BOL: Related items

Illumina Smartphone Chip !!!

Robert M Willioms — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 23:19:54 -0600

Illumina, the company that claims it brought human genome sequencing down to $1000 prices, has now turned its attention to a consumer product - a chip that you can plug into your smartphone and have it read your genetic information.

The biggest challenge ahead of Illumina is simplifying the process of genetic sequencing. Currently, Illumina’s DNA sequencers are gigantic machines that use techinques like colorimetry to work, but while the core technology is computational, it takes some 30 steps to extract genetic data and run it through. This process will likely have to be hugely simplified on mobile devices, given the fact that some studies require extracting 10 mililiters of blood. Illumina researchers are also working on finding the optimal technology for this on-chip DNA sequencing - be it electrical, optical, or other.

Illumina is one of the most prominent names in genetics, often said to be the Intel of genetic sequencing, as just like Intel it provides the algorithms, the processing brain that runs a DNA reading task.

In other recent smartphone-related biotech news, drug company Pfizer launched its REMOTE project, a new type of clinical trial that does not require going to a hospital for checks - targeted at patients with overactive bladder problems, the FDA-approved REMOTE project allowed to gather data from patients from over 10 states remotely, via mobile devices.

This is indeed the Illumina answer to Apple's Health app, HealthBook, Google HealthFit.

Will MinION Nanopore sequencing increase the number of Next Generation Sequencing projects?

Strand — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 05:14:07 -0500

Will MinION Nanopore sequencing increase the number of Next Generation Sequencing projects?

WALK-IN-INTERVIEW for the post of JRF and Project Assistant @ CIFT

Tue, 20 Jan 2015 23:03:20 -0600

Eligible candidates are invited to attend a walk-in-Interview with all relevant documents for the following positions of Project Fellows (on contractual basis) to work in the Project “ Genetic Diversity of Clostridium botulinum in seafood and Development of Lateral Flow Immuno Assay (LFIA) for toxinotyping funded by Department of Biotechnology. The duration of the project is 3 years / co-terminus with the scheme.

Jr. Research Fellow – 2 posts

Fellowship : Rs. 25000/- + 20% HRA pm for Ist & 2nd year and Rs.28000/- + HRA on 3rd year

Qualification : Ist class Masters Degree in Microbiology/Fishery Microbiology/Bio-technology.

Desirable :

1. CSIR/UGC NET/JRF qualified

2. Excellent analytical skills and computer documentation

3. Prior experience in handling microbial cultures and molecular techniques

Project Assistant – 1 post

Fellowship : Rs.8000/- p.m (consolidated)

Qualification: Masters degree in Microbiology/Biotechnology with skill in Bioinformatics

Desirable: Excellent analytical skills in Bioinformatics and computer documentation

Terms & Conditions:

Registration will begin at 8.30 a.m and will close at 11.00 am
Age limit (as on 29.1.2015): Below 35 years for men and 40 years for women.
Age relaxation of 3 year for OBC candidates and 5 years for SC/ST candidates is permissible.
Candidates are required to submit self-attested copies of all the Certificates in support of their claims regarding age, educational qualifications, scheduled caste/scheduled tribe/OBC etc. The original certificates shall be produced for verification before the interview.
Candidates should bring detailed bio-data (in the enclosed format) affixing a recent passport size photograph.
The selected candidate will be recruited on contract basis under ICAR norms. The post is purely temporary and is co-terminus with the project.
The candidates attending the interview should ensure that they fulfil all the eligibility conditions. No correspondence will be entertained from the candidates for selection/test/appointment.
No TA/DA will be paid to attend the interview.
Canvassing in any form will render the candidate disqualified for the post.
The Director’s decision will be final and binding in all aspects regarding the selection to the post.

Venue: CIFT, Matsyapuri.P.O, Cochin Date of interview: 29.01.2015 Time: 10.00 am

http://www.cift.res.in/uploads/userfiles/file/file/srf%20appn.doc

Finishing !!

Jit — Sat, 20 May 2017 15:50:20 -0500

The process of finishing a genome and moving it from a draft stage (the result of sequencing and initial assembly) to a complete genome is typically a time and resource intensive task. The advent of new sequencing technologies has come with its own set of opportunities and pitfalls in the finishing process. While genomes can now be sequenced to high redundancy in a cost-effective manner, the process of assembling the genomes is more challenging and often draft genomes are fragmented into hundreds of contigs. Correspondingly, the task of producing the complete genome can involve months of lab work and thousands of finishing experiments and is usually done in large genome centers.

