BOL: Related items

Important Journals, Blogs and Forums for Bioinformaticians

Jit — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 09:15:31 -0600

Journals. Most journals have RSS feeds for their current updates.

Blogs. Some of these blogs are very relevant to bioinfo jobs. Others are more personal interest.

The OpenHelix Blog
Ensembl blog
Galaxy News
Blue Collar Bioinformatics
Homologus
Golden Helix - our 2 SNPs
Genomics Law Report
R-bloggers (aggregates feeds from >350 blogs about R)
Genomes Unzipped
Jason Moore's Epistasis Blog
23andMe - the Spitoon

Variance Explained: David Robinson’s blog (Data Scientist at Stack Overflow, works in R and Python).
Global Biodefense: News on pathogens, outbreaks, and preparedness, with periodic posts on genomics and bioinformatics-related developments and funding opportunities.
In between lines of code: Lex Nederbragt’s blog on biology, sequencing, bioinformatics, …
Simply Statistics: A statistics blog by Rafa Irizarry, Roger Peng, and Jeff Leek.
Bits of DNA: Reviews and commentary on computational biology by Lior Pachter (fair warning: dialogue here can get a bit heated!).
Blue Collar Bioinformatics: articles related tool validation and the open source bioinformatics community.
Microbiome Digest – Bik’s Picks: A daily digest of scientific microbiome papers, by Elisabeth Bik, Science Editor at uBiome.
Living in an Ivory Basement: Titus Brown’s blog on metagenomics, open science, testing, reproducibility, and programming.
Enseqlopedia: James Hadfield’s blog on all things NGS.
Epistasis Blog: Jason Moore’s computational biology blog.
RStudio Blog: announcements about new RStudio functionality, updates about the tidyverse, and more.
nextgenseek.com: Next-Gen Sequencing Blog covering new developments in NGS data & analysis.
RNA-Seq Blog: Transcriptome Research & Industry News.
The Allium: We all need a little humor in our lives. Like The Onion, but for science.

Forums.

BRIG

Jit — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 13:14:25 -0600

BRIG is a free cross-platform (Windows/Mac/Unix) application that can display circular comparisons between a large number of genomes, with a focus on handling genome assembly data. The application is available at:http://sourceforge.net/projects/brig

If you have any questions or comments, post them on one of the trackers on BRIG’s SourceForge page:http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=328245.

Features:

Images show similarity between a central reference sequence and other sequences as concentric rings.
BRIG will perform all BLAST comparisons and file parsing automatically via a simple GUI.
Contig boundaries and read coverage can be displayed for draft genomes; customized graphs and annotations can be displayed.
Using a user-defined set of genes as input, BRIG can display gene presence, absence, truncation or sequence variation in a set of complete genomes, draft genomes or even raw, unassembled sequence data.
BRIG also accepts SAM-formatted read-mapping files enabling genomic regions present in unassembled sequence data from multiple samples to be compared simultaneously

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

J-Circos

Shruti Paniwala — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 09:06:54 -0600

Circos plot tool (J-Circos) that is an interactive visualization tool that can plot Circos figures, as well as being able to dynamically add data to the figure, and providing information for specific data points using mouse hover display and zoom in/out functions. J-Circos uses the Java computer language to enable it to be used on most operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux). Users can input data into J-Circos using flat data formats, as well as from the GUI. J-Circos will enable biologists to better study more complex chromosomal interactions and fusion transcripts that are otherwise difficult to visualize from next-generation sequencing data.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.australianprostatecentre.org/research/software/jcircos

bedtools

Jit — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 04:50:44 -0600

Collectively, the bedtools utilities are a swiss-army knife of tools for a wide-range of genomics analysis tasks. The most widely-used tools enable genome arithmetic: that is, set theory on the genome. For example, bedtools allows one tointersect, merge, count, complement, and shuffle genomic intervals from multiple files in widely-used genomic file formats such as BAM, BED, GFF/GTF, VCF. While each individual tool is designed to do a relatively simple task (e.g., intersect two interval files), quite sophisticated analyses can be conducted by combining multiple bedtools operations on the UNIX command line.

bedtools is developed in the Quinlan laboratory at the University of Utah and benefits from fantastic contributions made by scientists worldwide.

