Address of the bookmark: http://www.h-invitational.jp/g-compass/

Like other indel callers, Scalpel works by performing de novo assembly of regions of interest, so that misalignment to the reference genome cannot obscure the presence of an insertion or deletion. Scalpel's innovation is to repeatedly check its assembly before comparing to the reference genome, to account for simple sequence repeats that are a regular source of error in indel calling. When Scalpel assembles an exon, it collects reads that map to that exon (including partial matches), splits them into k-mers, and creates a de Bruijn graph to span the exon; however, if it detects repeats in the map, it iteratively increases the size of the k-mers by one base until the repeats are eliminated. This ensures that the final assembly of the exon is highly accurate while minimizing compute time.

The Cold Spring Harbor team's validation of Scalpel, published over the weekend in Nature Methods, compares Scalpel's performance on a live whole exome against HaplotypeCaller and SOAPindel. The donor is an individual with serious neurological disorders, which may be linked to a high incidence of indels. One thousand indels from this individual's exome, called by one or more of the informatics pipelines, were selected for focused resequencing. This resequencing revealed a 77% true positive rate for Scalpel calls, dramatically better than the rates for either of the competing tools; Scalpel performed especially well with indels longer than five base pairs, a traditional weak point for indel callers.

Finally, the authors demonstrate Scalpel's use on a large set of genetic data from nearly 600 families who donated samples to the Simons Simplex Collection, a project of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. Scalpel found a very high enrichment for indels in children affected by autism, compared with their unaffected siblings, a pattern that persisted even after excluding common variants.

Address of the bookmark: http://chmille4.github.io/Scribl/

Since ASCIIGenome does not require a graphical interface it is particularly useful for quickly visualizing genomic data on remote servers while offering flexibility similar to popular GUI viewers like IGV.

Documentation is at readthedocs/asciigenome.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/dariober/ASCIIGenome

Features

• Linear representation of several segments of DNA
• Comparisons represented by areas between the segments (like Artemis, for example)
• Reads from common formats: Genbank, EMBL, blast, Mauve, and from user-generated tab files
• Plot several subsegments of the same segment on the same line, separated by a //
• Automatic or manual placement of the segments on the plot
• Add annotations to all the lines
• Create smart, automatic annotations for genomes, based on gene names
• Add a user-generated tree
• Add a global scale or a scale to each line
• Use user-defined graphical functions to represent genes

Address of the bookmark: http://genoplotr.r-forge.r-project.org/

The Program first constructs all exact match pairs by a suffix-array based algorithm and extends them to long highly similar pairs. Then Smith-Waterman algorithm is used to adjust the ends of LTR pair candidates to get alignment boundaries. These boundaries are subject to re-adjustment using supporting information of TG..CA box and TSRs and reliable LTRs are selected. Next, LTR_FINDER tries to identify PBS, PPT and RT inside LTR pairs by build-in aligning and counting modules. RT identification includes a dynamic programming to process frame shift. For other protein domains, LTR_FINDER calls ps_scan (from PROSITE, http://www.expasy.org/prosite/) to locate cores of important enzymes if they occur.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/xzhub/LTR_Finder

C. Titus Brown http://video.open-bio.org/video/1/a-history-of-bioinformatics-in-the-year-2039

Scientists have reconstructed the genome of an ancient human who lived nearly 5,700 years ago in Southern Denmark from the birch pitch- an ancient tar-like substance.

By sequencing the sample, researchers not only discovered the ancient human DNA but also microbial DNA reflecting the oral microbiome of the person who chewed the pitch, along with plant and animal DNA that could be the recent meal she might have consumed.

The DNA sample is comparable in quality to well-preserved teeth and skull bones. The DNA suggests that the chewer was a female, most likely with dark skin, dark brown hair and blue eyes.