The most common newbie questions are:

Should I try to use these free open source programs?  Why are we not trying GUI software for computational analysis? Should I use commercial bioinformatics programs/software?”

1. Let’s be open

We generally think free and cheap are useless. But this concept is not applicable when we discuss open source software. Mostly, the bioinformatics software is developed by highly competitive biological programmers who believe in open sharing of knowledge. They come under Open Bioinformatics Foundation or O|B|F which is a non-profit, volunteer run organization focused on supporting open source programming in bioinformatics. The best part about open source tools/software is that they’re free to download the source code and read exactly what the program does. If you are so inclined, you can view all of the parts of the program and see the logical flow of the pipeline. In addition, open source makes an excellent learning tool for any beginning bioinformatician. Moreover, you can modify existing open source programs to deal with cutting-edge problems or to customize your pipeline. Apart from your computational and analysis work, most of the reviewer also prefers the open source based results so that they can validate the results if validation required.

2. Code headache

As a bioinformatician you are supposed to know the basics of programming languages, and if you are not good at it, then please learn it as soon as possible because you are not a bio-analyst but biological programmers. The open source programs usually lack dedicated service and support teams (often because they were the product of an overworked doc/postdoc!) so you are responsible for troubleshooting your own errors most of the time. We commonly receive the HELP email to support and assist to setup the pipeline; you can also find this kind of request on any QA forum. I personally believe this coding horror brings the biggest downside of open-source programs; where you need some programming skills in order to implement the program in your pipeline. But, if you are not able to fix the pipeline and modify the open source code according to your requirements them you should re-think on your bioinformatician name tag!!!

3. Dive into the codes

Some of the biologist turn bioinformatician says “if you can do the same thing with commercial software then why to get migraine with weird codes”, well this statement looks to me that guys are keen to learn swimming but still don’t like to get wet. If you are still using paid software and doing your work by customer support and clicking some of the well-designed GUI button then perhaps you are not interested in learning and trying new and challenging bioinformatics works. You are missing the basic flavour of bioinformatics. Let’s dive into the coding world, I am sure your will enjoy it. I recommend your to swim freely in code’s sea, and enjoy the journey; do not merely watch it from the outside.  

4. Paid does not mean better

The bioinformatics company which are specializes in bioinformatics solutions develop well designed/packed, user friendly software by using a large number of specialised scientist, programmers and support staff. They also provide good services to accomplice your biological analysis work. This means that if you hit a ‘snag’ with your data, help is likely only a phone call away! These companies price their products competitively against the cost of a dedicated bioinformatician. You may be able to afford the program, but not the additional staff! Additionally, most of the functionality that you need in your analysis is already coded into the program. Need to plot a graph? Just click this button right here. It is that easy. But, as a bioinformatician this is not generally well encouraged approach in biological analysis work, because the software is not available to everyone and your data can’t be validated. Moreover, there is very less chances that anyone will repeat your work or love to do similar kind of research (because not all the labs in the world are rich like yours).

5. Take a caution

In biological analysis work, in which you deal GB/TB of data are having maximum chances of getting errors, so please be careful and always cross check your data before coming to any conclusion. Even an error in two line code can alter your entire analysis and display weird results. Some of the scientist blindly believes on commercial software, which is entirely wrong. Using proprietary tools does not absolve you of the need to actually read and research the type of analysis that you are doing. This is particularly true in the case of genome assembly and annotation.

At the end, I would like to tell only one think that open source solutions allows you to do more cutting edge analysis than the commercial tools. So let’s go for it.

Disclaimer:

This is my personal view. I have nothing to do with any company or open source community. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my current/past employers. I do reserve the right to remove comments left by spammers or off-topic comments.

Next generation quantitative genetics in plants. Jiménez-Gómez, Frontiers in Plant Science 2:77, 2011 Full Text [equally relevant to animal and microbial systems]

Sense from sequence reads: methods for alignment and assembly. Flicek & Birney, Nat Methods 6(11 Suppl):S6-S12, 2009. Full Text

Library construction and experimental design

Statistical design and analysis of RNA sequencing data. Auer & Doerge, Genetics 185(2):405-16, 2010. PubMedCentral

Biases in Illumina transcriptome sequencing caused by random hexamer priming. Hansen et al., Nucleic Acids Res. 38(12): e131, 2010. PubMedCentral

