BOL: Related items

The Tree That Learned to Read Genomes

BioStar — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:51:02 -0500

Imagine trying to reconstruct a family tree when many family photographs are missing, some names are unclear, and different relatives remember the past differently. This is similar to the challenge scientists face when trying to understand how organisms are related. Their family records are genomes, and the family tree is a phylogenetic tree. With modern sequencing technologies, scientists now have access to thousands of genomes, but comparing them can be difficult, especially when genomes are incomplete or poorly annotated.

A recent study by Webster and Chapman introduces Buscogeny (https://github.com/Jwebster89/Buscogeny), an open-source bioinformatics pipeline designed to make this process easier. The tool uses BUSCO (Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs), which identifies conserved genes that are expected to occur as single copies in particular groups of organisms. These genes act like evolutionary landmarks, allowing researchers to compare genomes and investigate their relationships.

Buscogeny brings several steps of phylogenomic analysis into one workflow. It identifies BUSCO genes, extracts and aligns their sequences, removes unreliable regions, combines information from multiple genes, and uses the resulting data to construct a phylogenetic tree. It also provides quality-control information, helping researchers identify genomes that may be too incomplete for reliable analysis.

The authors demonstrate the usefulness of Buscogeny with bacterial and fungal genomes, including Alternaria. This is particularly valuable because fungal genomes can vary greatly in quality and annotation. Ultimately, Buscogeny helps transform massive amounts of genomic data into an understandable evolutionary story. Each DNA sequence becomes a clue, each conserved gene becomes a landmark, and together these clues reveal a picture of how life is connected.

More at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10123-025-00752-6?

NovelSeq: Novel Sequence Insertion Detection

Neel — Fri, 09 Jun 2017 04:31:30 -0500

The NovelSeq framework is designed to detect novel sequence insertions using high throughput paired-end whole genome sequencing data.

http://novelseq.sourceforge.net/Home

Paper at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20385726

Address of the bookmark: http://novelseq.sourceforge.net/Home

BEAP: Blast Extension and Assembly Program

Shruti Paniwala — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 04:52:56 -0500

The Blast Extension and Assembly Program (BEAP) is a computer program that uses a short starting DNA fragment, often a EST or partial gene segment, as "primer", to recursively blast nucleotide databases in an attempt to obtain all sequences that overlaps, directly or indirectly, with the "primer" therefore help to "extend" the length of the original sequence for constructing a "full length" sequence for functional analysis, or at least to obtain neighboring regions of the segment for SNP discovery and linkage disequilibrium analysis. The confidence of assembling the resulting sequences is achieved by using a known genome, such as human genome, as a reference. https://www.animalgenome.org/tools/beap/

Address of the bookmark: https://www.animalgenome.org/tools/beap/

medaka: Sequence correction provided by ONT Research

BioStar — Mon, 18 May 2020 16:28:00 -0500

medaka is a tool to create a consensus sequence from nanopore sequencing data. This task is performed using neural networks applied from a pileup of individual sequencing reads against a draft assembly. It outperforms graph-based methods operating on basecalled data, and can be competitive with state-of-the-art signal-based methods, whilst being much faster.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/nanoporetech/medaka

NCBIBLAST+ 2.14.1 now available

Neel — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 02:36:13 -0500

#NCBIBLAST+ 2.14.1 now available with improved documentation, faster and more reliable database downloads, and some bug fixes.

Check out the changes they made.

They added the cleanup-blastdb-volumes.py script to remove unused BLAST database volumes. Read the documentation here.

They also switched the protocol from ftp to https to access BLAST databases for increased performance and reliability when downloading data from the NCBI with the update_blastdb.pl script.

And fixed a few bugs related to downloading data from the NCBI, and mt_mode crashing blastn and blastx.

Check out the release notes.

Download BLAST+ 2.14.1

Questions or comments? Please write the BLAST help desk.

More info and download: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/doc/blast-news/2023-BLAST-News.html

Taxoblast : Taxoblast is a pipeline to identify contamination in genomic sequence

Jit — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 08:37:15 -0600

Modern genome sequencing strategies are highly sensitive to contamination making the detection of foreign DNA sequences an important part of analysis pipelines. Here we use Taxoblast, a simple pipeline with a graphical user interface, for the post-assembly detection of contaminating sequences in the published genome of the kelp Saccharina japonica. Analyses were based on multiple blastn searches with short sequence fragments. They revealed a number of probable bacterial contaminations as well as hybrid scaffolds that contain both bacterial and algal sequences. This or similar types of analysis, in combination with manual curation, may thus constitute a useful complement to standard bioinformatics analyses prior to submission of genomic data to public repositories. Our analysis pipeline is open-source and freely available at http://sdittami.altervista.org/taxoblast and via SourceForge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/taxoblast).

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/taxoblast/files/

Many-to-many pairwise alignments of two sequence sets

Poonam Mahapatra — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 08:34:15 -0500

needleall reads a set of input sequences and compares them all to one or more sequences, writing their optimal global sequence alignments to file. It uses the Needleman-Wunsch alignment algorithm to find the optimum alignment (including gaps) of two sequences along their entire length. The algorithm uses a dynamic programming method to ensure the alignment is optimum, by exploring all possible alignments and choosing the best. A scoring matrix is read that contains values for every possible residue or nucleotide match. Needleall finds the alignment with the maximum possible score where the score of an alignment is equal to the sum of the matches taken from the scoring matrix, minus penalties arising from opening and extending gaps in the aligned sequences. The substitution matrix and gap opening and extension penalties are user-specified.

Address of the bookmark: http://emboss.sourceforge.net/apps/release/6.6/emboss/apps/needleall.html

iRNAD: a computational tool for identifying D modification sites in RNA sequence

Abhimanyu Singh — Thu, 16 May 2019 00:20:07 -0500

iRNAD, for identifying D modification sites in RNA sequence. In this predictor, the RNA samples derived from five species were encoded by nucleotide chemical property and nucleotide density. Support vector machine was utilized to perform the classification.

http://lin-group.cn/server/iRNAD/

Address of the bookmark: http://lin-group.cn/server/iRNAD/

Apollo: a sequence annotation editor

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 08:08:47 -0500

The well-established inaccuracy of purely computational methods for annotating genome sequences necessitates an interactive tool to allow biological experts to refine these approximations by viewing and independently evaluating the data supporting each annotation. Apollo was developed to meet this need, enabling curators to inspect genome annotations closely and edit them

Address of the bookmark: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-2002-3-12-research0082

GfaViz: flexible and interactive visualization of GFA sequence graphs

Jit — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 07:33:46 -0600

GFA (Graphical Fragment Assembly) is an emerging standard format for representing sequence graphs. Although it was originally conceived as a format for sequence assembly (hence the name), and this remains its core application, it is more general, and able to represent many different types of sequence graphs, including scaffolding graphs, alignment graphs, variant graphs and splicing graphs.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ggonnella/gfaviz