An exciting opportunity exists for a highly motivated and enthusiastic bioinformatics researcher to work in the Exosome, Secretome and Systems Biology laboratory of Dr Suresh Mathivanan. This position is funded through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) USA, to study the role of extracellular RNA or ExRNA in intercellular communication.

The successful applicant will be involved in collaborative bioinformatics research with more than 30 American Universities/Institutes. The ExRNA consortium is a multi-institute USD 17 million funded program which has 5 primary aims: to understand the biogenesis of ExRNA (vesicles and non-vesicles), to explore the use of ExRNA in biomarker research, to establish a reference profile of ExRNA in various disease conditions, to explore the role of ExRNA in therapeutic purposes and to manage the generated data through a reference portal. The bioinformatics component is critical in managing and analysing the data generated by the entire consortium. The researcher is required to contribute to the management and perform the analysis of ExRNA data.

The candidate to succeed, you will possess:

Experience in the analysis and modelling of data, including the capacity to integrate data from a range of sources and of uneven quality.

Evidence of experience in research and of the ability to work effectively under limited supervision or independently.

A record of contribution to publications, conference papers and/or reports, or professional or technical contributions which provide evidence of research potential.

Completion of a doctoral degree in bioinformatics or biostatistics with a focus on transcriptomic data will be highly regarded.

Preference will be given to applicants with competence in programming (JavaScript, Perl/Python), any web-based applications (PHP, ZOPE) and relational databases (MySQL).

Closing date: 30 September 2013

Position Enquiries: Dr Suresh Mathivanan (s.mathivanan@latrobe.edu.au)

More at http://www.mathivananlab.org/

Now a day, geneticists have developed a language of their own. They are pouring lots of money and energy to read the entire genomic text and understand the gods own code ATGC. It is somewhat fascinating, not only for geneticist but also for non-biologist to know that there are several conserved blocks in genome which remain conserved over hundreds of millions of years. There have been several researches on conserved blocks and non-conserved regions to understand the mechanism and importance of all these regions (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2675965/). The finding indicates conservation and rearrangements of certain evolutionary important genes play an important role in evolution/adaptive changes (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7424/abs/nature11622.html https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/8/8/2442/2198198/Novel-Insights-into-Chromosome-Evolution-in-Birds , http://science.sciencemag.org/content/346/6215/1311).

But the puzzle remains open, how to correctly define the synteny (presence of two or more genes on the same chromosome) and conserved synteny (presence of two or more genes on chromosome of each of the two species) on several genomes.

Figure: Image generated with Evolution Highway (EH) tool http://eh-demo.ncsa.illinois.edu/ 

Keeping the new approach to define conserved synteny in mind there have been various algorithms developed to identify the conserved homologous synteny blocks (HSB) amongst species. Some of them which were commonly used for synteny detections are:

SyntenyTracker ( http://www-app.igb.uiuc.edu/labs/lewin/donthu/Synteny_assign/html/),

SyntenyTracker was shown to be an efficient and accurate automated tool for defining HSBs using datasets that may contain minor errors resulting from limitations in map construction methodologies.

CoGe (http://genomevolution.org/CoGe/SynFind.pl )

Satsuma (http://evomics.org/learning/genomics/satsuma/)

Cinteny (http://cinteny.cchmc.org/) ,

Cinteny server can be used for finding regions syntenic across multiple genomes and measuring the extent of genome rearrangement using reversal distance as a measure.

OrthoCluster (http://krono.act.uji.es/noticias/orthocluster-a-new-tool-for-mining-syntenic-blocks)

A new tool for mining syntenic blocks in comparative genomics

SynMap (http://genomevolution.org/wiki/index.php/SynMap),

SyMAP (http://www.symapdb.org/)

SyMAP (Synteny Mapping and Analysis Program) v4.0 is an automated system for identifying and displaying genome synteny alignments. The genomes may be represented by sequenced chromosomes (pseudomolecules), by draft sequence contigs, or by FPC physical maps (with BAC-end or marker sequence).

http://genomevolution.org/CoGe/SynMap.pl

RegionMiner (http://www.genomatix.de/online_help/help_regionminer/orthologous.html)

SyntenyMiner is being developed as an application to visualize and interrogate comparisons among multiple complete genome sequences. http://syntenyminer.sourceforge.net/

AutoGRAPH ( http://autograph.genouest.org/),

AutoGRAPH is an integrated web server for multi-species comparative genomic analysis. It is designed for constructing and visualizing synteny maps between two or three species, determination and display of macrosynteny and microsynteny relationships among species, and for highlighting evolutionary breakpoints.

SynChro(http://www.lgm.upmc.fr/CHROnicle/SynChro.html)

SynChro is a tool designed to define conserved synteny blocks. It reconstructs synteny blocks between pairwise comparison of multiple genomes. The reconstructed synteny blocks may overlap each other, be included in one another or duplicated due to micro-rearrangements.

