BOL: Related items

Evolution and Cancer

Fri, 27 Sep 2013 11:28:49 -0500

Air date: Wednesday, January 04, 2012, 3:00:00 PM Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local Category: Wednesday Afternoon Lectures Description: There is a broad consensus that cancer is the result of somatic cells having serially gained, by a series of mutations, the ability to grow independently, to recruit resources from the circulation and the stroma, to invade local tissues, and to found anatomically distant metastases, ultimately killing the host. From the point of view of the cancer-causing somatic cell population, this is evolution driven by mutation and selection. Genomics has resulted in a parallel consensus that the central functions of all eukaryotes are highly conserved, not only at the level of individual protein functions, but also complex biological pathways and systems. These ideas motivated a comparison between results of molecular genetic studies of experimental evolution in yeast and the molecular genetic phenomena associated with tumorigenesis and tumor progression. We find some very striking similarities, including recurring genomic rearrangements, alterations of the regulation of specific growth-promoting genes, population-genetic features that affect the fitness trajectories of growth rate variants in evolving populations, and physiological and metabolic similarities derived from the conservation of the basic plan of growth and cell multiplication among all eukaryotes. It is hoped that some of the insights from yeast will aid the interpretation of sequence changes found in tumors, especially in the urgent necessity to distinguish 'driver' from 'passenger' mutations." David Botstein's fundamental contributions to modern genetics include the development of genetic methods for understanding biological functions and the discovery of the functions of many yeast and bacterial genes. In 1980, Botstein and three colleagues proposed a method for mapping human genes that laid the groundwork for the Human Genome Project. The basic principle of the mapping scheme was to develop, by recombinant DNA techniques, random single-copy DNA probes capable of detecting DNA sequence polymorphisms when hybridized to restriction digests, or specific fragments, of an individual's DNA. The method was used in subsequent years to identify several human disease genes, such as Huntington's and BRCA1. Variations of this method enabled the sequencing phase of the Human Genome Project. In the 1990s Botstein, having moved to Stanford University School of Medicine, collaborated with Patrick O. Brown of Stanford in exploiting DNA microarrays to study genome-wide gene expression patterns in yeast and in human cancers. This required developing a new statistical method and graphical interface, widely used today to interpret genomic data. Botstein also has helped to create, with Michael Ashburner and Gerald Rubin, a bioinformatics initiative to unify the representation of gene and gene product attributes across all species, called Gene Ontology. He graduated from Harvard College and earned his doctorate from the University of Michigan. He worked at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1967 to 1988; served as vice president for science at Genentech from 1988 to 1990; chaired the Department of Genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine from 1990 to 2003; and joined the Princeton University faculty in 2003. He has sat on numerous editorial boards and was the founding editor of Molecular Biology of the Cell. Among recent major awards, Bostein won the Peter Gruber Foundation Prize in Genetics in 2003, the Apple Science Innovator Award in 2008, and the Albany Medical Center Prize in 2010. The NIH Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series includes weekly scientific talks by some of the top researchers in the biomedical sciences worldwide. For more information, visit: The NIH Director's Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series Author: Dr. David Botstein, Princeton University Runtime: 00:59:58 Permanent link: http://videocast.nih.gov/launch.asp?17046

Postdoctoral Fellow in Genomics and Comparative Genomics

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:12:32 -0500

Environnement de travail (Work environment):
The successful candidate will join a dynamic research group working
on the ecology and evolution of host'parasite'environment
interactions in non-model organisms, particularly snail vectors and
its trematode parasites. She/He will conduct genomic analyses aimed at
understanding host'parasite coevolution and the genetic architecture
of resistance in the invasive snail Pseudosuccinea columella to the
zoonotic parasite Fasciola hepatica. This thematic line is embedded
within the regional scientific project InvaSnail financed by the
ExposUM initiative from the Montpellier. The position is based in
Montpellier, a vibrant scientific hub in Southern France internationally
recognized for excellence in ecology and evolutionary biology. The IHPE
laboratory provides a collaborative research environment with access
to high-performance computing facilities, sequencing platforms, and
strong interdisciplinary interactions across research institutions in
the Montpellier area. University

Main mission:

Develop and implement strategies for whole-genome sequencing of non-model
species
Generate high-quality de novo genome assemblies using short- and long-read
sequencing technologies
Perform genome annotation and structural/functional characterization
Conduct comparative genomic analyses across related species or populations
Design and implement genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to identify
loci associated with phenotypic or adaptive traits
Integrate genomic, phenotypic, and environmental datasets
Contribute to the development of reproducible bioinformatics pipelines

