoflow

Fourth Branch of Life

Jitendra Narayan — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 21:48:37 -0500

Scientist have found the biggest viruses known, pandoraviruses which opened up entirely /completely... new questions questions and raise objections to in science. It even suggesting a fourth domain of life.

The new visrus are about one micron—a thousandth of a millimeter—in length, the newfound genus Pandoravirus dwarfs other viruses, which range in size from about 50 nanometers up to 100 nanometers. A genus is a taxonomic ranking between species and family.

Find more at @ http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/viruses101/newly_found_pandoraviruses_hint_at

http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2013/07/130718-viruses-pandoraviruses-science-biology-evolution/

Breaking chromosomes to study cancer !!!

Jit — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 05:42:09 -0500

Chromosomes are present in every cell of our body and they contain the information the body needs to develop and function properly. This information is carried in genes that are arranged along the chromosomes. There are usually 46 chromosomes in every cell. These chromosomes come in pairs, one from our mother and one from our father. The chromosomes can be sorted into 23 pairs by looking at them down a microscope.

Most people who have a balanced translocation have the right amount of chromosome material but it has been rearranged in some way. This may happen if two chromosomes swap pieces (a reciprocal translocation). In other cases two whole chromosomes may become stuck together (a Robertsonian translocation). This page describes what happens when someone has a reciprocal translocation.

Reciprocal chromosomal translocations occur following double-strand breaks (DSBs) in DNA when a section of one chromosome is exchanged with that of another, non-homologous chromosome. These exchanges may produce a dysfunctional fusion gene that disrupts cell growth and survival pathways, such as the translocations seen in leukemia and childhood sarcomas.

Chromosomal translocations have been well studied in cancer cell lines which are associated with two types of cancer, acute myeloid leukemia and Ewing's sarcoma, but determining how they contribute to cancer development is complicated by additional mutations and altered gene expression profiles in these cultured cells. Now, Juan Carlos Ramirez, head of the Viral Vector Facility at the Fundacion Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) and his colleagues Raul Torres at CNIC and Sandra Rodriguez-Peralez at the Spanish National Cancer Center (CNIO) in Madrid, Spain have used a new genome editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9, to induce chromosomal translocations for the first time in a human cell line and in primary cells. The study's authors conclude by stating that the use of this technology will allow for the clarification of how and why chromosomal translocation occurs, which without doubt will allow new anti-cancer therapeutic strategies to be tackled.

Using RNA-Guided Endonuclease (RGEN) technology or CRISPR/Cas9 genome engineering technology, CNIO and CNIC researchers have shown that it is possible to obtain such chromosomal translocations. The CRISPR-Cas9 system is extremely simple to introduce a cut at the desired locus, easier to design, and cheaper than many other systems. Using the CRISPR-Cas9 system, Ramirez and his colleagues reproduced the translocations observed in Ewing’s Sarcoma (ES) and Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) patient cell lines in HEK293 cells and also generated the ES translocation in human mesenchymal stem cells and the AML translocation in umbilical cord blood cells.

By focusing on chromosomal translocation without the confounding characteristics of established cell lines, these new cells lines should help answer the fundamental question of what causes a cell to become cancerous. Ramirez and his team now look forward to modeling other chromosome translocations in a variety of cell types.

Reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosomal_translocation

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140603/ncomms4964/abs/ncomms4964.html

Master Thesis: Trans-membrane topology prediction through Markov based decoders

Rahul Agarwal — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 16:16:17 -0500

Abstract:

Background/Motivation:

The dearth of structural information on alpha helical membrane protein (MPs) has hindered thus far the development of reliable knowledge –based potentials that can be used for automatic prediction of trans-membrane (TM) protein structure. While algorithm for identification of TM segments is available, modelling of the domains of alpha helical MPs involves assembling the segments into a bundle. This requires the correct assignment of the buried and lipid-exposed faces of the TM domains.

Results: In a cross validated test on single sequences, our trans-membrane MM, correctly predicts the entire topology for 77% of the sequences in a standard dataset of 86 proteins with supervised topology. These results compare favorably with existing methods.

Source Code: Matlab

Conclusion/Implementation: Here discriminant data mining approach was used to predict the location and orientation of alpha helices in membrane-spanning proteins. It is based on a first order Markov model (MM) with an architecture that corresponds closely to the biological systems. The model is enriched with three types of states for the loop on the cytoplasmic side (outer loop), loop for the non-cytoplasmic side (inner side), and trans-membrane part. The closed association between the biological and Markov states allows us to infer which part of the model architecture are important to capture the information which encodes the membrane topology, and gain a better understanding of the mechanism and constraints involved. Predictor Model was established by various Markov decoder , and assignment of the membrane helix boundaries was apparent.

Automatic Predictive Model Constructor - APMC

Jan Bińkowski — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 09:43:21 -0500

I would like to invite everyone interested in the subject of machine learning in life science, to test APMC module,

it`s a fully automatic tool (created by students) to simply create and develop supervised machine learning models

for classification and regression purposes. Links to tool, instruction and documentation bellow:

APMC: https://gene-calc.pl/apmc
How to use: https://gene-calc.pl/apmc/how-to-use
Documentation: https://gene-calc.pl/apmc/documentation

Termal: a fast and interactive terminal-based viewer for multiple sequence alignments

LEGE — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 23:51:02 -0500

termal, a fast, interactive, terminal-based viewer for multiple sequence alignments (MSAs), designed for use on remote systems such as high-performance computing (HPC) clusters.

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformaticsadvances/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bioadv/vbaf208/8257678?login=true

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/sib-swiss/termal

When Genes Leave Clues: Reading the Evolutionary Footprints of Life

LEGE — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:47:07 -0500

Imagine walking through a forest and finding two sets of footprints that always appear, disappear, and reappear together. You might wonder whether the animals are connected. In genomics, genes leave similar footprints across evolution. When two genes repeatedly occur together—or disappear together—across different species, their shared evolutionary history can provide clues about their function.

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 together seven profile-comparison methods and four approaches for identifying co-evolving gene clusters, making it easier to explore hidden functional relationships within genomes.

The study demonstrates that even a simple matrix of gene presence and absence can reveal meaningful biological patterns. By following these evolutionary footprints, researchers can generate new hypotheses about unknown genes, pathways, and molecular interactions. In a world where genomes are being sequenced faster than ever, tools like Profylo offer an exciting way to let evolution itself become a guide to understanding gene function.

More at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00239-025-10280-6