SyntenyView ( http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/dtucourse/cookbooks/nikob/exercises/gf1_output_5.html),

Ensembl 'SyntenyView' shows conservation of large-scale gene order between species pairs. A brief summary of the calculation method appears at the bottom of this help page.  The left of a 'SyntenyView' page displays a diagram of chromosomes with blocks of conserved synteny. The right of a page shows homology matches between individual genes within syntenic blocks.

SynBrowse ( http://www.synbrowse.org/),

SynBrowse (Synteny Browser) is a generic sequence comparison tool for visualizing genome alignments both within and between species. It is intended to help scientists study and analyze synteny, homologous genes and other conserved elements between sequences. This software is useful in studying genome duplication and evolution. It can also aid in identifying uncharacterized genes, putative regulatory elements and novel structural features of study species by comparing to a well annotated reference sequence, thus enabling genome curators to refine and edit annotations of species that have incomplete genome annotations.

Sibelia (http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.7941).

A comparative genomic tool: It assists biologists in analysing the genomic variations that correlate with pathogens, or the genomic changes that help microorganisms adapt in different environments. Sibelia will also be helpful for the evolutionary and genome rearrangement studies for multiple strains of microorganisms.

GSV (http://cas-bioinfo.cas.unt.edu/gsv/homepage.php)

Genome Synteny Viewer allows users to upload files which contain synteny regions between two or more genomes and interactively visualize the synteny between them. GSV also allows users to upload annotation files to visualize annotated regions in addition to synteny regions.

MicroSyn (http://www.lgm.upmc.fr/CHROnicle/SynChro.html)

MicroSyn software as a means of detecting microsynteny in adjacent genomic regions surrounding genes in gene families. MicroSyn searches for conserved, flanking colinear homologous gene pairs between two genomic fragments to determine the relationship between two members in a gene family.

SynOrth (http://synorth.genereg.net/)

Synorth [s n ôrth], named in combination of "synteny" and "ortholog", is designed for the study of evolutionary changes of genomic regulatory blocks (GRBs) in vertebrate genomes, and especially the changes following the whole-genome duplication in teleost fish, by tracing the ortholog genes gain and loss in ancient synteny blocks.

SyDiG (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21441096)

Uncovering Synteny in Distant Genomes.

MapSynteny  (http://www.automatizacionysistemas.com/download.html)

MapSynteny is a macro in MS Excel® able to create images to show the relationship between genetic maps and large sequences (scaffolds, chromosomes, BACs, etc.). Based on tab – delimited BLAST results and some formulas, a suitable image of syntenic relationships or physical mapping can be obtained. http://www.automatizacionysistemas.com/Poster_MapSynteny.pdf

One of the best synteny tutorial for beginer @ http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/synteny-inferring-ancestral-genomes-44022

Reference:

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/synteny-inferring-ancestral-genomes-44022

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7424/full/nature11622.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synteny

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2675965/

More at http://pandeylab.igm.jhmi.edu/

http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OhuG0FcAAAAJ&hl=en

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4783527/

RNAs, especially non-coding RNAs (such as microRNA, long ncRNAs) are recently identified to be very abundant in mammalian organisms and play some key roles in gene expression regulation, gene silencing, and also implicated in disease progression, stem cell pluripotency etc. Current research activities of our lab include analysis of expression pattern of ncRNAs by microarray and next-gen sequencing data and understanding the role of miRNAs or other regulatory RNAs in various diseases, especially cancer and validation by reporter assays (renilla/luciferase) and other experimental tools.

More @ http://vvekslab.in/index.html

SynVisio requires two files to run:

• The simplified gff file that was used as an input for a McScanX query.
• The collinearity file generated as an output by McScanX for the same input query.
• Optional track file in bedgraph format to annotate the generated charts.

SynVisio offers different types of visualizations such as Linear Parallel plots, Hive plots, Stacked Parallel Plots and Dot plots. Users can configure the type of plots required and then choose the source and the target chromosomes that need to be mapped. Users also have option to download the generated visualizations in publication ready SVG or PNG formats.

Address of the bookmark: https://synvisio.github.io/#/

---how genetic variation is distributed within and between individuals,
---determining how this diversity changes over evolutionary time.

Hence, Cox group work at the interface between biology, statistics and computer science to address questions of outstanding biological importance through intrepretation of large genetic datasets.

Profile:
Associate Professor Murray Cox,
Inaugural Rutherford Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Principal Investigator in the BioProtection Research Center and Associate Investigator in the Allan Wilson Center for Molecular Ecology and Evolution
Email : m.p.cox@massey.ac.nz
Webpage: http://massey.genomicus.com/index.html

Sibelia is useful in finding: (1) shared regions, (2) regions that present in one group of genomes but not in others, (3) rearrangements that transform one genome to other genomes.

More at http://bioinf.spbau.ru/sibelia

Sibelia docs http://gensoft.pasteur.fr/docs/Sibelia/3.0.7/SIBELIA.md

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/bioinf/Sibelia

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/schneebergerlab/syri