BOL: Related items

Basic Notions in Molecular Biology and Genetics

Antony Campos — Sun, 16 Mar 2014 18:15:29 -0500

This is a presentation about some fundamental concepts applied in molecular biology and genetics, also it contains a little bit of the experience that one of our members has gained in his years of undergraduate state related to molecular cloning. Our research group, called "BIOPHARM" (Acronymus of Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Pharmacogenetics), was stablished on 2007, took it a bit of years to make it real this initative, although, nowadays, we're working on some projects involved in those fields. This research group belongs to the Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, Perú. We try to encourage research initiatives, helping them and also we use to participate in differents courses, congress and symposiums.

P_RNA_scaffolder: a fast and accurate genome scaffolder using paired-end RNA-sequencing reads

Jit — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 08:14:41 -0500

P_RNA_scaffolder, a fast and accurate tool using paired-end RNA-sequencing reads to scaffold genomes. This tool aims to improve the completeness of both protein-coding and non-coding genes. After this tool was applied to scaffolding human contigs, the structures of both protein-coding genes and circular RNAs were almost completely recovered and equivalent to those in a complete genome, especially for long proteins and long circular RNAs.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.fishbrowser.org/software/P_RNA_scaffolder/

Scalpel

Shruti Paniwala — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 02:07:58 -0500

A team from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has released an algorithm, called Scalpel, for finding insertions and deletions in next generation sequencing data sets. Scalpel, which is open source and available for download on SourceForge, outperformed the popular tools GATK HaplotypeCaller and SOAPindel in test runs on both simulated and real whole human exomes.

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.

pyGenomeTracks: Standalone program and library to plot beautiful genome browser tracks

Neel — Fri, 09 Nov 2018 12:34:23 -0600

pyGenomeTracks aims to produce high-quality genome browser tracks that are highly customizable. Currently, it is possible to plot:

bigwig
bed (many options)
bedgraph
links (represented as arcs)
Hi-C matrices (if HiCExplorer is installed)

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/deeptools/pyGenomeTracks

Merqury: reference-free quality and phasing assessment for genome assemblies

Jit — Sat, 06 Jun 2020 05:38:34 -0500

Often, genome assembly projects have illumina whole genome sequencing reads available for the assembled individual. The k-mer spectrum of this read set can be used for independently evaluating assembly quality without the need of a high quality reference. Merqury provides a set of tools for this purpose.

https://github.com/marbl/meryl

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/marbl/merqury

Hawkeye: an interactive visual analytics tool for genome assemblies

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 11:56:17 -0600

Genome sequencing remains an inexact science, and genome sequences can contain significant errors if they are not carefully examined. Hawkeye is our new visual analytics tool for genome assemblies, designed to aid in identifying and correcting assembly errors. Users can analyze all levels of an assembly along with summary statistics and assembly metrics, and are guided by a ranking component towards likely mis-assemblies. Hawkeye is freely available and released as part of the open source AMOS project http://amos.sourceforge.net/hawkeye.

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-2007-8-3-r34

Address of the bookmark: http://amos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?title=Hawkeye

The Rogers Lab

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 08:07:44 -0500

The Rogers lab studies evolution of genome structure. We explore the ways that complex mutations like duplications, deletions, rearrangements, and retrogenes can create new genetic material. We study how these new mutations are important for adaptation. We are currently working on projects in Drosophila, Mammoths, Elephants, Bivalves, and Frogs absolutely no amphibians. This multi-organism approach can help us understand when and why complex mutations are important for organism fitness.

More at http://evolscientist.com/

simuG: a general-purpose genome simulator

BioStar — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 04:33:18 -0600

Simulated genomes with pre-defined and random genomic variants can be very useful for benchmarking genomic and bioinformatics analyses. Here we introduce simuG, a lightweight tool for simulating the full-spectrum of genomic variants (single nucleotide polymorphisms, Insertions/Deletions, copy number variants, inversions and translocations) for any organisms (including human). The simplicity and versatility of simuG make it a unique general-purpose genome simulator for a wide-range of simulation-based applications.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/yjx1217/simuG

China’s BGI says it can sequence a genome for just $100

Neel — Sat, 29 Feb 2020 04:49:43 -0600

Using technology originally acquired in the US, the Chinese gene giant BGI Group says it will make genome sequencing cheaper than ever, breaking the $100 barrier for the first time.

The Shenzhen company says the low cost will be possible with an “extreme” DNA sequencing system it plans to offer that is capable of decoding the genomes of 100,000 people a year.

Ref: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615289/china-bgi-100-dollar-genome/

Svardal lab

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 10:01:19 -0600

In the Svardal lab they are interested how the astonishing natural diversity we see on earth came into being, by which forces it formed and how it is changing today. Hence, they are trying to understand the process of evolution, with mathematical models and through the analysis of genome sequencing data.

Genomes, and in particular differences between them, are a crucial source of information to understand evolution and biology in general. They provide a record of the evolutionary past of populations, their relatedness patterns, their demography, and their adaptations.

More at https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/hannes-svardal/svardal-lab/