BOL: Related items

PHYMMBL

Jit — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 08:56:34 -0500

Metagenomics sequencing projects collect samples of DNA from uncharacterized environments that may contain hundreds or even thousands of species. One of the main challenges in analyzing a metagenome is phylogenetic classification of raw sequence reads into groups representing the same or similar species. Such classification is a useful prerequisite for genome assembly and for analysis of the biological diversity present in a sample. The newest sequencing technologies have simultaneously made metagenomics easier, by making the sequencing process faster, and more difficult, by producing shorter read lengths than previous technologies. Methods for classifying sequences as short as 100 base pairs (bp) have until now been relatively inaccurate, requiring metagenomics projects to use older, long-read technologies. Phymm, a new classification approach for metagenomics data which uses interpolated Markov models (IMMs) to taxonomically classify DNA sequences, can accurately classify reads as short as 100 bp. Its accuracy for short reads represents a significant leap forward over previous composition-based classification methods. PhymmBL (rhymes with "thimble"), the hybrid classifier included in this distribution which combines analysis from both Phymm and BLAST, produces even higher accuracy.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/software/phymm/

Shinyheatmap

Jit — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 05:12:11 -0500

Background: Transcriptomics, metabolomics, metagenomics, and other various next-generation sequencing (-omics) fields are known for their production of large datasets. Visualizing such big data has posed technical challenges in biology, both in terms of available computational resources as well as programming acumen. Since heatmaps are used to depict high-dimensional numerical data as a colored grid of cells, efficiency and speed have often proven to be critical considerations in the process of successfully converting data into graphics. For example, rendering interactive heatmaps from large input datasets (e.g., 100k+ rows) has been computationally infeasible on both desktop computers and web browsers. In addition to memory requirements, programming skills and knowledge have frequently been barriers-to-entry for creating highly customizable heatmaps. Results: We propose shinyheatmap: an advanced user-friendly heatmap software suite capable of efficiently creating highly customizable static and interactive biological heatmaps in a web browser. shinyheatmap is a low memory footprint program, making it particularly well-suited for the interactive visualization of extremely large datasets that cannot typically be computed in-memory due to size restrictions. Conclusions: shinyheatmap is hosted online as a freely available web server with an intuitive graphical user interface: http://shinyheatmap.com. The methods are implemented in R, and are available as part of the shinyheatmap project at: https://github.com/Bohdan-Khomtchouk/shinyheatmap.

More at http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/09/21/076463

Address of the bookmark: http://shinyheatmap.com/

Statistics Using R with Biological Examples

Neel — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 04:55:41 -0500

This book is a manifestation of my desire to teach researchers in biology a bit more about statistics than an ordinary introductory course covers and to introduce the utilization of R as a tool for analyzing their data. My goal is to reach those with little or no training in higher level statistics so that they can do more of their own data analysis, communicate more with statisticians, and appreciate the great potential statistics has to offer as a tool to answer biological questions.

This is necessary in light of the increasing use of higher level statistics in biomedical research. I hope it accomplishes this mission and encourage its free distribution and use as a course text or supplement.

K Seefeld, May 2007

RECORD

Bulbul — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 08:23:36 -0600

Background. Next-generation sequencing technologies are now producing multiple times the genome size in total reads from a single experiment. This is enough information to reconstruct at least some of the differences between the individual genome studied in the experiment and the reference genome of the species. However, in most typical protocols, this information is disregarded and the reference genome is used. Results. We provide a new approach that allows researchers to reconstruct genomes very closely related to the reference genome (e.g., mutants of the same species) directly from the reads used in the experiment. Our approach applies de novo assembly software to experimental reads and so-called pseudoreads and uses the resulting contigs to generate a modified reference sequence. In this way, it can very quickly, and at no additional sequencing cost, generate new, modified reference sequence that is closer to the actual sequenced genome and has a full coverage. In this paper, we describe our approach and test its implementation called RECORD. We evaluate RECORD on both simulated and real data. We made our software publicly available on sourceforge. Conclusion. Our tests show that on closely related sequences RECORD outperforms more general assisted-assembly software.

More at https://sourceforge.net/projects/record-genome-assembler/files/

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26558255

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/

Cutadapt

Bulbul — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 09:59:52 -0600

Cutadapt finds and removes adapter sequences, primers, poly-A tails and other types of unwanted sequence from your high-throughput sequencing reads.

Cutadapt helps with these trimming tasks by finding the adapter or primer sequences in an error-tolerant way. It can also modify and filter reads in various ways. Adapter sequences can contain IUPAC wildcard characters. Also, paired-end reads and even colorspace data is supported. If you want, you can also just demultiplex your input data, without removing adapter sequences at all.