ActivitÃ©s (Activities):

Lead the genomic component of the research project
High-molecular-weight DNA extraction optimization
Long-read genome assembly (PacBio HiFi / ONT)
Genome polishing and quality assessment (BUSCO, QUAST)
Structural and functional annotation
Variant discovery (SNPs, indels, SVs)
Population genomic analyses (FST, demographic inference)
Mixed-model GWAS accounting for structure
Workflow development (Snakemake/Nextflow)
HPC-based pipeline implementation
Publish results in peer-reviewed journals
Present findings at international conferences
Collaborate with experimental and computational team members
Contribute to project development
Mentor graduate students when appropriate

More at https://evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/evoldir/PostDocs//MontpellierU.ComparativeGenomics

Yeaman Lab

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 04:01:26 -0500

The natural world is a diverse place. To contend with highly variable environments, organisms have evolved a wide range of traits and behaviours as adaptations to their environment. From armour plating in stickleback to trade-offs between growth rate and cold tolerance in lodgepole pine, organisms have found many different genetic solutions to the challenge of existing in their environment. In my lab, we study a range of questions asking how such complex adaptations evolve:
How is the genetic basis of local adaptation shaped by the interplay between natural selection and dispersal?
Does the architecture of genome evolve to facilitate further adaptation?
How can we use genomic technologies and bioinformatics to study adaptation?
How do organisms adapt to rapidly changing environments?

To attempt to answer these questions about the basics of how evolution works, we use a combination of computational biology, analytical theory, comparative genomics.

More at https://yeamanlab.weebly.com

Chemical Elements of Bioinformatics

Rahul Agarwal — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 16:35:39 -0500

You must be familiar with periodic table and colour pattern, but this time you are going to amaze by new elements table by Eagle genomics. Just check it out and have fun :)

http://elements.eaglegenomics.com/

The genome factory !!!

Madhvan Reddy — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 02:09:31 -0600

Illumina, Inc. announced Tuesday that its new HiSeq X Ten Sequencing System has broken the “sound barrier” of human genomics by enabling the $1,000 genome. “This platform includes dramatic technology breakthroughs that enable researchers to undertake studies of unprecedented scale by providing the throughput to sequence tens of thousands of human whole genomes in a single year in a single lab,” Illumina stated.

Initial customers for the HiSeq X Ten System, which will ship in Q1 2014, include Macrogen, based in Seoul, South Korea and its CLIA laboratory in Rockville, Maryland, the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia.

“For the first time, it looks like it will be possible to deliver the $1,000 genome, which is tremendously exciting,” said Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute and a professor of biology at MIT. “The HiSeq X Ten should give us the ability to analyze complete genomic information from huge sample populations. Over the next few years, we have an opportunity to learn as much about the genetics of human disease as we have learned in the history of medicine.”

“The HiSeq X Ten is an ideal platform for scientists and institutions focused on the discovery of genotypic variation to enable a deeper understanding of human biology and genetic disease,” Illumina stated. “It can sequence tens of thousands of samples annually with high-quality, high-coverage sequencing, delivering a comprehensive catalog of human variation within and outside coding regions.”

HiSeq X Ten utilizes a number of advanced design features to generate massive throughput. Patterned flow cells, which contain billions of nanowells at fixed locations, combined with a new clustering chemistry deliver a significant increase in data density (6 billion clusters per run). Using state-of-the art optics and faster chemistry, HiSeq X Ten can process sequencing flow cells more quickly than ever before — generating a 10x increase in daily throughput when compared to current HiSeq 2500 performance.

The HiSeq X Ten is sold as a set of 10 or more ultra-high throughput sequencing systems, each generating up to 1.8 terabases (Tb) of sequencing data in less than three days or up to 600 gigabases (Gb) per day, per system, providing the throughput to sequence tens of thousands of high-quality, high-coverage genomes per year. Illumina says the $1,000 includes typical instrument depreciation, DNA extraction, library preparation, and estimated labor.

Landry Lab

Thu, 17 Jul 2014 14:33:57 -0500

EVOLUTIONARY AND INTEGRATIVE CELL BIOLOGY

Our research is at the crossroad between cell biology, ecological genomics, systems biology, molecular evolution and population genetics. We study the architecture and evolution of protein and signalling networks.

