BOL: Related items

REGEN: Ancestral Genome Reconstruction for Bacteria

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 06 Mar 2018 05:02:36 -0600

REGEN infers evolutionary events, including gene creation and deletion and replicon fission and fusion. The reconstruction can be performed by either a maximum parsimony or a maximum likelihood method. Gene content reconstruction is based on the concept of neighboring gene pairs. REGEN was designed to be used with any set of genomes that are sufficiently related, which will usually be the case for bacteria within the same taxonomic order.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/3/3/423

GeneMates: an R package for Detecting Horizontal Gene Co-transfer between Bacteria Using Gene-gene Associations Controlled for Population Structure

Rahul Nayak — Sat, 07 Mar 2020 05:52:20 -0600

GeneMates is an R package implementing a network approach to identify horizontal gene co-transfer (HGcoT) between bacteria using whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data. It is particularly useful for investigating intra-species HGcoT, where presence-absence status of acquired genes is usually confounded by bacterial population structure due to clonal reproduction.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.29.970970v1

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/wanyuac/GeneMates

HiBC: Human Intestinal Bacteria Collection

BioStar — Wed, 07 May 2025 05:49:19 -0500

The human gut is home to trillions of microorganisms, forming one of the most complex and dynamic microbial ecosystems known to science. The Human Intestinal Bacteria Collection (HiBC) is a pioneering initiative aimed at cataloging, preserving, and studying the diverse bacterial species that inhabit the human gastrointestinal tract. This curated collection serves as a critical resource for researchers working on microbiome-related health, disease, and therapeutics.

What is HiBC?

The Human Intestinal Bacteria Collection (HiBC) is a comprehensive, high-quality reference repository of bacterial isolates derived from human fecal samples. It focuses on anaerobic and facultative anaerobic bacteria that play pivotal roles in digestion, immune modulation, vitamin synthesis, and pathogen resistance. The collection includes both culturable strains and genomic data from unculturable taxa, bridging the gap between culture-dependent and -independent microbiome studies.

Why is HiBC Important?

Understanding Microbiome-Host Interactions
HiBC enables deeper insight into the functions of specific bacterial taxa in the gut. With well-characterized isolates, researchers can conduct mechanistic studies to explore how certain bacteria influence metabolism, inflammation, or mental health.
Precision Probiotics and Therapeutics
By providing access to native human gut microbes, HiBC supports the development of next-generation probiotics, live biotherapeutic products (LBPs), and fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) alternatives.
Standardization and Reproducibility
With standardized cultivation and genomic protocols, HiBC ensures consistency across microbiome research studies, improving reproducibility and comparability of findings.
Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Surveillance
HiBC includes metadata on antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), helping track the spread of AMR in commensal gut bacteria and understanding its implications for human health.

Key Features of HiBC

Culturable Bacteria Repository: A living collection of anaerobic and facultative strains isolated from healthy and diseased individuals worldwide.
Metadata-rich Entries: Each isolate is annotated with host details (age, health status, diet), geographical origin, phenotypic traits, and antibiotic susceptibility profiles.
Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS): High-quality genome assemblies for most strains to support functional and comparative genomics.
Interactive Database Access: User-friendly search and filtering options for strain selection based on taxonomy, function, or clinical relevance.
Cross-linking with Other Databases: Integration with NCBI, GOLD, and Human Microbiome Project (HMP) data for broader context and validation.

Applications of HiBC

Microbiome-based diagnostics and biomarker discovery
Host-microbe interaction studies in gnotobiotic mouse models
Gut microbiome modulation through diet, drugs, or engineered bacteria
Longitudinal studies of gut flora across age, geography, and lifestyle
Environmental and evolutionary microbiology of human-associated bacteria

Accessing HiBC

Researchers and interested parties can explore the HiBC database through its official website: https://www.hibc.rwth-aachen.de/. The platform offers comprehensive information on bacterial isolates, including taxonomy, cultivation conditions, and genomic data, facilitating advanced research in human gut microbiome studies.

Final Thoughts

The HiBC is a cornerstone resource in the rapidly evolving field of microbiome research. As science moves toward personalized medicine and microbial therapeutics, having a reliable and diverse collection of human gut bacteria is not just useful — it's essential. Whether you're a microbiologist, clinician, computational biologist, or biotechnologist, HiBC offers tools to accelerate discovery and innovation in gut microbiome science.

