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.

Bioinformatics : https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2681785372/

Engineer: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2681796993/

More @ http://news.yale.edu/2013/10/17/researchers-rewrite-entire-genome-and-add-healthy-twist

News Reference: Yale news

Image Source: Sciencedaily.

Evolution provides the overarching framework for organizing our understanding of biological phenomena at multiple structural levels and spatio-temporal scales. As such, evolutionary biology is more of a perspective or weltanschauung on the living world rather than a sub-discipline of biology. Unfortunately, despite the centrality of evolution to all thinking in biology, evolutionary biology remains neglected in the Indian context although research in many areas, not traditionally thought to be within the ambit of evolutionary biology, would greatly benefit from an evolutionary perspective.

The first school in evolutionary biology in the country, sponsored by SERB, will be conducted at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru. The school aims to provide participants with an introduction to the historical development of evolutionary thought and the various ecological, genetic and developmental aspects of the evolutionary process. The school will also provide an introduction to formal evolutionary theory and statistical methods for the analysis of evolutionary data.

Master’s/Ph.D. scholars, postdoctoral researchers and young faculty members in India may apply online on or before 31 December 2018 at http://school2019.serbevolschool.in, where additional details about the school can also be found. In case of any difficulty with the submission of applications, please e-mail Prof. T. N. C. Vidya, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Jakkur, Bengaluru, at tncvidya.lab@gmail.com.

Selected participants will be provided 3-tier AC train fare and local hospitality. There is no registration fee.

Application closing date 16/09/2024

Details of the post and application process can be found at the following
url:

https://vacancies.essex.ac.uk/tlive_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC107GF.open?VACANCY_ID=202575WW5Z&WVID=9918109NEm&LANG=USA

Informal enquiries may be made by email to the Head of the School of
Life Sciences Prof Terence McGenity at tjmcgen@essex.ac.uk(all formal
applications for the post should be made online through the University
of Essex website).

The tutorial is divided in three main parts:

• In the Sequence part, you will see how to look efficiently for a particular protein sequence, how to blast it against the database of your choice to find homologues, how to perform a multiple alignment of the homologues you've selected and how to edit this alignment.
• The Structure part is about molecular visualization, homology modeling and structural domain prediction.
• In the Function part, you will be introduced to you 3 useful servers to investigate the function of a protein. i.e. finding interactors, co-expressed genes, see a phylogenetic profile, easily access papers citing your gene etc ...

During all the three parts, we will use the S. cerevisiae VPS36 protein as an example.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/rlw/text/bioinfo_tuto/introduction.html

The Biotite package bundles popular tasks in computational biology into an unifying framework, which is easy to use on the one hand side, but is also computationally efficient due to intensive usage of NumPy and Cython. This package focuses on working with sequence and structure data and supports various file formats and analysis and manipulation functions.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/biotite-dev/biotite

Essential experience / qualifications:
We are looking for highly motivated candidates holding a Master / Diploma in Biology, Biochemistry, Molecular Medicine or similar; solid knowledge of molecular and cell biological techniques; good English knowledge.

Applications:
Please send your application (including CV, letter of motivation, contact information of two references, and list of publication) by 13.03.2020 at the latest to:

Universitätsklinikum Erlangen
Chirurgische Klinik
Translational Research Center
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Michael Stürzl
Schwabachanlage 12
91054 Erlangen
E-Mail: michael.stuerzl@uk-erlangen.de

Candidates should have a 1st class MSc/MTech/BTech degree in Bioinformatics. Please send complete CV, quoting Application for RMETH-JRF-2014, by email to Dr. Dinesh Gupta: dinesh@icgeb.res.in

Closing date for applications: 6 August 2014

More at http://www.icgeb.org/tl_files/Vacancies/JRF.pdf