BOL: Related items

NGS Platforms launched by BGI’s MGI Tech

Jit — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 04:42:06 -0600

MGI Tech Co., Ltd. (MGI), a subsidiary of BGI Group, is committed to enabling effective and affordable healthcare solutions for all. Based on its proprietary technology, MGI produces sequencing devices, equipment, consumables and reagents to support life science research, medicine and healthcare. MGI's multi-omics platforms include genetic sequencing, mass spectrometry and medical imaging. Providing real-time, comprehensive, life-long solutions, its mission is to develop and promote advanced life science tools for future healthcare.

MGI, a subsidiary of global genomics leader BGI Group, announced pricing and its first early access customer for the new ultra high-throughput sequencer, MGISEQ-T7, saying it has driven down sequencing cost to $5 per gigabyte, with exceptionally high accuracy. Such innovations are helping more people to realize the benefits of genomic information.

In October, MGI launched the MGISEQ-T7, a highly flexible production-scale platform that is the most powerful sequencer to date. It can produce as many as 60 whole human genomes in one day. The instrument sells for $1 million.

The T7 enables simultaneous but independent operation of up to four flow cells, which means different applications such as single-cell RNA sequencing, whole exome sequencing and whole genome sequencing can be run in different flow cells at the same time. This helps to reduce costs, allowing MGI to offer the most competitive sequencing price in the market.

Powered by DNBseq™, MGISEQ delivers quality data with accuracy for SNP and Indel calling rate of 99.9% and 99%, respectively, along with decreased duplication rate down to less than 2 percent, and almost zero Index mis-assignment rate.

SOURCE MGI

https://www.bgi.com/global/company/news/bgis-mgi-tech-launches-two-new-ngs-platforms/

http://en.mgitech.cn/

Nucleus: Python and C++ code for reading and writing genomics data.

Jit — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 08:14:19 -0600

Nucleus is a library of Python and C++ code designed to make it easy to read, write and analyze data in common genomics file formats like SAM and VCF. In addition, Nucleus enables painless integration with the TensorFlow machine learning framework, as anywhere a genomics file is consumed or produced, a TensorFlow tfrecords file may be used instead.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/google/nucleus

gggenomes: A grammar of graphics for comparative genomics

Surabhi Chaudhary — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:47:32 -0600

gggenomes is a versatile graphics package for comparative genomics. It extends the popular R visualization packageggplot2 by adding dedicated plot functions for genes, syntenic regions, etc. and verbs to manipulate the plot to, for example, quickly zoom in into gene neighborhoods.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/thackl/gggenomes

GEnView: A phylogeny based comparative genomics software to analyze the genetic environment of genes

Abhi — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 01:49:03 -0600

A phylogeny based comparative genomics software to analyze the genetic environment of genes. The user can select one or several taxa and provide one or several reference protein(s). Genomes and plasmids (based on user choice) will be downloaded from the NCBI Assembly/NR database and searched for the respective gene. Alternatively, custom genomes can be provided. User selected stretches (20kbp by default) of the genes genetic environment are extracted, annotated and aligned between all genomes. The sequences are then visualized, enabling comparison of synteny and gene content.

More at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34951622/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/EbmeyerSt/GEnView

Unlocking Evolutionary Secrets: A Dive into Comparative Genomics Methods

LEGE — Tue, 20 May 2025 00:25:09 -0500

Comparative genomics is the art and science of comparing genomes—across species, within species, or even among individuals—to unravel evolutionary relationships, functional elements, and genetic adaptations. As sequencing technologies have advanced and genome databases have expanded, comparative genomics has become a cornerstone of modern biology, shedding light on everything from antibiotic resistance in bacteria to human disease genetics.

In this post, we’ll explore the core methods used in comparative genomics, the questions they help answer, and how they’re shaping our understanding of life.

1. Whole-Genome Alignment
Whole-genome alignment involves mapping the entire genome of one species to another. Tools like MUMmer, MAUVE, and LASTZ perform large-scale sequence alignments to detect conserved regions, rearrangements, insertions, and deletions.

Use Case:
Comparing human and chimpanzee genomes to identify evolutionary conserved sequences (ECS) and regions of divergence.