CLARK: Fast, accurate and versatile sequence classification system

Jit — Sat, 15 Feb 2020 01:49:01 -0600

CLARK, a method based on a supervised sequence classification using discriminative k-mers. Considering two distinct specific classification problems (see the article for details), namely (1) the taxonomic classification of metagenomic reads to known bacterial genomes, and (2) the assignment of BAC clones and transcript to chromosome arms/centromeres (in the absence of a finished assembly for the reference genome), CLARK outperforms in classification speed and precision the best state-of-the-art methods.

http://clark.cs.ucr.edu/Spaced/

Address of the bookmark: http://clark.cs.ucr.edu/Spaced/

Cancer's origins revealed

Jitendra Narayan — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 13:06:56 -0500

Researchers have provided the first comprehensive compendium of mutational processes that drive tumour development. Together, these mutational processes explain most mutations found in 30 of the most common cancer types. This new understanding of cancer development could help to treat and prevent a wide-range of cancers.

More at >> http://www.sanger.ac.uk/about/press/2013/130814.html

How Genes are Regulated: Transcription Factors

Thu, 05 Sep 2013 16:54:19 -0500

Each cell in our body inherits the same master copy of DNA, but different cell types use it differently. Transcription Factors help influence which genes are used in which cell. Understanding how these dynamic proteins physically interact with DNA allows us to better understand and model their binding to DNA and their regulation of gene expression. Scientific Direction by the Wasserman Lab at the University of British Columbia: http://www.cmmt.ubc.ca/research/investigators/wasserman/lab Animation and editing by Blair Lyons of Stroma Studios: http://www.stromastudios.com

Molecular Genetics Lecture

Rahul Agarwal — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 04:24:45 -0500

"Robert Sapolsky makes interdisciplinary connections between behavioral biology and molecular genetic influences. He relates protein synthesis and point mutations to microevolutionary change, and discusses conflicting theories of gradualism and punctuated equilibrium and the influence of epigenetics on development theories."

"Robert Sapolsky is an American neuroendocrinologist, professor of biology, neuroscience, and neurosurgery at Stanford University, researcher and author" ----Wikipedia

Address of the bookmark: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dRXA1_e30o

Edit DNA !!!

Jit — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 02:27:54 -0600

A genome-engineering tool known as Crispr may allow scientists to alter the DNA of humans, animals and plants, a research breakthrough that promises to make a significant impact on science and fighting diseases, according to a March 3 story in the New York Times. Scientists hope Crispr might also be used for genomic surgery, as it were, to correct errant genes that cause disease.

A rescently publication paper ( http://jb.asm.org/content/169/12/5429.long )shows significance of an unusual repeated DNA sequences next to a gene in a common bacterium, and their scientific significance. The sequences, it turns out, are part of a sophisticated immune system that bacteria use to fight viruses. And that system, whose very existence was unknown until about seven years ago, may provide scientists with unprecedented power to rewrite the code of life. This means a genome can be edited, much as a writer might change words or fix spelling errors. It allows “customizing the genome of any cell or any species at will,”.

Reference:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/03/prweb11636031.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/health/a-powerful-new-way-to-edit-dna.html?hpw&rref=health

http://jb.asm.org/content/169/12/5429.long

Scripted DNA !!!

Jit — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 17:44:04 -0500

As per bioinformatician DNA is partially scripted ;) You dont believe in it. Please have a look at image carefully:)

FSA: Fast Statistical Alignment

Jit — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 04:26:01 -0600

FSA is a probabilistic multiple sequence alignment algorithm which uses a "distance-based" approach to aligning homologous protein, RNA or DNA sequences. Much as distance-based phylogenetic reconstruction methods like Neighbor-Joining build a phylogeny using only pairwise divergence estimates, FSA builds a multiple alignment using only pairwise estimations of homology. This is made possible by the sequence annealing technique for constructing a multiple alignment from pairwise comparisons, developed by Ariel Schwartz in "Posterior Decoding Methods for Optimization and Control of Multiple Alignments."

FSA brings the high accuracies previously available only for small-scale analyses of proteins or RNAs to large-scale problems such as aligning thousands of sequences or megabase-long sequences. FSA introduces several novel methods for constructing better alignments:

FSA uses machine-learning techniques to estimate gap and substitution parameters on the fly for each set of input sequences. This "query-specific learning" alignment method makes FSA very robust: it can produce superior alignments of sets of homologous sequences which are subject to very different evolutionary constraints.
FSA is capable of aligning hundreds or even thousands of sequences using a randomized inference algorithm to reduce the computational cost of multiple alignment. This randomized inference can be over ten times faster than a direct approach with little loss of accuracy.
FSA can quickly align very long sequences using the "anchor annealing" technique for resolving anchors and projecting them with transitive anchoring. It then stitches together the alignment between the anchors using the methods described above.
The included GUI, MAD (Multiple Alignment Display), can display the intermediate alignments produced by FSA, where each character is colored according to the probability that it is correctly aligned (see the picture and movie at the top of the page).

You can see more information on the FAQ.

Address of the bookmark: http://fsa.sourceforge.net/