BOL: Related items

Biotechnology Eligibility Test (BET) Question Paper !

Abhimanyu Singh — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 04:56:33 -0500

DBT-BET JRF 2019 Exam was held successfully on 14th April 2019. Official Question Paper & Answer key of DBT-BET 2019 Exam has been released.

The best part about the DBT-BET Exam is both the question paper & answer key is released immediately after the exam so you get the upper hand here to check how well you did in the DBT-BET exam, how much you are going to score and if you can pass the Exam with good score. This helps you in planning your career ahead.

DBT Exam is held once in a year by Department of Biotechnology – Govt of India. Candidates willing to get DBT-Junior Research Fellowship – DBT JRF fellowship should take up the DBT-BET Exam, DBT – Biotechnology Eligibility Test (BET) 2020 to be held on somewhere in the month of April. Official Notification for DBT-BET 2020 will be released in Feb 2020.

Answer at https://bioinformaticsonline.com/file/view/39262/biotechnology-eligibility-test-bet-answer-set

LoRDEC: a hybrid error correction program for long, PacBio reads

Jit — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 04:16:09 -0500

LoRDEC is a program to correct sequencing errors in long reads from 3rd generation sequencing with high error rate, and is especially intended for PacBio reads. It uses a hybrid strategy, meaning that it uses two sets of reads: the reference read set, whose error rate is assumed to be small, and the PacBio read set, which is then corrected using the reference set. Typically, the reference set contains Illumina reads.

Usually, errors in PacBio reads include many insertions and deletions, and comparatively less substitutions. LoRDEC can correct errors of all these types.
After correction, a larger portion of the sequence of PacBio reads is usable for detection of region of similarity with other sequences, for aligning them to the contigs of an assembly, etc.

Why is LoRDEC different?

It is efficient and can process large read data sets, included from eukaryotic or vertebrate species, on a usual computing server, and even works on desktop/laptop computers.
It adopts a novel graph based approach: it builds a succinct De Bruijn Graph (DBG) representing the short reads, and seeks a corrective sequence for each erroneous region of a long read by traversing chosen paths in the graph.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.atgc-montpellier.fr/lordec/

Genomic Impact

Jitendra Narayan — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 01:33:50 -0500

The ongoing genomic research in USA contributed $31 billion to the U.S. gross national product and helped support 152,000 jobs.

Reference: http://www.unitedformedicalresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/The-Impact-of-Genomics-on-the-US-Economy.pdf

DeCoSTAR - Detection of Co-evolution

Jit — Fri, 14 Apr 2017 06:27:25 -0500

DeCoSTAR is a software which aims at reconstructing ancestral gene or genome organizations, in the form of sets of neighborhood relations -adjacencies- between pairs of ancestral genes or gene domains.
Ancestral genes or domains are deduced from reconciled gene trees in a context of birth, speciation, duplication, loss, transfer, which are either given as input or computed with the ecceTERA package, to which DeCoSTAR is integrated. DeCoSTAR constructs parsimonious scenarios of gains and breakages of adjacencies, and contains in particular all the features of previous software DeCo, DeCoLT, ArtDeCo and DeClone. It provides statistical supports on ancestral adjacencies, or the possibility to handle badly assembled genomes.
DeCoSTAR is able to reconstruct the histories of domains inside genes, including gene fusion and fission events, as well as ancestral genome structures for dozens of whole genomes from all kingdoms of life in a few minutes.

Address of the bookmark: http://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/software/DeCoSTAR/

Five unique traits of effective computational biologist

Jitendra Narayan — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 13:12:51 -0500

Bioinformatics research is driven by large set of software, scripts, and tools to analyse gigantic biological data. Being a great biological programmer or bioinformatician involves more than writing code that works. The biological programmers who rise to the top ranks of their profession are not only good programmer but also expert in biological stuff. Moreover, In order to be a good and effective biological programmer, you need to possess a combination of traits that allow your computational as well as biological skill, experience, and knowledge to produce working code. There are some technically skilled biological programmers who will never be effective because they lack the other important traits needed. Here are top five traits that are necessary to become a great biological programmer.

