BOL: Related items

Professor (all levels) in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 05:43:38 -0600

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) (kaust.edu.sa) is seeking a highly motivated and skilled faculty member for the Bioinformatics track whose research focuses on development of methods and tools for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.
KAUST is an international, graduate-level research university dedicated to advancing science and technology through interdisciplinary research, education, and innovation. Located on the shores of the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia, KAUST offers superb research facilities, generous assured research funding, and internationally competitive salaries, attracting top international faculty, scientists, engineers, and students to conduct fundamental and goal-oriented research to address the world’s pressing scientific and technological challenges in the areas of food, water, energy, and the environment.
The successful applicant is expected to develop world-leading research in domain of bioinformatics/computational biology with focus on development of novel computational approaches for efficient and accurate methods of analyzing biological phenomena at molecular level. The faculty member will be part of the Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC) within the Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) Division. The position will remain open until filled.

Requirements:

PhD or equivalent in a Computer Science, Mathematics or Engineering discipline. Candidates should be well-established within the research field relevant to the position grade. They should demonstrate original research and experience at the highest international level.

Responsibilities and tasks:

Research competence in the following areas is preferred:
Analysis of next generation sequencing (NGS) and other ‘omics’ data (e.g. CAGE, ChIP-Seq, DHS, RNA-Seq, Ribo-Seq, proteomic, metabolic and NMR spectra, etc.).
Signaling, regulatory and metabolic pathways analysis.
Development of tools (web-based and standalone) suited for efficient computational biology/bioinformatics.

Visit cemse.kaust.edu.sa to apply.

Structural variation: the hidden genomic treasure

Jit — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 16:19:09 -0600

Genome re-sequencing projects have revealed substantial amounts of genetic variation between individuals extending beyond single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and short indels. Structural Variations (SVs) and Copy Number Variations (CNVs) are a major source of genomic variation. However, compared to SNPs, accurate detection, genotyping and understanding of CNVs is lagging behind due to much greater analytical challenges related to SV/CNV detection and analysis. In our lab we analyse SVs/CNVs using high-throughput sequencing and different analytical approaches. The most‐studied structural variants are copy number variations (CNVs) which can be generated by several different mechanisms including non‐allelic homologous recombination, non‐homologous end‐joining and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) replication‐related fork stalling and template switching. CNVs are closely related to segmental duplications (SDs): SDs can stimulate the formation of CNVs and themselves started out as CNVs, but became fixed in a species. Structural variation can be neutral but has also influenced our phenotypic evolution, for example our susceptibility to disease and our ability to digest certain types of food. Our understanding of the extent of structural variation is increasing rapidly, but it will be much more difficult to understand its phenotypic consequences.

Structural variants (SVs) such as deletions, insertions, duplications, inversions and translocations litter genomes and are often associated with gene expression changes and severe phenotypes (ie. genetic diseases in humans). Recent studies on the functional aspects of different types of SVs have unveiled several cases of adaptive evolution. For example, inversions have been associated with ecological adaptations and may facilitate speciation. Due to their prevalent nature, SVs arguably have a large impact on genome evolution and should not be neglected when studying the genetics of adaptation and speciation. SVs were classically defined as chromosomal rearrangements larger than 1kb, but due to a higher resolution of new detection methods, smaller variants (between 50 and 1000 base pairs) can now be accurately assessed. Besides various methods of detection in next generation sequencing data (paired end mapping, split reads, and depth of coverage), array-based approaches have proven to be particularly useful for detecting copy number variations (CNVs). These technologies have enabled researchers to catalog a wide spectrum of SVs in many organisms and infer the effects of selection shaping their evolutionary trajectories.

Structure variation sequencing signature (Source: NatRev Genetics)

Related tools, databases and publications are listed below. If you know any interesing papers, please let us know in comment section:

Key concepts

Structural variation includes balanced variants such as inversions and translocations, and unbalanced ones such as duplications and deletions (copy number variations or CNVs).

Structural variants can arise by several mechanisms, including nonallelic homologous recombination (NAHR), nonhomologous end‐joining (NHEJ) and DNA replication‐based fork stalling and template switching (FoSTeS).

