BOL: Related items

MEDEA: Comparative Genomic Visualization with Adobe Flash

Jit — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 12:15:16 -0500

As the number of sequence and annotated genomes grows larger, the need to understand, compare, and contrast the data becomes increasingly important. Using the power of the human visual system to detect trends and spot outliers is necessary in such large and complex data sets.

More at http://www.broadinstitute.org/annotation/medea/

Address of the bookmark: http://www.broadinstitute.org/annotation/medea/

RASTtk : algorithm for building custom annotation pipelines and annotating batches of genomes

Abhi — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 11:07:59 -0500

The RAST (Rapid Annotation using Subsystem Technology) annotation engine was built in 2008 to annotate bacterial and archaeal genomes. It works by offering a standard software pipeline for identifying genomic features (i.e., protein-encoding genes and RNA) and annotating their functions. Recently, in order to make RAST a more useful research tool and to keep pace with advancements in bioinformatics, it has become desirable to build a version of RAST that is both customizable and extensible. In this paper, we describe the RAST tool kit (RASTtk), a modular version of RAST that enables researchers to build custom annotation pipelines. RASTtk offers a choice of software for identifying and annotating genomic features as well as the ability to add custom features to an annotation job. RASTtk also accommodates the batch submission of genomes and the ability to customize annotation protocols for batch submissions. This is the first major software restructuring of RAST since its inception.

More at http://www.nature.com/articles/srep08365

Address of the bookmark: http://rast.nmpdr.org/

Andi

Jit — Fri, 13 May 2016 05:16:35 -0500

This is the andi program for estimating the evolutionary distance between closely related genomes. These distances can be used to rapidly infer phylogenies for big sets of genomes. Because andi does not compute full alignments, it is so efficient that it scales even up to thousands of bacterial genomes.

This readme covers all necessary instructions for the impatient to get andi up and running. For extensive instructions please consult the manual.

More at https://github.com/evolbioinf/andi/

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/01/13/bioinformatics.btu815.full

BBMap/BBTools package: Multipurpose tool designed for converting reads or other nucleotide data between different formats.

Jit — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 05:47:21 -0500

Reformatis a member of the BBMap/BBTools package. It is a multipurpose tool designed for converting reads or other nucleotide data between different formats. It supports, and can inter-convert:

fastq
fasta
fasta+qual
sam
scarf (an old Illumina format)
bam (if samtools is installed)
gzip
zip
ascii-33 (sanger)
ascii-64 (old Illumina)
paired files
interleaved files

It is multithreaded and can process data at over 500 megabytes per second, and can accept streams from standard in and write to standard out, allowing it to be easily dropped into the middle of a pipeline for format conversion. Reformat autodetects formats based on file extensions and content, making it very easy to use; and the autodetection can be overridden, allowing flexibility for people who don't like to follow naming conventions, or out-of-spec fastq files with qualities values like -17 or 120.

The program has been gradually expanded, and can now perform various other functions. None of these will break pairing, if the input is paired.

Quality trimming (either or both ends)
Quality filtering
Fixed-length trimming
Generation of histograms (base composition, quality, etc)
Subsampling (to a fraction of input reads, or an exact number of reads or bases)
Changing fasta line-wrapping length
Reverse-complementing (all reads or only read 2)
Adding /1 and /2 suffix to read names
GC-content filtering
Length-filtering
Testing for corrupted interleaved files

Reformat is compatible with any platform that supports Java 1.7 or higher. It also has a bash shellscript for simpler invocation. Typical usage examples:

Reformat fastq into fasta:
reformat.sh in=x.fq out=y.fa

Interleave paired reads:
reformat.sh in1=x1.fq in2=x2.fq out=y.fq

Note - you can actually use a shortcut if paired read files have the same name with a 1 and a 2. This is equivalent to the above command:
reformat.sh in=x#.fq out=y.fq

De-interleave reads:
reformat.sh in=x.fq out1=y1.fq out2=y2.fq

Verify that interleaving appears correct, assuming Illumina namimg conventions:
reformat.sh in=x.fq vint

Convert ASCII-33 to ASCII-64:
reformat.sh in=x.fq out=y.fq qin=33 qout=64

Quality-trim paired reads to Q10 on the left and right ends and discard reads shorter than 50bp after trimming:
reformat.sh in1=x1.fq in2=x2.fq out1=y1.fq out2=y2.fq outsingle=singletons.fq qtrim=rl trimq=10 minlength=50

Subsample 10% of the first 20000 pairs in an interleaved file:
reformat.sh in=x.fq out=y.fq reads=20000 samplerate=0.1 int=t
(in this case "int=t" overrides interleaving autodetection, to ensure reads are treated as pairs)

Pipe in a gzipped sam file and pipe out fasta:
reformat.sh in=stdin.sam.gz out=stdout.fa

Reverse-complement reads:
reformat.sh in=x.fq out=y.fq rcomp

For reformatting a file with very long sequences, Reformat will need more memory; just add the additional flag "-Xmx2g". For example, to change the line-wrapping length on the human genome (which has individual sequences over 200Mbp long) to 70 characters:
reformat.sh -Xmx2g in=HG19.fa.gz out=HG19_wrapped.fa.gz fastawrap=70

For additional functions, please run the shellscript with no arguments, or just read it with a text editor. If you have any questions, please post them in this thread.