Analyzing and minimizing PCR amplification bias in Illumina sequencing libraries. Aird et al, Genome Biology 12:R18, 2011 Full Text

Amplification-free Illumina sequencing-library preparation facilitates improved mapping and assembly of GC-biased genomes. Kozarewa et al, Nature Methods 6(4):291-5, 2009 PubMedCentral

Cost-effective, high-throughput DNA sequencing libraries for multiplexed target capture. Rohland & Reich, Genome Research 22(5): 939–946. PubMedCentral

Data formats, data management, and alignment software tools

The Sequence Alignment/Map format and SAMtools. Li et al, Bioinformatics 25(16):2078-9, 2009 PubMedCentral

SAM format specification file

Efficient storage of high throughput sequencing data using reference-based compression. Fritz et al, Genome Res 21(5):734-40, 2011. Full Text

Compression of DNA sequence reads in FASTQ format. Deorowicz & Grabowski, Bioinformatics 27(6):860-2, 2011. PubMed

Fast and accurate short read alignment with Burrows-Wheeler transform. Li & Durbin, Bioinformatics 25(14):1754-60, 2009. PubMedCentral

Improving SNP discovery by base alignment quality. Li H, Bioinformatics 27(8):1157-8, 2011. PubMed

BEDTools: a flexible suite of utilities for comparing genomic features. Quinlan and Hall, Bioinformatics 26:841-842, 2010. Publisher Website

Data quality assessment, filtering, and correction

SolexaQA: At-a-glance quality assessment of Illumina second-generation sequencing data. Cox et al, BMC Bioinformatics 11:485, 2010. PubMedCentral

TileQC: a system for tile-based quality control of Solexa data. Dolan & Denver, BMC Bioinformatics 9:250, 2008 PubMedCentral [requires a reference sequence]

Quake: quality-aware detection and correction of sequencing errors. Kelley et al, Genome Biol 11(11):R116, 2010. PubMed

FastQC: a quality control tool for high-throughput sequence data. Home Page

FASTX-toolkit: FASTQ/A short-reads pre-processing tools Home Page

Reference-free validation of short read data. Schröder et al, PLoS One 5(9):e12681, 2010. PubMedCentral

Correction of sequencing errors in a mixed set of reads. Salmela, Bioinformatics 26(10):1284, 2010. Full Text [includes error correction of SOLiD reads in colorspace]

Repeat-aware modeling and correction of short read errors. Yang et al, BMC Bioinformatics 12(Supp1):S52, 2011 PubMedCentral [requires a reference sequence]

HiTEC: accurate error correction in high-throughput sequencing data. Ilie et al, Bioinformatics 27(3):295, 2011 Full Text

Error correction of high-throughput sequencing datasets with non-uniform coverage. Medvedev et al., Bioinformatics 27(13):i137-41, 2011. PubMedCentral

De novo assembly

Velvet: algorithms for de novo short read assembly using de Bruijn graphs. Zerbino & Birney, Genome Res 18(5):821-9, 2008. u>PubMedCentral

Assembly of large genomes using second-generation sequencing. Schatz et al, Genome Res 20(9):1165-73, 2010. PubMedCentral

High-quality draft assemblies of mammalian genomes from massively parallel sequence data. Gnerre et al, PNAS 108(4): 1513-18, 2011 PubMedCentral

Genome assembly has a major impact on gene content: a comparison of annotation in two Bos taurus assemblies. Florea  et al., PLoS One 6(6):e21400, 2011. PubMedCentral

Artemis: an integrated platform for visualization and analysis of high-throughput sequence-based experimental data. Carver et al, Bioinformatics 28(4):464 - 469, 2012 PubMedCentral

Efficient de novo assembly of large genomes using compressed data structures. Simpson & Durbin, Genome Research 22:549-556, 2012 Full Text [Describes the String Graph Assembler (SGA), which assembled a human genome in less than 6 days using 54 Gb of RAM and a 123-processor compute cluster for calculation of an FM-index of the 1.2 billion reads]

Readjoiner: a fast and memory efficient string graph-based sequence assembler. Gonnella & Kurtz, BMC Bioinformatics 13: 82, 2012 PubMedCentral

Assemblathon 1: A competitive assessment of de novo short read assembly methods. Earl et al, Genome Research 21:2224-2241, 2011 Full Text