CNV is closely linked to segmental duplication, but is not exactly the same. Segmental duplications can stimulate CNV formation by NAHR, and themselves arise from CNVs that have become fixed.

Segmental duplications did not appear uniformly during the evolution of the Great Ape species, but rather during a burst of activity around the time of the divergence of gorilla from the human/chimpanzee ancestor.

Duplicated genes play a critical role in the evolution of a genome as they act as ‘spare parts’ than can evolve to perform new or more specialized functions.

Effects of structural variation on gene expression can be identified but only a few examples of the consequences for species biology have been documented.

Tools

CNVnatora tool for CNV discovery and genotyping from depth of read mapping.2011a,2011b

AGEa tools that implements an algorithm for optimal alignment of sequences with SVs.2011

BreakSeqa pipeline for annotation, classification and analysis of SVs at single nucleotide resolution.2010

PEMera computational and simulation framework for discovering SVs by paired-end read mapping.2009,2007

GASV https://code.google.com/archive/p/gasv/

PAIROSCOPE http://pairoscope.sourceforge.net/

SVDetect http://svdetect.sourceforge.net/Site/Home.html

BreakPtr, discovery of unbalanced structural variants (copy-number variants) with tiling microarrays Link

R Package https://www.bioconductor.org/help/course-materials/2010/EMBL2010/Practical-4-StructuralVariants.pdf

BreakSeq, structural variant genotyping using split reads Link

CopySeq, genotyping of unbalanced structural variants (copy-number variants) using read-depth Link

DELLY2, integrated structural variant discovery, genotyping and visualization in deep sequencing data Link

PEMer, structural variant discovery in 454 sequencing data by paired-end mapping Link

TIGER, transduction inference in germline genomes using short read data Link

MANTA https://github.com/Illumina/manta

SV-Bay https://github.com/InstitutCurie/SV-Bay

BreakDancer http://breakdancer.sourceforge.net/

Variation Hunter http://compbio.cs.sfu.ca/software-variation-hunter

Lumpy https://github.com/arq5x/lumpy-sv

ForestSV http://sebatlab.ucsd.edu/index.php/software-data

PBSuites for long reads https://sourceforge.net/projects/pb-jelly/

Visualization

The SV visualization tool: http://genomesavant.com/savant/

InGAP-SV (http://ingap.sourceforge.net/) that is nice tools for both detection and visualisation of severals kind of structural variations (Large insertions, translocation, deletion, inversions....)

Tools table: http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v29/n8/fig_tab/nbt.1904_T2.html

Variation Viewer https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/variation/view/

Papers

http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v9/n2/full/nmeth.1858.html

http://journal.frontiersin.org/researchtopic/1412/structural-variations-in-genomes-ecological-and-evolutionary-implications

http://www.mi.fu-berlin.de/wiki/pub/ABI/GenomicsLecture10Materials/structural-variation.pdf

http://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-015-1479-3

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/dbvar/content/overview/

http://www.nature.com/subjects/structural-variation

https://eichlerlab.gs.washington.edu/news/NatMeth_Feb2012.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19477992 ***

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22452995

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/09/06/073833

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4479793/

http://www.nature.com/articles/srep18501

http://www.genetics.org/content/202/1/351

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sssykim/teaching/s13/slides/Lecture_SVI.pdf

https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/structural-variation-detection-from-next-generation-sequencing-2469-9853-S1-007.php?aid=69055

http://schatzlab.cshl.edu/presentations/2016/2016.01.12.PAG.Structural%20Variations.pdf

MCscan

Bulbul — Thu, 22 Dec 2016 03:53:58 -0600

MCscan is a computer program that can simultaneously scan multiple genomes to identify homologous chromosomal regions and subsequently align these regions using genes as anchors. This is the toolset for generating the synteny correspondences in Plant Genome Duplication Database. It is intended as an easy-to-use and quick way to identify conserved gene arrays both within the same genome and across different genomes.