1. Learn and get updated

Some of the bad biological programmers only learn new technical or non-technical things when it’s absolutely necessary. The good biological programmers learn new technical skills proactively. But great biological programmers not only learn new technical skills on their own but also learn non-technical skills, and have an open mind to sources of knowledge that others may shut out.

In other concrete term, the bad biological programmer learn Perl's regular expression when they started a project on comparative genomics; the good biological programmer learned it a year before because it looked interesting; and the great biological programmer also read about the BioPerl packages, genomics, DNA string, genomic theories, or some similar course of study so that they could understand the results and explain it biologically.

2. Not a merely coder!!!

I often encountered with biological programmer who call themself a hard-core computer programmer and avoid biology. I can almost guarantee that if you are one of them then you are not doing research but merely writing "dry" codes.

According to my supervisor most of the computational biologist, don't know what they are doing biologically. Even they struggle to explain their own programs output and results. Therefore, It is highly advisable to learn basic of biology which can assist you to explain the result and understand your discovery. Always remember you are a researcher not a coder.

3. Be Social with biologist

The computational biologist spends most of the time in from of computers, writing codes. They always think their job is to produce working codes, not technical research perfections. But, they are completely wrong. You should not forget that apart from your computational skills you also need some biologist, other than your supervisor, to explain and make you understand the complex biological mechanism.

I highly recommend your to interact with biotech researchers and learn how do they explain their one graph (which they generally produce after one year of work) biologically. Remember, the origin of your research project is complex biological phenomenon, which is more complex than that of your limited programming rules.

4. Do not search, research for answers

Researching for answers means more than typing several keywords into a search engine or posting a question at Stack Overflow or the BioStars forums. I have entered problems into search engines that generate no results, and every question I posted on Stack Overflow or the BioStars forums never got anything resembling an answer, yet I solved the issues and moved on. I’m not a magician — I just know how to find answers or discover root causes.

Many problems are situational, and if you depend on search engines and forums, you can waste a lot of time going down a rabbit hole and possibly never getting a solution. Learn to perform root cause analysis, learn enough about the underlying system to look for other clues and solutions, and learn to take a long distance view of an issue before deep diving into it.

5. Love and defend your research

You cannot rise to the top in this research profession without loving your work. There are some very good “it’s just a job” biological programmers (I’ve been one at times), but if that is your outlook, you won’t be willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. This idea gets a lot of folks in a huff, because they feel it is a personal insult. “I’m a good programmer, but I have other priorities and can’t make work my life.” I understand completely; I have other priorities too. As much as I hate to say it, when I am passionate about my work, I am willing (though not eager) to abandon my other priorities to finish the job. It is not an insult to say that if you aren’t willing to pull out all the stops you can’t be the best, it is a fact.

You must be passionate about more than programming — you must also be excited about your research, the tools and technology you are using, and so on. I have seen very good and even great biological programmers operating at mediocre levels because something was not a good fit, such as they hated the project or were using a technology they disliked. Therefore, like your research project and get excited about your discoveries. You have not only to discover but also defend your finding with scientific words.

Thanks to all of you for reading.

The Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), Bailey Lab

Sun, 14 Jul 2013 11:53:08 -0500

Pattern recognition and computational biology

MEME Suite software development; gene expression; mathematical modelling; gene regulation and transcription

Specialization:
Pattern recognition and modelling in computational biology

Link @ http://www.imb.uq.edu.au/tim-bailey

Mapping NGS

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 02 May 2017 07:58:07 -0500

NGS data are just a bunch of sequences, you have no idea which region in the genome each sequences comes from, which gene it represents...
To know that you have to align the sequences to the reference sequence. The reference sequence is in most cases the full genome sequence but sometimes, a library of EST sequences is used.
In either way, aligning your sequence reads to the reference sequence is called mapping.