Chromatin immunoprecipation analysis: ChIP-seq

ChIP-seq: advantages and challenges of a maturing technology. Park, Nat Rev Genet. 10:669-80, 2009 PubMed

ChIP-seq and Beyond: new and improved methodologies to detect and characterize protein-DNA interactions. Furey, Nat Rev Genet 13: 840–852, 2012 Publisher Web Site

MuMoD: a Bayesian approach to detect multiple modes of protein–DNA binding from genome-wide ChIP data. Narlikar, Nucleic Acids Res 41:21–32, 2013 PubMed

Transcriptome analysis

Assembly and comparison to genome

Full-length transcriptome assembly from RNA-Seq data without a reference genome. Grabherr et al, Nature Biotechnology 29:644 - 652, 2011. PubMed [The software is called Trinity, and is available on Sourceforge.]

Comprehensive analysis of RNA-Seq data reveals extensive RNA editing in a human transcriptome. Peng et al, Nature Biotechnology 30:253 - 260, 2012. PubMed [Several comments on this paper question whether the reported differences are in fact evidence of editing or are simply sequencing errors - the authors stand by their conclusions, but the controversy demonstrates the importance of robust data analysis methods.]

Optimization of de novo transcriptome assembly from next-generation sequencing data. Surget-Groba & Montoya-Burgos, Genome Res 20(10):1432-40, 2010. Full Text

Rnnotator: an automated de novo transcriptome assembly pipeline from stranded RNA-Seq reads. Martin et al, BMC Genomics 11:663, 2010 Full Text

De novo assembly and analysis of RNA-seq data. Robertson et al, Nature Methods 7:909-912, 2010 Full Text [describes Trans-ABySS, a pipeline to use the ABySS parallel assembler for de novo transcriptome analysis]

Differential expression analysis

R-SAP: a multi-threading computational pipeline for the characterization of high-throughput RNA-sequencing data. Mittal & McDonald, Nucleic Acids Res, 2012 Full Text

Targeted RNA sequencing reveals the deep complexity of the human transcriptome. Mercer et al, Nature Biotechnology 30:99 - 104, 2012 Publisher Website

Differential gene and transcript expression analysis of RNA-Seq experiments with TopHat and Cufflinks. Trapnell et al, Nature Protocols 7:562 - 578, 2012 Publisher Website

Characterization and improvement of RNA-Seq precision in quantitative transcript expression profiling. Łabaj et al, Bioinformatics 27:i383 - i391, 2011 Full Text

Improving RNA-Seq expression estimates by correcting for fragment bias. Roberts et al, Genome Biol 12:R22, 2011 PubMed Central

Cloud-scale RNA-sequencing differential expression analysis with Myrna. Langmead et al, Genome Biol 11:R83, 2010 Full Text

From RNA-seq reads to differential expression results. Oshlack et al, Genome Biol 11(12):220, 2010 Full Text

DEGseq: an R package for identifying differentially expressed genes from RNA-seq data. Wang et al., Bioinformatics. 26(1):136-8. 2010 PubMed

DEseq: Differential expression analysis for sequence count data. Anders and Huber, Genome Biology 11:R106, 2010 Full Text

edgeR: a Bioconductor package for differential expression analysis of digital gene expression data. Robinson et al., Bioinformatics 26(1):139-40 2010 PubMedCentral

Two-stage Poisson model for testing RNA-seq data. Auer and Doerge, SAGMB 10(1), article 26 Full Text

Experimental design, preprocessing, normalization and differential expression analysis of small RNA sequencing experiments. McCormick et al., Silence2(1):2, 2011 PubMedCentral

RNA-Seq gene expression estimation with read mapping uncertainty. Li et al, Bioinformatics 26:493-500, 2010 PubMedCentral [describes the RSEM software package]

Comparing genomes and assemblies; variant detection

Versatile and open software for comparing large genomes. Kurtz et al, Genome Biol (5(2):R12, 2004. PubMedCentral [describes the MUMmer software for full-genome alignment & comparisons]

Searching for SNPs with cloud computing. Langmead et al, Genome Biol 10(11):R134, 2009 Full Text

Calling SNPs without a reference sequence. Ratan et al, BMC Bioinformatics 11:130, 2010 PubMedCentral

Microindel detection in short-read sequence data. Krawitz et al, Bioinformatics 26(6):722-9, 2010. Full Text

vipR: variant identification in pooled DNA using R. Altmann et al., Bioinformatics 27: i77-i84, 2011. PubMedCentral