Key Challenges:
Handling repetitive sequences and genome rearrangements.

Computational complexity in large genomes.

2. Synteny and Collinearity Analysis
Synteny refers to conserved blocks of gene order across species. Tools like MCScanX, SynMap, or CHITRA (for visualizing synteny interactively) detect these blocks to understand chromosomal evolution.

Use Case:
Studying ancient genome duplications in plants.

Investigating chromosomal rearrangements in cancer genomes.

3. Ortholog and Paralog Detection
Orthologs are genes in different species that evolved from a common ancestor, while paralogs are genes duplicated within a genome. Identifying them is crucial for functional annotation and evolutionary studies.

Popular Tools:
OrthoFinder, Orthologous MAtrix (OMA), InParanoid, and EggNOG.

Use Case:
Functional prediction of uncharacterized genes based on orthologs in model organisms.

Tracing gene family evolution.

4. Phylogenomic Analysis
Phylogenomic methods combine phylogenetics and genomics to infer evolutionary trees based on genome-wide data. These methods can handle dozens to hundreds of genomes, using concatenated alignments or gene trees.

Tools:
RAxML, IQ-TREE, ASTRAL, Phylip, BEAST.

Use Case:
Resolving the evolutionary relationships between microbial species.

Studying speciation events.

5. Pan-Genome Analysis
The pan-genome consists of the core genome (shared by all strains) and the accessory genome (strain-specific genes). This is especially popular in microbial genomics.

Tools:
Roary, Panaroo, BPGA, PGAP.

Use Case:
Understanding virulence factor diversity in E. coli.

Designing broad-spectrum vaccines.

6. Comparative Transcriptomics
Comparing transcriptomes across species or conditions reveals conserved and unique expression patterns. RNA-seq data can be mapped to reference genomes to identify orthologous expression profiles.

Use Case:
Comparing stress response in extremophiles and model species.

Studying conserved regulatory networks.

7. Functional Element Comparison
Beyond genes, comparative genomics also targets non-coding regions—enhancers, promoters, miRNAs. Conservation across species often implies functional importance.

Tools:
PhastCons, GERP, phyloP (based on multiple alignments).

Use Case:
Detecting conserved non-coding elements in vertebrates.

Studying regulatory divergence in human evolution.

8. Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) Detection
In microbes, genes often jump across species boundaries. Comparative genomics can detect HGT by identifying genes that defy the expected phylogenetic pattern.

Tools:
HGTector, DarkHorse, AlienHunter, SIGI-HMM.

Use Case:
Tracing antibiotic resistance genes.

Exploring microbial adaptability in extreme environments.

Final Thoughts
Comparative genomics is a powerful lens to observe the diversity and unity of life. With a broad toolkit—from aligners to orthology pipelines, phylogenetic engines to visualization tools—it allows scientists to ask big questions: How did genomes evolve? What makes species unique? Where do new genes come from?

Whether you're studying extremophiles, building better crops, or exploring human ancestry, comparative genomics offers the methods to connect the dots across the tree of life.

A powerful, yet simple, gene set analysis tool for interpreting RNA-seq and NGS results.

Shani — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 09:19:29 -0500

LifeMap Sciences is introducing GeneAnalytics, our new gene set analysis tool, which is applicable for NGS results and differentially expressed gene lists from variable sources. GeneAnalytics provides gene associations with tissues & cells, diseases, pathways, GO terms and compounds.

Our main advantages over other similar tools are:

GeneAnalytics is very simple and intuitive to use.
GeneAnalytics is based on our proprietary databases – GeneCards, MalaCards, PathCards and LifeMap Discovery, each of them integrates information from a very large number of resources.
GeneAnalytics supplies links for extensive background information on each of the matched results.

I invite you to try it out for free at geneanalytics.genecards.org, and would be happy to hear your comments and thoughts on how we can improve.

Yours,

Shani Ben-Ari Fuchs

LifeMap Sciences Team

XAMPP: Starting Apache fail Ubuntu

Ram Yash Pal — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 05:52:35 -0500

Once you install XAMMP on linux, the most common problem you face is Apache failure. To fix the issues please use following command to first stop and then again start it.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

sudo /etc/init.d/proftpd stop

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

PhpMyAdmin “Wrong permissions on configuration file, should not be world writable!”