Address of the bookmark: http://bedtools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

FinisherSC: a repeat-aware and scalable tool for upgrading de novo assembly using long reads

Jit — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 09:49:45 -0600

FinisherSC, a repeat-aware and scalable tool for upgrading de novo assembly using long reads. Experiments with real data suggest that FinisherSC can provide longer and higher quality contigs than existing tools while maintaining high concordance.

Address of the bookmark: http://kakitone.github.io/finishingTool/

MetaBAT: An Efficient Tool for Accurately Reconstructing Single Genomes from Complex Microbial Communities

Jit — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 03:44:34 -0600

MetaBAT, An Efficient Tool for Accurately Reconstructing Single Genomes from Complex Microbial Communities

Grouping large genomic fragments assembled from shotgun metagenomic sequences to deconvolute complex microbial communities, or metagenome binning, enables the study of individual organisms and their interactions. Here we developed an automated metagenome binning software, called MetaBAT, which integrates empirical probabilistic distances of genome abundance and tetranucleotide frequency. Tested on both synthetic and real metagenome datasets, MetaBAT outperforms alternative methods in both accuracy and computational efficiency. Applying MetaBAT to an assembly from 1,704 human gut samples formed 1,634 genome bins (>200kb) in 3 hours, where 621 genome bins are >50% complete with <5% contamination from other species. Further analysis shows that the quality of these genome bins approaches manually curated genomes.

Address of the bookmark: https://bitbucket.org/berkeleylab/metabat

PhenoGram

Jit — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 08:35:12 -0600

With PhenoGram researchers can create chomosomal ideograms annotated with lines in color at specific base-pair locations, or colored base-pair to base-pair regions, with or without other annotation. PhenoGram allows for annotation of chromosomal locations and/or regions with shapes in different colors, gene identifiers, or other text. PhenoGram also allows for creation of plots showing expanded chromosomal locations, providing a way to show results for specific chromosomal regions in greater detail.

Address of the bookmark: http://ritchielab.psu.edu/software/phenogram-downloads

Pacbio Long Reads Compatible Software and Tools

Archana Malhotra — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 14:19:01 -0500

The following software packages are known to be compatible with PacBio® data, in addition to PacBio's own SMRT® Analysis suite. All packages are believed to be open source or freely available for non-commercial use. See the individual project sites for up-to-date license information. A separate page lists commercial software.

Know of any other open source software for PacBio data? Email us.

Software categories:

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/DevNet/wiki/Compatible-Software

SNPGenie

Jit — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 17:38:02 -0500

SNPGenie is a Perl script for estimating evolutionary parameters, mainly from pooled next-generation sequencing (NGS) single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) variant data. SNP reports (acceptable in a variety of formats) much each correspond to a single population, with variants called relative to a single reference sequence (one sequence in one FASTA file). Just run the main script, snpgenie.pl, in a directory containing the necessary input files, and we take care of the rest! For the earlier version, see Hughes Lab Bioinformatics Resource.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/hugheslab/snpgenie

NGS teaching material

Jit — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 04:29:06 -0500

High throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies are being applied to a wide range of important topics in biology. However, the analyses of non-model organisms, for which little previous sequence information is available, pose specific problems. This course addresses the specific strengths and weaknesses of alternative HTS technologies, the computational resources needed for HTS, and how to analyze non-model species using HTS. The course consists of a practical training module, HTS bioinformatics training, and lecturing/seminars of HTS approaches specifically targeting non-model organisms.

Address of the bookmark: http://marinetics.org/teaching/hts/Assembly.html