More at
https://zfin.org/ZDB-LAB-110408-1
http://www.imcb.a-star.edu.sg/php/venkatesh.php

Bactopia was inspired by Staphopia, a workflow we (Tim Read and myself) released that is targeted towards Staphylococcus aureus genomes. Using what we learned from Staphopia and user feedback, Bactopia was developed from scratch with usability, portability, and speed in mind from the start.

Bactopia uses Nextflow to manage the workflow, allowing for support of many types of environments (e.g. cluster or cloud). Bactopia allows for the usage of many public datasets as well as your own datasets to further enhance the analysis of your sequencing. Bactopia only uses software packages available from Bioconda and Conda-Forge to make installation as simple as possible for all users.

To highlight the use of Bactopia and Bactopia Tools, we performed an analysis of 1,664 public Lactobacillus genomes, focusing on Lactobacillus crispatus, a species that is a common part of the human vaginal microbiome. The results from this analysis are published in mSystems under the title: Bactopia: a flexible pipeline for complete analysis of bacterial genomes

Address of the bookmark: https://bactopia.github.io/latest/

You will need to solve bioinformatics problems using programming. The goal is to correctly solve as many problems as possible within 24 hours. Some of them will be approximation problems and will have partial grades. All rounds will be held online, submissions will be auto-graded in real time.

Check more at http://contest.bioinf.me/

Good luck!

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

Again, running spades.py will show you the options:

spades.py

This produces:

SPAdes genome assembler v3.10.1

Usage: /usr/local/SPAdes-3.10.1-Linux/bin/spades.py [options] -o <output_dir>

Basic options:
-o      <output_dir>    directory to store all the resulting files (required)
--sc                    this flag is required for MDA (single-cell) data
--meta                  this flag is required for metagenomic sample data
--rna                   this flag is required for RNA-Seq data
--plasmid               runs plasmidSPAdes pipeline for plasmid detection
--iontorrent            this flag is required for IonTorrent data
--test                  runs SPAdes on toy dataset
-h/--help               prints this usage message
-v/--version            prints version

Input data:
--12    <filename>      file with interlaced forward and reverse paired-end reads
-1      <filename>      file with forward paired-end reads
-2      <filename>      file with reverse paired-end reads
-s      <filename>      file with unpaired reads
--pe<#>-12      <filename>      file with interlaced reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-1       <filename>      file with forward reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-2       <filename>      file with reverse reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-s       <filename>      file with unpaired reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-<or>    orientation of reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9; <or> = fr, rf, ff)
--s<#>          <filename>      file with unpaired reads for single reads library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-12      <filename>      file with interlaced reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-1       <filename>      file with forward reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-2       <filename>      file with reverse reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-s       <filename>      file with unpaired reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-<or>    orientation of reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9; <or> = fr, rf, ff)
--hqmp<#>-12    <filename>      file with interlaced reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-1     <filename>      file with forward reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-2     <filename>      file with reverse reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-s     <filename>      file with unpaired reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-<or>  orientation of reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9; <or> = fr, rf, ff)
--nxmate<#>-1   <filename>      file with forward reads for Lucigen NxMate library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--nxmate<#>-2   <filename>      file with reverse reads for Lucigen NxMate library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--sanger        <filename>      file with Sanger reads
--pacbio        <filename>      file with PacBio reads
--nanopore      <filename>      file with Nanopore reads
--tslr  <filename>      file with TSLR-contigs
--trusted-contigs       <filename>      file with trusted contigs
--untrusted-contigs     <filename>      file with untrusted contigs

Pipeline options:
--only-error-correction runs only read error correction (without assembling)
--only-assembler        runs only assembling (without read error correction)
--careful               tries to reduce number of mismatches and short indels
--continue              continue run from the last available check-point
--restart-from  <cp>    restart run with updated options and from the specified check-point ('ec', 'as', 'k<int>', 'mc')
--disable-gzip-output   forces error correction not to compress the corrected reads
--disable-rr            disables repeat resolution stage of assembling

Advanced options:
--dataset       <filename>      file with dataset description in YAML format
-t/--threads    <int>           number of threads
                                [default: 16]
-m/--memory     <int>           RAM limit for SPAdes in Gb (terminates if exceeded)
                                [default: 250]
--tmp-dir       <dirname>       directory for temporary files
                                [default: <output_dir>/tmp]
-k              <int,int,...>   comma-separated list of k-mer sizes (must be odd and
                                less than 128) [default: 'auto']
--cov-cutoff    <float>         coverage cutoff value (a positive float number, or 'auto', or 'off') [default: 'off']
--phred-offset  <33 or 64>      PHRED quality offset in the input reads (33 or 64)
                                [default: auto-detect]