Once the Xammp is installed, it might be possible to set up the configuration file in writable mode. Try the following steps:

Just chmod 0755 the file

sudo chmod 0755 config.inc.php

karyoploteR: plot whole genomes with arbitrary data

Abhimanyu Singh — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 03:24:28 -0600

karyoploteR is an R package to create karyoplots, that is, representations of whole genomes with arbitrary data plotted on them. It is inspired by the R base graphics system and does not depend on other graphics packages. The aim of karyoploteR is to offer the user an easy way to plot data along the genome to get broad genome-wide view to facilitate the identification of genome wide relations and distributions.

Address of the bookmark: https://bernatgel.github.io/karyoploter_tutorial/

GRASS: a generic algorithm for scaffolding next-generation sequencing assemblies.

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 23 May 2017 05:20:32 -0500

GRASS (GeneRic ASsembly Scaffolder)-a novel algorithm for scaffolding second-generation sequencing assemblies capable of using diverse information sources. GRASS offers a mixed-integer programming formulation of the contig scaffolding problem, which combines contig order, distance and orientation in a single optimization objective. The resulting optimization problem is solved using an expectation-maximization procedure and an unconstrained binary quadratic programming approximation of the original problem. We compared GRASS with existing HTS scaffolders using Illumina paired reads of three bacterial genomes. Our algorithm constructs a comparable number of scaffolds, but makes fewer errors. This result is further improved when additional data, in the form of related genome sequences, are used.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/AlexeyG/GRASS

List of visualization tools for genome alignments

Rahul Nayak — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 13:25:33 -0600

Genome browsers are useful not only for showing final results but also for improving analysis protocols, testing data quality, and generating result drafts. Its integration in analysis pipelines allows the optimization of parameters, which leads to better results. But sometime, we need publication ready figure of genomes. Following are the list of genome alignment visualization tools, which could be useful for analysis and interpretation of results:

ABySS Explorer

Interactive Java application that uses a novel graph-based representation to display a sequence assembly and associated metadata

http://www.bcgsc.ca/platform/bioinfo/software/abyss-explorer

BamView

Genome browser and annotation tool that allows visualization of sequence features, next-generation sequencing (NGS) data and the results of analyses within the context of the sequence, and also its six-frame translation

http://www.sanger.ac.uk/resources/software/artemis/

DNannotator

Annotation web toolkit for regional genomic sequences

http://bioapp.psych.uic.edu/DNannotator.htm

JVM

Java Visual Mapping tool for NGS reads

http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9789401792448-c2.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-1487072-p176815501

LookSeq

Web-based visualization of sequences derived from multiple sequencing technologies. Low- or high-depth read pileups and easy visualization of putative single nucleotide and structural variation

http://lookseq.sourceforge.net

MagicViewer

Visualization of short read alignment, identification of genetic variation and association with annotation information of a reference genome

http://bioinformatics.zj.cn/magicviewer/

MapView

Alignments of huge-scale single-end and pair-end short reads

http://omictools.com/mapview-s1367.html

MultiPipMaker

Computes alignments of similar regions in two DNA sequences. The resulting alignments are summarized with a ‘percent identity plot’ (pip)

http://pipmaker.bx.psu.edu/pipmaker/

PileLineGUI

Handling genome position files in NGS studies

http://sing.ei.uvigo.es/pileline/pilelinegui.html

SAMtools tview

Simple and fast text alignment viewer; NGS compatible

http://www.htslib.org/

SEWAL

Uses a locality-sensitive hashing algorithm to enumerate all unique sequences in an entire Illumina sequencing run

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/sewal

STAR

A web-based integrated solution to management and visualization of sequencing data

http://wanglab.ucsd.edu/star/browser

SVA

Software for annotating and visualizing sequenced human genomes

http://www.svaproject.org

Viewer (IGV)

Visualization of large heterogeneous datasets, providing a smooth and intuitive user experience at all levels of genome resolution

https://www.broadinstitute.org/igv/

ZOOM Lite

NGS data mapping and visualization software

http://bioinfor.com/zoom/lite/