For people using a non-bash terminal, you may need to type "bash reformat.sh" instead of just "reformat.sh".
For users of Windows or other platforms that do not support bash shellscripts, replace "reformat.sh" with "java -ea -Xmx200m /path/to/bbmap/current/ jgi.ReformatReads"
for example,
java -ea -Xmx200m C:\bbmap\current\ jgi.ReformatReads in=x.fq out=y.fa

Reformat can be downloaded with BBTools here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/bbmap/

CNIDARIA: fast, reference-free phylogenomic clustering

Shruti Paniwala — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 17:55:17 -0500

Motivation: Identification of biological specimens is a major requirement for a range of applications. Reference-free methods analyse unprocessed sequencing data without relying on prior knowledge, but these do not scale to arbitrarily large genomes and arbitrarily large phylogenetic distances.

Results: We present Cnidaria, a practical tool for clustering genomic and transcriptomic data with no limitation on ge-nome size or phylogenetic distances. We successfully simultaneously clustered 169 genomic and transcriptomic datasets from 4 kingdoms, achieving 100% accuracy at supra-species level and 78% accuracy for species level.

Availability and Implementation: Cnidaria is written in C++ and Python and is available at http://www.ab.wur.nl/cnidaria.

Contact: Saulo Aflitos - sauloal@gmail.com

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/sauloal/cnidaria/wiki

SAM flags

Poonam Mahapatra — Wed, 29 Jun 2016 15:38:15 -0500

Decoding SAM flags

This utility makes it easy to identify what are the properties of a read based on its SAM flag value, or conversely, to find what the SAM Flag value would be for a given combination of properties.

To decode a given SAM flag value, just enter the number in the field below. The encoded properties will be listed under Summary below, to the right.

Address of the bookmark: https://broadinstitute.github.io/picard/explain-flags.html

CSBB-v1.0

Neel — Wed, 29 Jun 2016 07:33:05 -0500

CSBB is a command line based bioinformatics suite to analyze biological data acquired through varied avenues of biological experiments. CSBB is implemented in Perl, while it also leverages the use of R and python in background for specific modules. Major focus of CSBB is to allow users from biology and bioinformatics community, to get benefited by performing down-stream analysis tasks while eliminating the need to write programming code. CSBB is currently available on Linux, UNIX, MAC OS and Windows platforms.

Currently CSBB provides 13 modules focused on analytical tasks like performing upper-quantile normalization on expression data or convert genome wide gene expression to z-scores when comparing expression data from different platforms.

More at https://github.com/skygenomics/CSBB-v1.0

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/skygenomics/CSBB-v1.0

HiCdat

Jit — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 05:23:44 -0600

HiCdat: a fast and easy-to-use Hi-C data analysis tool

HiCdat is easy-to-use and provides solutions starting from aligned reads up to in-depth analyses. Importantly, HiCdat is focussed on the analysis of larger structural features of chromosomes, their correlation to genomic and epigenomic features, and on comparative studies. It uses simple input and output formats and can therefore easily be integrated into existing workflows or combined with alternative tools.

More at http://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-015-0678-x

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/MWSchmid/HiCdat

GeneBreak: a tool to systematically identify genes recurrently affected by the genomic location of chromosomal CNA-associated breaks by a genome-wide approach

Jit — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 15:15:29 -0500

Development of cancer is driven by somatic alterations, including numerical and structural chromosomal aberrations. Currently, several computational methods are available and are widely applied to detect numerical copy number aberrations (CNAs) of chromosomal segments in tumor genomes. However, there is lack of computational methods that systematically detect structural chromosomal aberrations by virtue of the genomic location of CNA-associated chromosomal breaks and identify genes that appear non-randomly affected by chromosomal breakpoints across (large) series of tumor samples. ‘GeneBreak’ is developed to systematically identify genes recurrently affected by the genomic location of chromosomal CNA-associated breaks by a genome-wide approach, which can be applied to DNA copy number data obtained by array-Comparative Genomic Hybridization (CGH) or by (low-pass) whole genome sequencing (WGS). First, ‘GeneBreak’ collects the genomic locations of chromosomal CNA-associated breaks that were previously pinpointed by the segmentation algorithm that was applied to obtain CNA profiles. Next, a tailored annotation approach for breakpoint-to-gene mapping is implemented. Finally, dedicated cohort-based statistics is incorporated with correction for covariates that influence the probability to be a breakpoint gene. In addition, multiple testing correction is integrated to reveal recurrent breakpoint events. This easy-to-use algorithm, ‘GeneBreak’, is implemented in R (www.cran.r-project.org) and is available from Bioconductor (www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/GeneBreak.html).

Address of the bookmark: http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/GeneBreak.html

ART: Set of Simulation Tools

Jit — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 08:28:25 -0500

ART is a set of simulation tools to generate synthetic next-generation sequencing reads. ART simulates sequencing reads by mimicking real sequencing process with empirical error models or quality profiles summarized from large recalibrated sequencing data. ART can also simulate reads using user own read error model or quality profiles. ART supports simulation of single-end, paired-end/mate-pair reads of three major commercial next-generation sequencing platforms: Illumina's Solexa, Roche's 454 and Applied Biosystems' SOLiD. ART can be used to test or benchmark a variety of method or tools for next-generation sequencing data analysis, including read alignment, de novo assembly, SNP and structure variation discovery. ART was used as a primary tool for the simulation study of the 1000 Genomes Project . ART is implemented in C++ with optimized algorithms and is highly efficient in read simulation. ART outputs reads in the FASTQ format, and alignments in the ALN format. ART can also generate alignments in the SAM alignment or UCSC BED file format. ART can be used together with genome variants simulators (e.g. VarSim) for evaluating variant calling tools or methods.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/resources/software/biostatistics/art/