Geoseq: a tool for dissecting deep-sequencing datasets. Gurtowski et al, BMC Bioinformatics 11:506, 2010. PubMedCentral [Geoseq is a web service that allows searching deep sequencing datasets with a reference sequence of a gene of interest]

Detecting and annotating genetic variations using the HugeSeq pipeline. Lam et al, Nature Biotechnology 30:226 - 229, 2012 Publisher Website, Home Page

Genome-wide LORE1 retrotransposon mutagenesis and high-throughput insertion detection in Lotus japonicus. Urbański et al, Plant J 64:731-741, 2012. Publisher Website [This paper describes a 2-dimensional pooling strategy with barcoding to allow use of Illumina sequencing to screen for retrotransposon insertion mutations, and includes a software package called FSTpoolit for analysis of the resulting sequence reads.]

Genotyping by sequencing

Genome-wide genetic marker discovery and genotyping using next-generation sequencing. Davey et al., Nat Rev Genet 12(7):499-510, 2011 PubMed [A review of methods available at the time]

A robust, simple genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) approach for high diversity species. Elshire et al., PLoS One 6(5):e19379, 2011. Full Text

Development of high-density genetic maps for barley and wheat using a novel two-enzyme genotyping-by-sequencing approach. Poland et al., PLoS One 7(2): e32253, 2012. Full Text

Double digest RADseq: an inexpensive method for de novo SNP discovery and genotyping in model and non-model species. Peterson et al, PLoS One 7(5):e37135, . 2012. Full Text

Imputation of unordered markers and the impact on genomic selection accuracy. Rutkowski et al, G3 3(3):427-39, 2013. Full Text

Diversity Arrays Technology (DArT) and next-generation sequencing combined: genome-wide, high-throughput, highly informative genotyping for molecular breeding of Eucalyptus. Sansaloni et al., BMC Proceedings 5(Suppl 7):P54, 2011 Full Text

High-throughput genotyping by whole-genome resequencing. Huang et al., Genome Res 19(6):1068-76, 2009. Full Text

Multiplexed shotgun genotyping for rapid and efficient genetic mapping. Andolfatto et al. Genome Res 21(4):610-7, 2011. Full Text

Restriction-site Associated DNA (RAD) markers

Rapid SNP discovery and genetic mapping using sequenced RAD markers. Baird et al, PLoS One 3(10):e3376, 2008 Full Text

Linkage mapping and comparative genomics using next-generation RAD sequencing of a non-model organism. Baxter et al., PLoS One 6(4):e19315, 2011. Full Text

Genome evolution and meiotic maps by massively parallel DNA sequencing: spotted gar, an outgroup for the teleost genome duplication. Amores et al, Genetics 188(4):799-808, 2011. PubMed

Construction and application for QTL analysis of a Restriction-site Associated DNA (RAD) linkage map in barley. Chutimanitsakun et al, BMC Genomics 4; 12:4, 2011. Full Text

RAD tag sequencing as a source of SNP markers in Cynara cardunculus L. Scaglione et al., BMC Genomics 13:3, 2012. Full Text

Paired-end RAD-seq for de novo assembly and marker design without available reference. Willing et al., Bioinformatics 27(16):2187-93, 2011. Publisher Website

Local de novo assembly of RAD paired-end contigs using short sequencing reads. Etter et al., PLOS ONE 6(4): e18561, 2011. Full Text

Stacks: building and genotyping loci de novo from short-read sequences. Catchen et al., G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics, 1:171-182, 2011. Full Text, Home Page

Rainbow: an integrated tool for efficient clustering and assembling RAD-seq reads. Chong et al, Bioinformatics 28(21):2732-7, 2012. Publisher Website

UK RAD Sequencing Wiki page, with bibliography and RADTools software download Home Page

Workspace environments

Papers

Galaxy: a comprehensive approach for supporting accessible, reproducible, and transparent computational research in the life sciences. Goecks et al, Genome Biol 11(8):R86, 2010 PubMedCentral

Galaxy Cloudman: Delivering compute clusters. BMC Bioinformatics 11(Suppl. 12):S4, 2010 Full Text

The Genome Analysis Toolkit: a MapReduce framework for analyzing next-generation DNA sequencing data. McKenna et al, Genome Res 20(9):1297-303, 2010. PubMedCentral