Cutadapt comes with an extensive suite of automated tests and is available under the terms of the MIT license.

If you use cutadapt, please cite DOI:10.14806/ej.17.1.200 .

More at https://github.com/marcelm/cutadapt

Address of the bookmark: http://cutadapt.readthedocs.io/en/stable/guide.html

PRISM

Jit — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 15:19:40 -0600

PRISM is a software for split read (reads which span across a structrual variant -- SV ) mapping and SV calling from the mapping result. PRISM is able to detect small insertions and abitrary size deletions, inversions and tandom duplications with the direction of discordant read pairs. PRISM_CTX is a tool for detecting inter-chromosome trans-location events.

PRISM and PRISM_CTX were originally designed and written by Michael Brudno and Yue Jiang, The original PRISM publication can be found here.

The authors may be contacted via e-mail at: prism at cs.toronto.edu.

Additional information is available in the PRISM README file and PRISM_CTX README file.

http://compbio.cs.toronto.edu/prism/

Address of the bookmark: http://compbio.cs.toronto.edu/prism/

ScaffMatch

Jit — Tue, 13 Dec 2016 10:23:56 -0600

caffMatch is a novel scaffolding tool based on Maximum-Weight Matching able to produce high-quality scaffolds from NGS data (reads and contigs). The tool is written in Python 2.7. It also includes a bash script wrapper that calls aligner in case one needs to first map reads to contigs (instead of providing .sam files).

The arguments accepted by ScaffMatch are:

-w) Working directory -- this is the directory where ScaffMatch files are stored. These are .sam files produced after mapping reads to contigs and the resulting scaffolds file `scaffolds.fa` fasta file;

-c) Contig fasta file;

-m) Command line argument with no options. It is used when .sam files are used instead of reads .fastq files. Do not use this option if you provide reads files;

-1) (Comma separated list of) either .fastq or .sam file(s) corresponding to the first read of the read pair;

-2) (Comma separated list of) either .fastq or .sam file(s) corresponding to the second read of the read pair;

-i) (Comma separated list of) insert size(s) of the library(-ies);

-s) (Comma separated list of) library(-ies) standard deviation(s) of insert size(s);

-t) Bundle threshold. Pairs of contigs supported by number of read pairs less than the value of this argument are discarded. Optional argument, by default it is equal to 5;

-g) Matching heuristics: use `max_weight` for Maximum Weight Matching heuristics with the Insertion step, use `backbone` for Maximum Weight Matching heuristics without the Insertion step, use `greedy` for Greedy Matching heuristics;

-l) Log file - where to store the logs. Optional argument. By default, stdout is used.

Address of the bookmark: http://alan.cs.gsu.edu/NGS/?q=content/scaffmatch

pyScaf

Bulbul — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 14:20:33 -0600

pyScaf orders contigs from genome assemblies utilising several types of information:

paired-end (PE) and/or mate-pair libraries (NGS-based mode)
long reads (NGS-based mode)
synteny to the genome of some related species (reference-based mode)

Scaffolding

In reference-based mode, pyScaf uses synteny to the genome of closely related species in order to order contigs and estimate distances between adjacent contigs.

Contigs are aligned globally (end-to-end) onto reference chromosomes, ignoring:

matches not satisfying cut-offs (--identity and --overlap)
suboptimal matches (only best match of each query to reference is kept)
and removing overlapping matches on reference.

In preliminary tests, pyScaf performed superbly on simulated heterozygous genomes based on C. parapsilosis (13 Mb; CANPA) and A. thaliana (119 Mb; ARATH) chromosomes, reconstructing correctly all chromosomes always for CANPA and nearly always for ARATH (Figures in dropbox, CANPA table, ARATH table).
Runs took ~0.5 min for CANPA on 4 CPUs and ~2 min for ARATH on 16 CPUs.

Important remarks:

Reduce your assembly before (fasta2homozygous.py) as any redundancy will likely break the synteny.
pyScaf works better with contigs than scaffolds, as scaffolds are often affected by mis-assemblies (no de novo assembler / scaffolder is perfect...), which breaks synteny.
pyScaf works very well if divergence between reference genome and assembled contigs is below 20% at nucleotide level.
pyScaf deals with large rearrangements ie. deletions, insertion, inversions, translocations. Note however, this is experimental implementation!
Consider closing gaps after scaffolding.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/lpryszcz/pyScaf

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/