More at http://chibba.agtec.uga.edu/duplication/mcscan/

Address of the bookmark: http://chibba.agtec.uga.edu/duplication/mcscan/

Easyfig

Poonam Mahapatra — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 05:49:39 -0500

Easyfig has moved to github, for newer releases of Easyfig please visit our new webpage - https://mjsull.github.io/Easyfig. Easyfig is a Python application for creating linear comparison figures of multiple genomic loci with an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI).

More at http://easyfig.sourceforge.net/

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

QUAST: quality assessment tool for genome assemblies

Jitendra Prajapati — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 18:23:33 -0500

QUAST evaluates genome assemblies. For metagenomes, please see MetaQUAST project.
It can works both with and without a given reference genome.
The tool accepts multiple assemblies, thus is suitable for comparison.

More at http://bioinf.spbau.ru/quast

http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/03/09/bioinformatics.btt086.long

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/03/09/bioinformatics.btt086.long

SPAdes

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 08:37:08 -0500

SPAdes – St. Petersburg genome assembler – is intended for both standard isolates and single-cell MDA bacteria assemblies. This manual will help you to install and run SPAdes. SPAdes version 3.7.1 was released under GPLv2 on March 8, 2016 and can be downloaded from http://bioinf.spbau.ru/en/spades.

Manual at http://spades.bioinf.spbau.ru/release3.7.1/manual.html

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinf.spbau.ru/spades

GATB : Genome Analysis Toolbox with de-Bruijn graph

Jit — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 11:16:51 -0500

The Genome Analysis Toolbox with de-Bruijn graph (GATB) provides a set of highly efficient algorithms to analyse NGS data sets. These methods enable the analysis of data sets of any size on multi-core desktop computers, including very huge amount of reads data coming from any kind of organisms such as bacteria, plants, animals and even complex samples (e.g. metagenomes).

More at https://gatb.inria.fr/

Address of the bookmark: https://gatb.inria.fr/

GAEMR

Jit — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 06:18:37 -0500

The Genome Assembly Evaluation Metrics and Reporting (GAEMR) package is an assembly analysis framework composed a number of integrated modules. These modules can be executed as a single program to generate a complete analysis report, or executed individually to generate specific charts and tables. GAEMR standardizes input by converting a variety of read types to Binary Alignment Map (BAM) format, allowing a single input format to be entered into GAEMR’s analysis pipeline, hence enabling the generation of standard reports.

GAEMR’s analysis philosophy is centered on contiguity, correctness, and completeness -- how many pieces in an assembly composed of, how well those pieces accurately represent the genome sequenced, and how much of that genome is represented by those pieces. By performing over twenty different analyses based on these principles, GAEMR gives a clear picture of the condition of a genome assembly.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.broadinstitute.org/software/gaemr/

SWALO

Jit — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 05:06:05 -0600

SWALO (scaffolding with assembly likelihood optimization) is a method for scaffolding based on likelihood of genome assemblies computed using generative models for sequencing.

Download

Git repository of SWALO is at https://github.com/atifrahman/SWALO.

Address of the bookmark: https://atifrahman.github.io/SWALO/

CISA: Contig Integrator for Sequence Assembly

Neel — Thu, 15 Dec 2016 05:42:21 -0600

A plethora of algorithmic assemblers have been proposed for the de novo assembly of genomes, however, no individual assembler guarantees the optimal assembly for diverse species. Optimizing various parameters in an assembler is often performed in order to generate the most optimal assembly. However, few efforts have been pursued to take advantage of multiple assemblies to yield an assembly of high accuracy. In this study, we employ various state-of-the-art assemblers to generate different sets of contigs for bacterial genomes. A tool, named CISA, has been developed to integrate the assemblies into a hybrid set of contigs, resulting in assemblies of superior contiguity and accuracy, compared with the assemblies generated by the state-of-the-art assemblers and the hybrid assemblies merged by existing tools. This tool is implemented in Python and requires MUMmer and BLAST+ to be installed on the local machine. The source code of CISA and examples of its use are available at http://sb.nhri.org.tw/CISA/.

Address of the bookmark: http://sb.nhri.org.tw/CISA/en/CISA