The most used mappers of DNA-seq data are BWA and Bowtie for DNA-Seq data and Tophat, STAR or HISAT for RNA-Seq data. Mappers differ in which options they can take in, how fast and how accurate they are. Bowtie is faster than BWA, but looses some sensitivity (does not map an equal amount of reads to the correct position in the genome).

Address of the bookmark: http://wiki.bits.vib.be/index.php/Mapping_of_NGS_data

The Centre for Bioinformatics, Biomarker Discovery and Information-Based Medicine (CIBM)

Sun, 14 Jul 2013 12:31:38 -0500

The Centre for Bioinformatics, Biomarker Discovery and Information-Based Medicine (CIBM) is committed to shortening the process of obtaining novel discoveries to achieve distinctively better outcomes in clinical practice and translational individualised medicine.

Link @ http://www.newcastle.edu.au/research-and-innovation/centre/cibm/about-us

CLA: Contig-Layout-Authenticator

Jit — Fri, 05 May 2017 05:58:36 -0500

To improve upon the shortcomings associated with the construction of draft genomes with Illumina paired-end sequencing, we developed Contig-Layout-Authenticator (CLA). The CLA pipeline can scaffold reference-sorted contigs based on paired reads, resulting in better assembled genomes. Moreover, CLA also hints at probable misassemblies and contaminations, for the users to cross-check before constructing the consensus draft. The CLA pipeline was designed and trained extensively on various bacterial genome datasets for the ordering and scaffolding of large repetitive contigs. The tool has been validated and compared favorably with other widely-used scaffolding and ordering tools using both simulated and real sequence datasets. CLA is a user friendly tool that requires a single command line input to generate ordered scaffolds.

Script https://sourceforge.net/projects/c-l-authenticator/files/

Address of the bookmark: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0155459

BioRuby :Ruby packages for biologist

Jitendra Narayan — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 01:36:28 -0500

BioRuby is a package of Open Source Ruby code, with classes for DNA and protein sequence analysis, alignment, database parsing, and other Bioinformatics tools.
BioRuby project provides an integrated environment in bioinformatics for the Ruby language. This project is supported by University of Tokyo (Human Genome Center), Kyoto University(Bioinformatics Center) and the Open Bio Foundation. The project was supported by Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA) as an Exploratory Software Project in 2005
RubyForge is a home for open source Ruby projects: RubyForge is a home for open source Ruby projects. BioRuby project was started in late 2000, and is still in progress. Currently, there are over 80 files and 15,000 lines (except comment-only lines) in our source code. This might be equivalent to twice or more lines of other languages because of Ruby's extremely high descriptive power.

Classes for
Multiple alignment (Bio::Alignment),
Gene Ontology(Bio::GO),
PDB (Bio::PDB),
FANTOM database(Bio::FANTOM),
GFF (Bio::GFF) and KEGG
Orthology (Bio::KEGG::KO).

They also added support for many applications such as PSORT, SOSUI, TargetP, TMHMM, GenScan, ClustalW, MAFFT, and KEGG API.

Wiki Links
http://bioruby.open-bio.org/wiki/BioRubyOnRails
http://dev.bioruby.org/en/

BioRuby in Anger
http://dev.bioruby.org/en/?BioRuby+in+Anger

BioRuby RDocs
http://bioruby.org/rdoc/

BioRuby Tutorial Website
http://dev.bioruby.org/en/?Tutorial.rd

Why BioRuby Hub for BioRuby
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5915

Social Coding Hub for BioRuby
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5915

Bioinformatics on Rails: BioRuby Tutorial
http://bioinforuby.blogspot.com/2008/02/bioruby-tutorial.html

RRA BioRuby
http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/bioruby/

BioRuby Project Discussion Group
http://portal.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo/bioruby

BioRuby related Projects: Project tree
http://rubyforge.org/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=252

Reference
http://www.jsbi.org/journal/GIW03/GIW03P191.pdf