A framework for variation discovery and genotyping using next-generation DNA sequencing data. DePristo et al., Nat Genet 43(5):491-8, 2011. PubMed

Online resources

The R statistical computing environment includes Bioconductor, a specialized set of tools for analysis of microarray and high-throughput sequencing data. Introductory materials from on-line or short workshops are widely available online; examples are Evomics2012 Bioconductor-tutorial.pdf, and Intro to Bioconductor. Materials from an advanced course on high-throughput genetic data analysis are at Seattle 2012 materials. Thomas Girke of UC-Riverside has written a very complete set of manuals describing the use of R and Bioconductor for analysis of genomic datasets, available at R and Bioconductor Manuals.
Manuals and contributed documentation for R are available at the R-project.org website, and video tutorials are also available on Youtube; those posted by Tutorlol are brief, clear, and to the point.
Materials from a series of mini-courses in R taught in 2010 at UCLA are available:

• Intro to programming and graphics
• Data manipulation and functions
• Graphics for exploratory data analysis
• Introductory statistics
• Linear regression

A Little Book of R for Bioinformatics is an on-line resource with information and exercises to provide practice in bioinformatics analysis of DNA sequences and other biological data in R.
Many books on specific topics in R programming are also available through Amazon or other vendors.

Cloud computing resources

The case for cloud computing in genome informatics. Lincoln Stein, Genome Biol. 11(5):207, 2010 Pubmed

Galaxy Cloudman: delivering cloud compute clusters. Afgan et al, BMC Bioinformatics 11(Suppl 12):S4, 2010 Full Text

CloudBioLinux is an open-source project that provides a bioinformatics Linux system for cloud computing, pre-configured with a variety of software tools installed and ready to use.

A tutorial on getting started with CloudBioLinux on the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

“Deploying Galaxy on the Cloud” – slides from a presentation by Enis Afgan (Emory University) at the
 Bioinformatics Open Source Conference in Boston, July 2010

A screencast that provides a step-by-step guide to starting a Galaxy cluster in the EC2 environment

A webpage that has the same information in text form, and is the basis for the screencast

The iPlant Collaborative, an NSF-funded project to create computational resources for plant biology research, provides access to cloud computing resources through Atmosphere

SeqWare Query Engine: storing and searching sequence data in the cloud. O’Connor et al, BMC Bioinformatics 11(Suppl 12):S2, 2010 Full Text

An overview of the Hadoop/MapReduce/HBase framework and its current applications in bioinformatics. Taylor, BMC Bioinformatics 11(Suppl 12):S1, 2010 Full Text

Links to Linux command-line tutorials and resources

Tutorials for AWK, a powerful tool for handling data tables

• A set of awk notes from Boston University
• Bruce Barnett's awk tutorial
• Greg Goebel's awk tutorial
• Executing an awk command from R to simplify data exploratory analysis, from Lex Nederbragt

Tutorials for bash shell scripting

• A tutorial at linuxconfig.org
• A Getting Started With Bash tutorial at hypexr.org
• Mendel Cooper's Advanced Bash Shell-Scripting Guide

Tutorials for sed, the command-line stream editor

• A tutorial at Rutgers
• Peteris Krumins claims to have the World's Best Introduction to Sed; take a look and judge for yourself.
• Bruce Barnett's sed tutorial.

Links to other useful sites

The SEQanswers online community has forums on several topics related to sequencing; the bioinformatics forum is the most active.

The SEQanswers Software Wiki is a list of software for analysis of sequencing data

Biostar is another online community for questions and answers on bioinformatics and computational genomics.

Information on file formats used by the University of California - Santa Cruz Genome Browser is on the FAQ list

A manual for the Integrated Genome Browser visualization tool is here

Course materials for a short course entitled Introduction to R and Bioconductor, held in Seattle in Dec 2010

Genomic Regions Enrichment of Annotations Tool - A web service to test for over-representation of specific ontology categories among genes near ChIP-seq peaks

Next-gen-seq software - a list of software packages, both commercial and open-source, related to analysis of deep sequencing datasets

Software from the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Maryland - many useful programs, all open-source

PLAZA: a comparative genomics resource to study gene and genome evolution in plants; described by Proost et al, Plant Cell 21:3718, 2010 Full Text

The European Bioinformatics Institute provides tools ArrayExpressHTS and R-Cloud for analysis of transcriptome data

1. RNA-Seq Analysis Pipelines

RNA-seq is one of the most popular techniques for studying RNA. These tools streamline processing raw sequence data:

• FASTQC: For quality control of raw RNA-seq reads.
• Trimmomatic: For trimming and filtering RNA-seq reads.
• HISAT2/STAR: High-performance aligners for RNA-seq reads.
• FeatureCounts: For quantifying gene expression.
• DESeq2/EdgeR: For differential expression analysis.