As you can see this is also a “pipeline” of tools that can be switched on or off. SPAdes takes quite a long time, so for the purposes of this practical, something like this may suffice:

spades.py -t 4 \
          -m 32 \
          -k 31,51,71 \
          --only-assembler \
          -1 miseq.1.fastq -2 miseq.2.fastq \
          --nanopore minion.fastq \
          -o hybrid_assembly

In turn, these parameters mean

• use 4 threads
• max memory is 32Gb
• use 3 kmer values to build the de bruijn graph(s) - 31, 51 and 71
• only run the assembler, not the correction algorithm (for speed)
• read 1 and read 2 of the MiSeq data
• the nanopore data
• put the output in folder “hybrid_assembly”

Address of the bookmark: https://hpcugent.github.io/easybuild/

Following are the genome assembly tools based on string graph:

1.SGA (String Graph Assembler) https://github.com/jts/sga

Assembles large genomes from high coverage short read data. SGA is designed as a modular set of programs, which are used to form an assembly pipeline. SGA implements a set of assembly algorithms based on the FM-index. As the FM-index is a compressed data structure, the algorithms are very memory efficient. The SGA assembly has three distinct phases. The first phase corrects base calling errors in the reads. The second phase assembles contigs from the corrected reads. The third phase uses paired end and/or mate pair data to build scaffolds from the contigs. The output of this software is a PDF report that allows the properties of the genome and data quality to be visually explored. By providing more information to the user at the start of an assembly project, this software will help increase awareness of the factors that make a given assembly easy or difficult, assist in the selection of software and parameters and help to troubleshoot an assembly if it runs into problems.

2. SAGE: String-overlap Assembly of GEnomes https://github.com/lucian-ilie/SAGE2

SAGE, for de novo genome assembly. As opposed to most assemblers, which are de Bruijn graph based, SAGE uses the string-overlap graph. SAGE builds upon great existing work on string-overlap graph and maximum likelihood assembly, bringing an important number of new ideas, such as the efficient computation of the transitive reduction of the string overlap graph, the use of (generalized) edge multiplicity statistics for more accurate estimation of read copy counts, and the improved use of mate pairs and min-cost flow for supporting edge merging. The assemblies produced by SAGE for several short and medium-size genomes compared favourably with those of existing leading assemblers.

3. FSG: Fast String Graph

The new integrated assembler has been assessed on a standard benchmark, showing that fast string graph (FSG) is significantly faster than SGA while maintaining a moderate use of main memory, and showing practical advantages in running FSG on multiple threads. Moreover, we have studied the effect of coverage rates on the running times.

4.  BASE https://github.com/dhlbh/BASE

It enhances the classic seed-extension approach by indexing the reads efficiently to generate adaptive seeds that have high probability to appear uniquely in the genome. Such seeds form the basis for BASE to build extension trees and then to use reverse validation to remove the branches based on read coverage and paired-end information, resulting in high-quality consensus sequences of reads sharing the seeds. Such consensus sequences are then extended to contigs. BASE is a practically efficient tool for constructing contig, with significant improvement in quality for long NGS reads. It is relatively easy to extend BASE to include scaffolding.

5. Fermi https://github.com/lh3/fermi/

Fermi is a de novo assembler with a particular focus on assembling Illumina short sequence reads from a mammal-sized genome. In addition to the role of a typical assembler, fermi also aims to preserve heterozygotes which are often collapsed by other assemblers. Its ultimate goal is to find a minimal set of unitigs to represent all the information in raw reads.

If you want to learn about String Graph assembler, please read the following papers -

i) The Fragment Assembly String Graph - E. W. Myers

This paper describes the String Graph concept.

ii) Efficient construction of an assembly string graph using the FM-index - Jared T. Simpson and Richard Durbin

This earlier paper from Simpson and Durbin

iii) Efficient de novo assembly of large genomes using compressed data structures - Jared T. Simpson and Richard Durbin

Pondicherry University, Puducherry has been identified as a nodal agency by the Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India to coordinate this examination along with nine centres namely,

Pune University, Pune;

Anna University, Chennai;

Bose Institute, Kolkata;

Institute of Bioinformatics & Applied Biotechnology, Bangalore;

North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad;

University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram;

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and

Assam Agricultural University, Guwahati. 