More at http://landrylab.ibis.ulaval.ca/

Introduction to Bioinformatics

eliabrodsky — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 14:58:11 -0500

Introduction to bioinformatics is a course for biologists and clinicians that would like to learn more about the way bioinformatics is used in healthcare, biotech and pharmaceuitcal industry as well as basic research. The course covers many of the topics transformed by the emergence of big data and computational technologies. To learn more about the course, visit: https://edu.t-bio.info/course/introduction-bioinformatics/

Scalpel

Shruti Paniwala — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 02:07:58 -0500

A team from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has released an algorithm, called Scalpel, for finding insertions and deletions in next generation sequencing data sets. Scalpel, which is open source and available for download on SourceForge, outperformed the popular tools GATK HaplotypeCaller and SOAPindel in test runs on both simulated and real whole human exomes.

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.

Next generation sequencing in R or bioconductor environment

John Parker — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 18:03:09 -0500

There are many R software and bioconductor packages for NGS data analysis, some of them are as follows

Biostrings

The Biostrings package from Bioconductor provides an advanced environment for efficient sequence management and analysis in R. It contains many speed and memory effective string containers, string matching algorithms, and other utilities, for fast manipulation of large sets of biological sequences. The objects and functions provided by Biostrings form the basis for many other sequence analysis packages. Documentation

IRanges Overview

IRanges provides the low-level infrastructure and containers for handling sets of integer ranges within Bioconductor's BioC-Seq domain. Its classes and methods provide support for many more high-level packages like GenomicRanges, ShortRead, Rsamtools, etc. Documentation

GenomicRanges Overview

The GenomicRanges package serves as the foundation for representing genomic locations within the Bioconductor project. It is built upon the IRanges infrastructure and defines three major data containers - GRanges, GRangesList and GappedAlignments - which are supporting other important BioC-Seq packages including ShortRead, Rsamtools, rtracklayer, GenomicFeatures and BSgenome. Compared to the IRanges container, the GRanges/GRangesList classes are more flexible and extensible to store additional information about sequence ranges, such as chromosome identifiers (sequence space), strand information and annotation data. Documentation

Motif Discovery

cosmo

The cosmo package allows to search a set of unaligned DNA sequences for a shared motif that may function as transcription factor binding site. The algorithm extends the popular motif discovery tool MEME (Bailey and Elkan, 1995) in that it allows the search to be supervised by specifying a set of constraints that the motif to be discovered must satisfy. Documentation

BCRANK

BCRANK is a method that takes a ranked list of genomic regions as input and outputs short DNA sequences that are overrepresented in some part of the list. The algorithm was developed for detecting transcription factor (TF) binding sites in a large number of enriched regions from high-throughput ChIP-chip or ChIP-seq experiments, but it can be applied to any ranked list of DNA sequences. Documentation

rGADEM: Documentation

MotIV: Documentation

ShortRead

The ShortRead package provides input, quality control, filtering, parsing, and manipulation functionality for short read sequences produced by high throughput sequencing technologies. While support is provided for many sequencing technologies, this package is primairly focused on Solexa/Illumina reads. Documentation

Rsamtools

Rsamtools provides functions for parsing and inspecting samtools BAM formatted binary alignment data. SAM/BAM is quickly becoming a universal standard alignment format, and is now supported by a wide variety of alignment tools. Documentation

Samtools Website
BWA (Burrows-Wheeler Alignment) Website

Additional tools for SNP analysis:

snpMatrix

BSgenome

BSgenome provides an object oriented infrastructure for interacting with a Biostring based genome sequence. BSgenome packages exist for many common genomes, and can be created to represent custom genomes. See the "How to forge a BSgenome data package" Vignette for instructions to create a new BSgenome package if a prebuilt package does not exist for your organism. Documentation

rtracklayer

rtracklayer provides an interface for exporting annotation feature data to various genome browsers and file formats (such as GFF). See the Small RNA Profiling exercise for an example of using rtracklayer to visualize alignment coverage. Documentation

biomaRt

The biomaRt package, provides an interface to a growing collection of databases implementing the BioMart software suite (http:// www.biomart.org). The package enables online retrieval of large amounts of data in a uniform way without the need to know the underlying database schemas. This data is retrieved automatically via the Internet, so it's recommended that you cache the data locally, or check versions if your code will be adversely affected by updates to these data. Documentation

ChIP-Seq Analysis Packages

Bioconductor provides various packages for analyzing and visualizing ChIP-Seq data. Only a small selection of these packages is introduced here. Additional useful introductions to this topic are: BioC ChIP-seq Case Study and BioC ChIP-Seq.

chipseq

The chipseq package combines a variety of HT-Seq packages to a pipeline for ChIP-Seq data analysis. Documentation

BayesPeak

BayesPeak is a peak calling package for identifying DNA binding sites of proteins in ChIP-Seq experiments. Its algorithm uses hidden Markov models (HMM) and Bayesian statistical methods. The following sample code introduces the identification of peaks with the BayesPeak package as well as the incorporation of read coverage information obtained by the chipseq package. Documentation [ Publication ]

