BOL: Related items

Five points for bioinformatics software/tools

Jitendra Narayan — Mon, 05 Aug 2013 04:12:32 -0500

In the bioinformatics sector we mostly spend time on computational analysis of huge amounts of data and try to make sense of it, biologically. But, most of the newbie bioinformaticians are faced with dilemma when they receive biological sequence data for the first time. They mostly found confusing over open source, user friendly GUI, and commercial bioinformatics software. Don’t be surprise this is true and also not an easy task to decide, because analytical step is the most crucial part and believe to be the biggest bottleneck in publishing paper in high impact journals. Through this blog I would like to address the pros and cons of both kind of software/tools and try to assist (Hmmm not really, It looks convince) you to make decision on your software selections.

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.

Orione – a web-based framework for NGS analysis in microbiology

Martin Jones — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 06:43:03 -0500

End-to-end NGS microbiology data analysis requires a diversity of tools covering bacterial resequencing, de novo assembly, scaffolding, bacterial RNA-Seq, gene annotation and metagenomics. However, the construction of computational pipelines that use different software packages is difficult due to a lack of interoperability, reproducibility, and transparency. To overcome these limitations researchers at CRS4, Italy have developed Orione, a Galaxy-based framework consisting of publicly available research software and specifically designed pipelines to build complex, reproducible workflows for NGS microbiology data analysis. Enabling microbiology researchers to conduct their own custom analysis and data manipulation without software installation or programming, Orione provides new opportunities for data-intensive computational analyses in microbiology and metagenomics.

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/

BioinfoLab

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 11:05:35 -0500

Laboratory of Statistics and Computational tools for Bioinformatics

The Laboratory of Statistics and Computational tools for Bioinformatics (BioinfoLab) is hosted at the Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo "Mauro Picone" - CNR . The laboratory has been officially opened in 2012 with the support of Programma Operativo Nazionale "Ricerca e Competitività" 2007-2013 (PON "R&C"), and it incorporates several expertise and research activities started since 2007, and supported by several CNR projects. Main interest of BioinfoLab is to develop novel statistical methods and computational tools for the analysis of high dimensional data arising from "Multi-omics" applications. In particular, current activities involve the analysis of ChIP-seq and RNA-seq experiments.

More at http://bioinfo.na.iac.cnr.it/BioinfoLab/index.html

Smash: An alignment-free method to find and visualise rearrangements between pairs of DNA sequences

Jit — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 12:18:49 -0500

Smash is a completely alignment-free method/tool to find and visualise genomic rearrangements. The detection is based on conditional exclusive compression, namely using a FCM (Markov model), of high context order (typically 20). For visualisation, Smash outputs a SVG image, with an ideogramoutput architecture, where the patterns are represented with several HSV values (only value varies). The method can perform both in small- and large-scale. Nevertheless is more directed to large-scale since that the main aim of the research is to know where the large-scale [chromosomal by chromosome] of several primates was equal/different, having at a glance a map of the entire genomes.

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinformatics.ua.pt/software/smash/

GATB : Genome Analysis Toolbox with de-Bruijn graph

Jit — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 11:16:51 -0500

The Genome Analysis Toolbox with de-Bruijn graph (GATB) provides a set of highly efficient algorithms to analyse NGS data sets. These methods enable the analysis of data sets of any size on multi-core desktop computers, including very huge amount of reads data coming from any kind of organisms such as bacteria, plants, animals and even complex samples (e.g. metagenomes).

More at https://gatb.inria.fr/

Address of the bookmark: https://gatb.inria.fr/

KisSplice

Jit — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 08:34:19 -0500

KisSplice is a software that enables to analyse RNA-seq data with or without a reference genome. It is an exact local transcriptome assembler that allows to identify SNPs, indels and alternative splicing events. It can deal with an arbitrary number of biological conditions, and will quantify each variant in each condition. It has been tested on Illumina datasets of up to 1G reads. Its memory consumption is around 5Gb for 100M reads.

KisSplice is not a full-length transcriptome assembler. This means that it will output the variable regions of the transcripts, not reconstruct them entirely.

KisSplice comes as a workflow, with several possible post-treatments meant to facilitate the analysis of the results. The choice of the post-treatment depends on the availability of a reference genome/transcriptome and on the need to perform a differential analysis, as summarised in the following table.

Address of the bookmark: http://kissplice.prabi.fr/

Machine Learning !!!

Gudiya Pal — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 12:57:12 -0500

In machine learning, computers apply statistical learning techniques to automatically identify patterns in data. These techniques can be used to make highly accurate predictions.

Keep scrolling. Using a data set about homes, we will create a machine learning model to distinguish homes in New York from homes in San Francisco.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.r2d3.us/visual-intro-to-machine-learning-part-1/

MEGAN6

Neel — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 05:45:22 -0500

Microbiome analysis using a single application

MEGAN6 is a comprehensive toolbox for interactively analyzing microbiome data. All the interactive tools you need in one application.

Taxonomic analysis using the NCBI taxonomy or a customized taxonomy such as SILVA
Functional analysis using InterPro2GO, SEED, eggNOG or KEGG
Bar charts, word clouds, Voronoi tree maps and many other charts
PCoA, clustering and networks
Supports metadata
MEGAN parses many different types of input

Why use MEGAN6?

The software is:

Easy to use. MEGAN6 is a single application and all features are available through menus, toolbars and graphics. No scripting skills required.
Powerful. MEGAN6 allows you to work with hundreds of samples containing hundreds of millions of sequencing reads. Blast-like analysis can be performed using DIAMOND.
Comprehensive. MEGAN6 offers a large range of analysis tools, and is under active development.

Address of the bookmark: https://ab.inf.uni-tuebingen.de/software/megan6

valet

Jit — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 04:27:09 -0500

VALET is a pipeline for performing de novo validation of metagenomic assemblies. VALET checks a number of properties that should hold true for a correct assembly (e.g., mate-pairs are aligned at the correct distance from each other in the assembly, the depth of coverage is fairly uniform along contigs, etc.). The violations of these invariants are reported allowing one to pinpoint areas that were potentially mis-assembled, or to compare the quality of different assemblies. For comparing multiple assemblies of the same data-sets, VALET also reports an overall estimate of the likelihood a particular assembly is correct.

Home Page:

VALET code repository

Address of the bookmark: https://www.cbcb.umd.edu/software/valet

GeneValidator - Identify problems with predicted genes

Poonam Mahapatra — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 06:00:03 -0500

GeneValidator helps in identifing problems with gene predictions and provide useful information extracted from analysing orthologs in BLAST databases. The results produced can be used by biocurators and researchers who need accurate gene predictions.

If you would like to use GeneValidator on a few sequences, see our online GeneValidator Web App -http://genevalidator.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk.

If you use GeneValidator in your work, please cite us as follows:

Dragan M‡, Moghul MI‡, Priyam A, Bustos C & Wurm Y. 2016. GeneValidator: identify problems with protein-coding gene predictions. Bioinformatics, doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btw015.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/wurmlab/genevalidator