The work in our lab has focussed on computational approaches to speed-up the finishing process. Specifically, we have explored the use of optical mapping and mate-pair data to augment assemblies and direct finishing experiments. The tools developed in our lab have been used in several finishing projects, producing complete genomes (and near-complete ones) with surprisingly little computational and experimental effort (Nagarajan et al., in submission). The executables (as well as source code) for these tools are freely available here:

Scaffolding using Optical Restriction Mapping
Optical Maps are global, ordered maps of restriction site locations in a genome. This information can be quite useful in scaffolding contigs from a shotgun assembly to guide the finishing process. A set of programs to exploit optical maps for assembly can be found here: SOMA v2.0 (63 MB tar.gz file). This version of SOMA contains several improvements to programs in v1.0 as well as new scripts for working with multiple maps, contig graphs and scaffolds.
Augmenting assemblies with mate-pair data
Mate-pair information can be valuable in augmenting short-read assemblies and reconstructing the genome as larger scaffolds. AMOS-Hybrid is a pipeline written in the AMOS framework (open-source assembly tools) to merge arbitrary mated reads into an existing assembly and merge contigs and create scaffolds where possible. Source code and executables for AMOS-Hybrid are available here: AMOS-Hybrid v1.0 (142 MB tar.gz file).
Assembly and sequence-composition guided finishing
Contigs from a shotgun assembly are typically linked together in a graph structure that can serve to guide finishing and in some case close gaps in-silico. Also, in many cases, sequence composition of contigs can provide clues to fill gaps in scaffolds. A set of scripts to automate some of these tasks can be found here: Finishing Scripts v1.0 (63 MB tar.gz file).

http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/finishing/

Address of the bookmark: http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/finishing/

WALK-IN-INTERVIEW FOR PROJECT ASSISTANT @ BHARATHIDASAN UNIVERSITY

Mon, 12 Jan 2015 21:54:10 -0600

BHARATHIDASAN UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF BIOINFORMATICS, SCHOOL OF LIFE SCIENCES, TIRUCHIRAPPALLI – 620024

Project title: “Genome-scale metabolic modeling and simulation of rumen methanogens An in silico attempt to methane attenuation”

Funding Agency: University Grants Commission, New Delhi

Tenure of the project: Two years or till the end of the project period.

Position: Project Assistant (1 no.)

Essential qualification: First class M.Sc. in Bioinformatics/Microbiology/ Biotechnology and other related discipline.

Desirable qualification: Experience in an area relevant (Molecular Systems Engineering) to the project.

Fellowship: Rs. 5000 per month as per the UGC norms.

Upper age limit: 28 years

Date of Venue of interview: 22.01.2015, Department of Bioinformatics, School of Life Sciences, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli -620 024, Tamil Nadu

The above post is purely temporary and will be terminated with three month notice.

The Terms and the condition of the appointment shall be governed according to UGC, Govt. of India. The eligible candidates will bring their original certificates and documents at the time of interview. No TA/DA will be paid for attending the interview.

Dr. P. CHELLAPANDI
UGC-Research Awardee,
Department of Bioinformatics,
School of Life Sciences,
Bharathidasan University,
Tiruchirappalli -620 024, Tamil Nadu

Advertisement: www.bdu.ac.in/adv/PA_UGC_Bioinformatics.pdf

PLAST: A fast, accurate and NGS scalable bank-to-bank sequence similarity search tool

Jit — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 04:10:54 -0600

PLAST is a fast, accurate and NGS scalable bank-to-bank sequence similarity search tool providing significant accelerations of seeds-based heuristic comparison methods, such as the Blast suite of algorithms.

Relying on unique software architecture, PLAST takes full advantage of recent multi-core personal computers without requiring any additional hardware devices.

PLAST stands for Parallel Local Sequence Alignment Search Tool and is was published in BMC Bioinformatics.

PLAST is a general purpose sequence comparison tool providing the following benefits:

PLAST is a high-performance sequence comparison tool designed to compare two sets of sequences (query vs. reference),
Reduces the processing time of sequences comparisons while providing highest quality results,
Contains a fully integrated data filtering engine capable of selecting relevant hits with user-defined criteria (E-Value, identity, coverage, alignment length, etc.),
Does not require any additional hardware, since it is a software solution. It is easy to install, cost-effective, takes full advantage of multi-core processors and uses a small RAM footprint,
Ready to be used on desktop computer, cluster, cloud as well as within distributed system running Hadoop.

https://plast.inria.fr/

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

Linux operating system aimed at scientists

Pranjali Yadav — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 08:30:49 -0600

The Bio-Linux operating system is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and the previous version was using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The developers only use LTS releases and that means that upgrades for this distro don't come along all that often.

This Linux distribution is aimed at scientists and it comes with more than 250 bioinformatics packages, 50 graphical applications and several hundred command line tools. And this is just skimming the surface of what the OS can do. Users have access to even more apps from the official repositories.

Bio-Linux is using an Ubuntu LTS version as its base

The fact that it uses Ubuntu LTS versions for the base is a good thing because it means its users won't have to worry about the support. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is supported until 2019, so people who are using Bio-Linux shouldn't have a problem.