2. Transcriptome Assembly and Annotation

For analyzing transcriptomes from non-model organisms or assembling novel transcripts:

• Trinity: For de novo transcriptome assembly.
• StringTie: For transcript assembly and quantification from RNA-seq alignments.
• TransDecoder: To predict coding regions within assembled transcripts.
• TAU: Tools for annotating non-coding and coding RNAs.

3. Exploring Non-Coding RNA (ncRNA)

Non-coding RNAs play critical regulatory roles. Dedicated tools for studying them include:

• Infernal: For identifying ncRNA sequences based on covariance models.
• Rfam: Database and tools for ncRNA families.
• miRDeep: For identifying microRNAs in RNA-seq datasets.

4. RNA Structure and Motif Analysis

Structural biology of RNA helps in understanding its function:

• RNAfold (ViennaRNA): Predicts secondary structures from RNA sequences.
• RNAstructure: Tools for RNA secondary structure prediction and analysis.
• MEME Suite: For identifying motifs in RNA sequences.
• IntaRNA: For RNA-RNA interaction prediction.

5. RNA Editing and Modifications

Epitranscriptomics is a growing field focusing on RNA modifications:

• REDItools: For RNA editing analysis.
• m6Aboost: For identifying m6A modifications in RNA.

6. Long-Read RNA Sequencing Analysis

Long-read technologies like Nanopore and PacBio are transforming RNA research:

• FLAIR: For isoform-level analysis of long-read RNA-seq data.
• NanoMod: For detecting modifications in RNA from Nanopore sequencing.

7. RNA-Protein Interactions

To study RNA-protein interactions and complexes:

• RBPmap: For identifying RNA-binding protein motifs.
• PARalyzer: For analyzing PAR-CLIP data.

8. Functional Enrichment Analysis

Understanding biological functions and pathways from RNA-seq data:

• getENRICH: A tool designed for pathway enrichment analysis of non-model organisms (hypergeometric P-value calculation with FDR correction).
• ClusterProfiler: For GO and KEGG pathway enrichment analysis.

9. Visualization and Data Sharing

Presenting and sharing RNA sequence analysis results effectively:

• IGV: Genome browser for visualizing RNA-seq alignments.
• Circos: Circular visualization of RNA-seq data.
• DashBio: A Python library for creating bioinformatics visualizations.

Conclusion

The bioinformatics landscape for RNA sequence analysis is vast, with tools catering to specific needs. Whether you’re studying coding RNAs, non-coding RNAs, or exploring RNA-protein interactions, the right tools can transform your data into biological insights.

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/

Nature Biotechnology spoke with Altschul and several other originators of computational biology software programs widely used today (Table 1). The conversations explored what makes certain software tools successful, the unique challenges of developing them for biological research and how the field of computational biology, as a whole, can move research agendas forward. What follows is an edited compilation of interviews.

Detail @ http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/full/nbt.2721.html

News Source @ Nature

More at http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000369

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000369

Perl one-liners are small and awesome Perl programs that fit in a single line of code and they do one thing really well. These things include changing line spacing, numbering lines, doing calculations, converting and substituting text, deleting and printing certain lines, parsing logs, editing files in-place, doing statistics, carrying out system administration tasks, updating a bunch of files at once, and many more. Perl one-liners will make you the shell warrior. Anything that took you minutes to solve, will now take you seconds!

perl -pe '$\="\n"'   
#double space a file

perl -pe '$_ .= "\n" unless /^$/'
#double space a file except blank lines

perl -pe '$_.="\n"x7'
#7 space in a line.

perl -ne 'print unless /^$/'
#remove all blank lines

perl -lne 'print if length($_) < 20'
#print all lines with length less than 20.

perl -00 -pe ''
#If there are multiple spaces, delete all leaving one(make the file a single spaced file).