In the BINC 2015 and 2016 examination, 23 candidates and five candidates were certified respectively. DBT has agreed to fund Research fellowships for all the BINC qualified Indian nationals to pursue Ph.D. in Indian Institutes/Universities.

Note that the candidate must possess a postgraduate degree(or equivalent) & meet the criteria of the institutes/universities in order to avail research fellowship.

In addition, cash prize of Rs. 10,000/- will be awarded to the top 10 BINC qualifiers.

More at http://www.pondiuni.edu.in/exams/binc/

y a number of metrics, including:

• Overall assembly length
• Number of scaffolds/contigs
• Length of longest scaffold/contig
• Scaffold/contig N50 and N90Assembly base composition, in particular percentage GC and percentage Ns
• CEGMA completeness
• Scaffold/contig length/count distribution

assembly-stats supports two widely used presentations of these values, tabular and cumulative length plots, and introduces an additional circular plot that summarises most commonly used assembly metrics in a single visualisation. Each of these presentations is generated using javascript from a common (JSON) data structure, allowing toggling between alternative views, and each can be applied to a single or multiple assemblies to allow direct comparison of alternate assemblies.

Tabular presentation allows direct comparison of exact values between assemblies, the limitations of this approach lie in the necessary omission of distributions and the challenge of interpreting ratios of values that may vary by several orders of magnitude.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/rjchallis/assembly-stats

• Bioinformatics - RSS feed of current and advance online publications
• Genome Research - current & advance
• Genome Biology - editors picks, latest, most viewed, most forwarded. (Hit the RSS icon under each tab).
• PLoS Genetics - new articles
• PLoS Computational Biology - new articles
• Nature Genetics - current TOC and AOP
• Nature Reviews Genetics - current TOC and AOP

• Bioinformatics
• BMC Bioinformatics
• Briefings in Bioinformatics
• Genome Biology
• Genome Research: current and AOP
• Microbiome
• Nature Genetics, current & AOP
• Nature Reviews Genetics, current & AOP
• Nucleic Acids Research
• PLOS Computational Biology
• PLOS Genetics

Blogs. Some of these blogs are very relevant to bioinfo jobs. Others are more personal interest.

• The OpenHelix Blog
• Ensembl blog
• Galaxy News
• Blue Collar Bioinformatics
• Homologus
• Golden Helix - our 2 SNPs
• Genomics Law Report
• R-bloggers (aggregates feeds from >350 blogs about R)
• Genomes Unzipped
• Jason Moore's Epistasis Blog
• 23andMe - the Spitoon

• Variance Explained: David Robinson’s blog (Data Scientist at Stack Overflow, works in R and Python).
• Global Biodefense: News on pathogens, outbreaks, and preparedness, with periodic posts on genomics and bioinformatics-related developments and funding opportunities.
• In between lines of code: Lex Nederbragt’s blog on biology, sequencing, bioinformatics, …
• Simply Statistics: A statistics blog by Rafa Irizarry, Roger Peng, and Jeff Leek.
• Bits of DNA: Reviews and commentary on computational biology by Lior Pachter (fair warning: dialogue here can get a bit heated!).
• Blue Collar Bioinformatics: articles related tool validation and the open source bioinformatics community.
• Microbiome Digest – Bik’s Picks: A daily digest of scientific microbiome papers, by Elisabeth Bik, Science Editor at uBiome.
• Living in an Ivory Basement: Titus Brown’s blog on metagenomics, open science, testing, reproducibility, and programming.
• Enseqlopedia: James Hadfield’s blog on all things NGS.
• Epistasis Blog: Jason Moore’s computational biology blog.
• RStudio Blog: announcements about new RStudio functionality, updates about the tidyverse, and more.
• nextgenseek.com: Next-Gen Sequencing Blog covering new developments in NGS data & analysis.
• RNA-Seq Blog: Transcriptome Research & Industry News.
• The Allium: We all need a little humor in our lives. Like The Onion, but for science.

Forums.

• Seqanswers - bioinformatics forum
• Seqanswers - RNA-Seq forum
• BioStar
• BOL