"An updated Bio-Linux 8 version is now on the website in ISO and OVA versions. As usual, there is no need to download this version if you are an existing user. All updates to existing packages will be applied to your system through the update manager and new packages are all available via apt-get or Synaptic," reads the announcement.

The changelog also states that a problem that was preventing the desktop to not start on VirtualBox has been fixed, the QIIME and Bowtie-Bio tools have been upgraded, the pandaseq paired end assembler has been added, and the beginners tutorial specific to Bio-Linux 8 has been improved.

Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and updates. You can download Bio-Linux 8.0.5 right now from Softpedia and give it a spin. It has the Unity desktop and now it runs very well in virtual environments.

Reference @ http://news.softpedia.com/news/Bioinformatics-Distro-Bio-Linux-8-0-5-Now-Available-for-Download-469867.shtml

Porechop: tool for finding and removing adapters from Oxford Nanopore reads

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 29 May 2018 07:33:44 -0500

Porechop is a tool for finding and removing adapters from Oxford Nanopore reads. Adapters on the ends of reads are trimmed off, and when a read has an adapter in its middle, it is treated as chimeric and chopped into separate reads. Porechop performs thorough alignments to effectively find adapters, even at low sequence identity.

Porechop also supports demultiplexing of Nanopore reads that were barcoded with the Native Barcoding Kit, PCR Barcoding Kit or Rapid Barcoding Kit.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/rrwick/Porechop

DNA Transcription (Advanced)

Thu, 29 Jan 2015 05:31:42 -0600

Transcription is the process by which the information in DNA is copied into messenger RNA (mRNA) for protein production. Originally created for DNA Interactive ( http://www.dnai.org ). TRANSCRIPT: The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology: "DNA makes RNA makes protein" Here the process begins. Transcription factors assemble at a specific promoter region along the DNA. The length of DNA following the promoter is a gene and it contains the recipe for a protein. A mediator protein complex arrives carrying the enzyme RNA polymerase. It manoeuvres the RNA polymerase into place... inserting it with the help of other factors between the strands of the DNA double helix. The assembled collection of all these factors is referred to as the transcription initiation complex... and now it is ready to be activated. The initiation complex requires contact with activator proteins, which bind to specific sequences of DNA known as enhancer regions. These regions may be thousands of base pairs distant from the start of the gene. Contact between the activator proteins and the initiation-complex releases the copying mechanism. The RNA polymerase unzips a small portion of the DNA helix exposing the bases on each strand. Only one of the strands is copied. It acts as a template for the synthesis of an RNA molecule which is assembled one sub-unit at a time by matching the DNA letter code on the template strand. The sub-units can be seen here entering the enzyme through its intake hole and they are joined together to form the long messenger RNA chain snaking out of the top.

Installing Salmon for Trinity !

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 09:02:29 -0500

➜ trinityrnaseq-Trinity-v2.6.6 git:(master) ✗ conda install salmon
Solving environment: done

## Package Plan ##

environment location: /home/urbe/anaconda3

added / updated specs:
- salmon

The following packages will be downloaded:

package | build
---------------------------|-----------------
boost-1.64.0 | py36_4 331 KB conda-forge
jemalloc-5.1.0 | hfc679d8_0 8.2 MB conda-forge
boost-cpp-1.64.0 | 1 17.8 MB conda-forge
salmon-0.10.2 | 1 3.7 MB bioconda
conda-4.5.5 | py36_0 624 KB conda-forge
tbb-2018_20171205 | 0 1.2 MB conda-forge
------------------------------------------------------------
Total: 31.8 MB

The following NEW packages will be INSTALLED:

boost: 1.64.0-py36_4 conda-forge
boost-cpp: 1.64.0-1 conda-forge
jemalloc: 5.1.0-hfc679d8_0 conda-forge
salmon: 0.10.2-1 bioconda
tbb: 2018_20171205-0 conda-forge

The following packages will be UPDATED:

conda: 4.5.4-py36_0 conda-forge --> 4.5.5-py36_0 conda-forge

Proceed ([y]/n)? y

Downloading and Extracting Packages
boost-1.64.0 | 331 KB | ####################################################################################################################################### | 100%
jemalloc-5.1.0 | 8.2 MB | ####################################################################################################################################### | 100%
boost-cpp-1.64.0 | 17.8 MB | ####################################################################################################################################### | 100%
salmon-0.10.2 | 3.7 MB | ####################################################################################################################################### | 100%
conda-4.5.5 | 624 KB | ####################################################################################################################################### | 100%
tbb-2018_20171205 | 1.2 MB | ####################################################################################################################################### | 100%
Preparing transaction: done
Verifying transaction: done
Executing transaction: done