BOL: Related items

10 Books to Kickstart (and Level Up) Your Bioinformatics Journey

Neel — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 03:50:11 -0500

If you’re starting out in bioinformatics or looking to sharpen your computational biology skills, having the right learning resources makes all the difference.
Here’s my curated list of 10 must-read books — from beginner-friendly introductions to advanced computational genomics.

1️⃣ Data Analysis for the Life Sciences
A fantastic starting point to learn statistics, R programming, and exploratory data analysis in the context of biology. The best part? It’s available free online from HarvardX.

2️⃣ Practical Computing for Biologists
The very first book I picked up when I started learning computational biology. It’s beginner-friendly and focuses on essential computing skills every biologist needs.

3️⃣ A Primer for Computational Biology
An open-access, hands-on introduction to computational biology concepts and coding techniques. Perfect if you want to learn through real examples.

4️⃣ Computational Genomics with R
For those who already know R and want to dive deeper into genome-scale data analysis, from sequence alignment to gene expression.

5️⃣ The Biologist’s Guide to Computing
Bridges the gap between biological problems and computational thinking, making it easier for life scientists to approach programming and data analysis.

6️⃣ Bioinformatics Data Skills
A must-read to sharpen your bioinformatics toolkit — from command-line skills to reproducible research workflows. Ideal once you’ve covered the basics.

7️⃣ Bioinformatics Workbook
A practical tutorial series to help scientists design bioinformatics projects, analyze data, and understand best practices.

8️⃣ Modern Statistics for Modern Biology
An essential guide to modern statistical methods applied to biology, blending theory with hands-on examples in R.

9️⃣ Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences by Dan Gusfield
A classic reference for anyone wanting to understand the algorithms behind sequence alignment, genome assembly, and biological data structures.

Amity University Bioinformatics Summer Program - Kolkata

eliabrodsky — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 21:27:10 -0500

Registrations are now open for the 2019 Summer Bioinformatics Training program at Amity University, Kolkata. The program will focus on introductory topics for life science students. We will review important history, topics and challenges bioinformatics can help address in the context of basic research, discovery and industry.

Read more: https://edu.t-bio.info/amity-university-summer-bioinformatics-program-registrations-are-open/

MetaPred2CS

Manisha Mishra — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 05:15:07 -0600

MetaPred2CS Web server is a meta-predictor based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) that combines 6 individual sequence based protein-protein interaction prediction methods to predict prokaryotic two-component system protein-protein interactions (PPIs). The methods implemented in MetaPred2CS are 2 co-evolutionary methods: in-silico two hybrid (i2h) and mirror tree (MT) methods and 4 genomics context based methods: phylogenetic profiling (PP), gene fusion (GF), gene neighbourhood (GN) and and gene operon methods (GO).

http://metapred2cs.ibers.aber.ac.uk/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/martinjvickers/MetaPred2CS

Anvio

Shruti Paniwala — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 18:15:41 -0500

In a nutshell

Anvi’o is an analysis and visualization platform for ‘omics data.

Please find the methods paper here: https://peerj.com/articles/1319/

Anvi’o would not have been possible without the help of many people who directly or indirectly contributed to its development. Here is the acknowledgements section of our methods paper

An analysis and visualization platform for 'omics data http://merenlab.org/projects/anvio

Paper https://peerj.com/articles/1839/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/meren/anvio

Genome Workbench 2.10.7

Gudiya Pal — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 12:09:59 -0500

Genome Workbench 2.10.7 is here! New features include added support for local custom BLAST databases and improvements to Tree View.

For the full list of features, improvements and fixes, see the release notes:https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/gbench/releasenotes

New Features

BLAST Tool: added support for local custom BLAST databases
Graphical Sequence View: added log scaling option for graph tracks
Generic Table View: new tutorial added

Bug Fixes and Improvements

Project Tree View: Genomic Collections/Assemblies now show accessions, not just names
Tree View: layout updated to better accommodate nodes of different sizes
Table Import Dialog (MacOS): fixed issue with table visibility
Fixed bug where different molecules IDs in GenBank could resolve to the same sequence
Graphical Sequence View: fixed issue where sequence track was not shown for some sequences
Graphical Sequence View: fixed protein coloration methods
Graphical Sequence View: improved rendering of Markers to better indicate boundaries and produce higher quality PDF images
Create Gene Model tool: fixed scenario when gene model tool failed with local sequences
Search View: ORF Finder – fixed incorrect protein lengths
Fixed bug with not opening project file (.gbp) on a click
Fixed issues in GVF import
Fixed BLAST Search tool against NCBI databases not working
Fixed tblastn (protein BLAST) not working in standalone mode
Fixed GTF export failure

Scarpa

Poonam Mahapatra — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 07:59:25 -0500

Scarpa is a stand-alone scaffolding tool for NGS data. It can be used together with virtually any genome assembler and any NGS read mapper that supports SAM format. Other features include support for multiple libraries and an option to estimate insert size distributions from data. Scarpa is available free of charge for academic and commercial use under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

See the user manual or the paper for more information about Scarpa. Click here for the supplementary material.

Address of the bookmark: http://compbio.cs.toronto.edu/hapsembler/scarpa.html

VAGUE:Velvet Assembler Graphical Front End

Jit — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 08:56:49 -0600

VAGUE is a vague acronym for "Velvet Assembler Graphical Front End", which means it is a GUI for the Velvet de novo assembler. The command line version of Velvet can be complicated for beginners to use, but VAGUE makes it clear and simple

More at http://www.vicbioinformatics.com/software.vague.shtml

Address of the bookmark: http://www.vicbioinformatics.com/software.vague.shtml

RepeatModeler

Jit — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 09:57:15 -0500

RepeatModeler is a de-novo repeat family identification and modeling package. At the heart of RepeatModeler are two de-novo repeat finding programs ( RECON and RepeatScout ) which employ complementary computational methods for identifying repeat element boundaries and family relationships from sequence data. RepeatModeler assists in automating the runs of RECON and RepeatScout given a genomic database and uses the output to build, refine and classify consensus models of putative interspersed repeats.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.repeatmasker.org/RepeatModeler.html

TGNet

Shruti Paniwala — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 05:36:36 -0500

Recent technological progress has greatly facilitated de novo genome sequencing. However, de novo assemblies consist in many pieces of contiguous sequence (contigs) arranged in thousands of scaffolds instead of small numbers of chromosomes. Confirming and improving the quality of such assemblies is critical for subsequent analysis.

Visualization and quality assessment of de novo genome assemblies

Citation

This software is fully described in the paper:
Riba-Grognuz, Keller, Falquet, Xenarios & Wurm (2011) Visualization and quality assessment of de novo genome assemblies.

In brief, our scripts create Cytoscape files to visualize transcript evidence that suggests adjacency between scaffolds and contigs.

Software requirements

BLAT (tested with Standalone BLAT v. 32×1). Source Binaries .
Cytoscape (tested with versions 2.7.0, 2.8.2)
a UNIX machine (tested on Mac OS X 10.6 and CentOS 4.6)

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ksanao/TGNet

Useful Bioinformatics Tools

Poonam Mahapatra — Mon, 29 Aug 2016 04:08:12 -0500

Collections of few handy tools for bioinformatician

http://molbiol-tools.ca/Convert.htm

Address of the bookmark: http://molbiol-tools.ca/Convert.htm