perl -00 -pe '$_.="\n"x4'
#Expand single blank lines into 4 consecutive blank lines

perl -pe '$_ = "$. $_"'
#Number all lines in a file

perl -pe '$_ = ++$a." $_" if /./'
#Number only non-empty lines in a file

perl -ne 'print ++$a." $_" if /./'
#Number and print only non-empty lines in a file

perl -pe '$_ = ++$a." $_" if /regex/'
#Number only lines that match a pattern

perl -ne 'print ++$a." $_" if /regex/'
#Number and print only lines that match a pattern

perl -ne 'printf "%-5d %s", $., $_ if /regex/'
#Left align lines with 5 white spaces if matches a pattern (perl -ne 'printf "%-5d %s", $., $_' : for all the lines)

perl -le 'print scalar(grep{/./}<>)'
#prints the total number of non-empty lines in a file

perl -lne '$a++ if /regex/; END {print $a+0}'
#print the total number of lines that matches the pattern

perl -alne 'print scalar @F'
#print the total number fields(words) in each line.

perl -alne '$t += @F; END { print $t}'
#Find total number of words in the file

perl -alne 'map { /regex/ && $t++ } @F; END { print $t }'
#find total number of fields that match the pattern

perl -lne '/regex/ && $t++; END { print $t }'
#Find total number of lines that match a pattern

perl -le '$n = 20; $m = 35; ($m,$n) = ($n,$m%$n) while $n; print $m'
#will calculate the GCD of two numbers.

perl -le '$a = $n = 20; $b = $m = 35; ($m,$n) = ($n,$m%$n) while $n; print $a*$b/$m'
#will calculate lcd of 20 and 35.

perl -le '$n=10; $min=5; $max=15; $, = " "; print map { int(rand($max-$min))+$min } 1..$n'
#Generates 10 random numbers between 5 and 15.

perl -le 'print map { ("a".."z",”0”..”9”)[rand 36] } 1..8'
#Generates a 8 character password from a to z and number 0 – 9.

perl -le 'print map { ("a",”t”,”g”,”c”)[rand 4] } 1..20'
#Generates a 20 nucleotide long random residue.

perl -le 'print "a"x50'
#generate a string of ‘x’ 50 character long

perl -le 'print join ", ", map { ord } split //, "hello world"'
#Will print the ascii value of the string hello world.

perl -le '@ascii = (99, 111, 100, 105, 110, 103); print pack("C*", @ascii)'
#converts ascii values into character strings.

perl -le '@odd = grep {$_ % 2 == 1} 1..100; print "@odd"'
#Generates an array of odd numbers.

perl -le '@even = grep {$_ % 2 == 0} 1..100; print "@even"'
#Generate an array of even numbers

perl -lpe 'y/A-Za-z/N-ZA-Mn-za-m/' file
#Convert the entire file into 13 characters offset(ROT13)

perl -nle 'print uc'
#Convert all text to uppercase:

perl -nle 'print lc'
#Convert text to lowercase:

perl -nle 'print ucfirst lc'
#Convert only first letter of first word to uppercas

perl -ple 'y/A-Za-z/a-zA-Z/'
#Convert upper case to lower case and vice versa

perl -ple 's/(\w+)/\u$1/g'
#Camel Casing

perl -pe 's|\n|\r\n|'
#Convert unix new lines into DOS new lines:

perl -pe 's|\r\n|\n|'
#Convert DOS newlines into unix new line

perl -pe 's|\n|\r|'
#Convert unix newlines into MAC newlines:

perl -pe '/regexp/ && s/foo/bar/'
#Substitute a foo with a bar in a line with a regexp.

Reference/Sources:

http://genomics-array.blogspot.in/2010/11/some-unixperl-oneliners-for.html

http://genomespot.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-selection-of-useful-bash-one-liners.html

http://biowize.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/command-line-magic-for-your-gene-annotations/

http://genomics-array.blogspot.com/2010/11/some-unixperl-oneliners-for.html

http://bioexpressblog.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/split-multi-fasta-sequence-file/

Address of the bookmark: http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/content/2/1/15?utm_content=buffer25ee0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

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/

Reference

Cuccuru G1, Orsini M, Pinna A, Sbardellati A, Soranzo N, Travaglione A, Uva P, Zanetti G, Fotia G. (2014) Orione, a web-based framework for NGS analysis in microbiology. Bioinformatics [Epub ahead of print]. [article]

Address of the bookmark: http://orione.crs4.it/