PICS

The PICS package applies probabilistic inference to aligned-read ChIP-Seq data in order to identify regions bound by transcription factors. PICS identifies enriched regions by modeling local concentrations of directional reads, and uses DNA fragment length prior information to discriminate closely adjacent binding events via a Bayesian hierarchical t-mixture model. The following sample code uses the test data set from the above BayesPeak package in order to compare the results from both methods by identifying their consensus peak set. Documentation [ Publication ]

ChIPpeakAnno

The ChIPpeakAnno package provides. batch annotation of the peaks identified from either ChIP-seq or ChIP-chip experiments. It includes functions to retrieve the sequences around peaks, obtain enriched Gene Ontology (GO) terms, find the nearest gene, exon, miRNA or custom features such as most conserved elements and other transcription factor binding sites supplied by users. The package leverages the biomaRt, IRanges, Biostrings, BSgenome, GO.db, multtest and stat packages. Documentation

Additional ChIP-Seq Packages

DiffBind: Documentation

MOSAICS: Documentation

iSeq: Documentation

ChIPseqR: Documentation

ChiPsim: Documentation

CSAR: Documentation

ChIP-Seq Pipeline: PICS, rGADEM and MotIV (developer web site)

SPP: ChIP-seq processing pipeline

SPP Tutorial

MACS

SIPeS

RNA-Seq Analysis

Counting Reads that Overlap with Annotation Ranges

The GenomicRanges package provides support for importing into R short read alignment data in BAM format (via Rsamtools) and associating them with genomic feature ranges, such as exons or genes. This way one can quantify the number of reads aligning to annotated genomic regions. The package defines general purpose containers for storing genomic intervals as well as more specialized containers for storing alignments against a reference genome. The two main functions for read counting provided by this infrastructure are countOverlaps and summarizeOverlaps. For their proper usage, it is important to read the corresponding PDF manual. Documentation

Differential Gene Expression Analysis with DESeq

The DESeq package contains functions to call differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in count tables based on a model using the negative binomial distribution. It expects as input a data frame with the raw read counts per region/gene of interest (rows) for each test sample (columns). Such a count table can be imported into R or generated from BAM alignment files using the countOverlaps function as introduced above. Documentation

Differential Gene Expression Analysis with edgeR

The edgeR package uses empirical Bayes estimation and exact tests based on the negative binomial distribution to call differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in count data.

Documentation

A variety of additional R packages are available for normalizing RNA-Seq read count data and identifying differentially expressed genes (DEG):

easyRNASeq (simplifies read counting per genome feature)

DEXSeq (Inference of differential exon usage); parathyroidSE explains how to generate exon read counts in R

DEGseq

baySeq (also see: segmentSeq)

Genominator (Bullard et al. 2010)

Detection of Alternative Splice Junctions

Another utility of RNA-Seq experiments is the analysis of splice junctions. The following software suggestions provide this utility:

ERANGE
TopHat

SpliceMap

SplitSeek

DNA-Methylation Data Analysis

methylPipe
bsseq
BiSeq
Much more under BiocViews

HT-Seq Data Visualization

ggbio: ggplot2 extension for genomics data (online manual) Gviz: Plotting data and annotation information along genomic coordinates HilbertVis: Hilbert genome plots

GenomeGraphs: Plotting genomic information from Ensembl

TileQC: Flow Cell Quality Visualization

rtracklayer: R interface to genome browsers

genoPlotR: Plotting maps of genes and genomes

Genominator: Tools for storing, accessing, analyzing and visualizing genomic data.

To install all packages

source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite()
biocLite(c("ShortRead", "Biostrings", "IRanges", "BSgenome", "rtracklayer", "biomaRt", "chipseq", "ChIPpeakAnno", "Rsamtools", "BayesPeak", "PICS", "GenomicRanges", "DESeq", "edgeR", "leeBamViews", "GenomicFeatures", "BSgenome.Celegans.UCSC.ce2"))

Bioinformatics algorithms tutorials

John Parker — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:10:45 -0500

Useful bioinformatics tutorial, such as

De Bruijn Graphs for NGS Assembly
Algorithms for PacBio Reads
Software and Hardware Concepts for Bioinformatics
Finding us in Homolog.us (Search Algorithms)
NGS Genome and RNAseq Assembly - a Hands on Primer
Introduction to PERL, Python, R and C/C++ for Bioinformatics

Address of the bookmark: http://www.homolog.us/Tutorials/