BOL: Related items

Postdoc position at Kiel University, Germany

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 01:16:55 -0500

In the Genomic Microbiology Group of Prof. Tal Dagan at the Institute
of Microbiology at Kiel University, Germany, a

Postdoc position (m/w/d)

in the field of computational evolutionary microbiology is available
for an initially limited period of 36 months at the earliest possible
date. The weekly working time corresponds to 100% of full employment
(If the legal requirements under collective bargaining law are met, the
tariff grouping is carried out up to pay scale 13 TV-L. The obligation
to teach amounts to 4 hours.

The Genomic Microbiology Group research interests are focused on
microbial genome evolution with an emphasis on the study of lateral gene
transfer. In our research we use both computational and experimental
approaches (see www.uni-kiel.de/genomik). The position offers the
opportunity to develop an independent research profile within the group
research focus. The successful applicant is expected to be involved
in teaching of bioinformatics and molecular evolution, including the
development of teaching materials (lectures/exercises/short videos).

Your profile:
· Doctoral or PhD degree in Molecular Evolution, Bioinformatics or
related fields.
· Knowledge and experience in programming (e.g., Python) and
biostatistical analysis (e.g., with R or MatLab).
· Any of the following expertise is an advantage: the analysis of
genomic or transcriptomic data, phylogenetic reconstruction,
comparative genomics.
· Good oral and written communication skills in English.
· Ability to teach in German is an advantage (alternatively, an
indication to do so from the 2nd year on).
· Skills and motivation to communicate and interact with other
scientists.

The Christian-Albrechts-University sees itself as a modern and
cosmopolitan employer. We welcome your application regardless of your age,
gender, cultural and social background, religion, ideology, disability
or sexual identity. We promote equality of the sexes.

The Christian-Albrechts-University is committed to the employment of
people with disabilities. Preference will be given to applications from
severely handicapped persons and persons of equal standing, provided
they are suitable.

We expressly welcome applications from people with a migration background.

For enquiries regarding the position, teaching obligations and research
topic please contact Prof. Tal Dagan: tdagan@ifam.uni-kiel.de.

Applications should be submitted by email to Mrs. Haacks
(dhaacks@ifam.uni-kiel.de) as a single PDF and include: (1) a letter of
motivation (max 1 page, Arial 11, line spacing 1.15), (2) CV, (3) PhD
certificate. Please use 'GMG postdoc application - [your name]'
as a subject.

Please, refrain from sending us application photos.

Application deadline: August 31 2021 or until the position is
filled. Interviews will take place during September/October 2021. The
planned starting date for the position is flexible (but in 2021).

Bioinformatics -- Understanding of living systems through information science

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 11:50:17 -0500

Recently, the progress of the Human Genome Project, aiming to decode all human DNA sequences, has highlighted a research field called bioinformatics. In this new field, computers and techniques from information science are not just used as tools to advance life science research; they're expected to have a major impact on how we think about the life sciences. Q. The main feature of bioinformatics is, it utilizes computers to analyze life. One is example is the genome. In all organisms, DNA contains genetic information, and this is called the genome. But the amount of information involved is huge, so recently, it's been read using next-generation sequencers, and analyzed by computers. In bioinformatics research, what we do is utilize those genome information to investigate the principles of life. As an organism evolves, its genome sequence changes through sudden mutations. Additionally, at the genome level, mutations called rearrangements, such as inversions, transpositions, and duplications, occur. The genome comparison system developed by the Sakakibara Lab calculates homologous sequences called anchors, which are conserved between species. If the genome is considered as a long text, then anchors can be thought of as words. Q. We're coming to understand the genomes of various organisms - not just humans, but monkeys, chimpanzees, bacteria, and so on. The first method used to analyze a genome is comparing it with the genomes of other organisms, to see where it's the same and where it's different. In that way, the content of the genome is decoded bit by bit, using computers. By contrast, in our method, we've developed software called Murasaki, which we also use to analyze large genomes, by comparing them with those of other organisms. The Sakakibara Lab uses a next-generation sequencer at Keio University, along with a cluster machine with hundreds of CPUs. In this way, the Lab is analyzing genome mutations that cause cancer, and the genome of the natto production strain Bacillus subtilis. Until now, genome analysis could only be done in national-scale projects. But now, next-generation sequencer development has made genome analysis possible in an ordinary lab. In a world-first achievement, the Sakakibara Lab has decoded the natto bacillus genome, through analysis using Keio's next-generation sequencer. Q. In the future, biology and the life sciences may become almost entirely information science and computer science. And in healthcare, that may enable us, for example, to predict whether individuals are susceptible to cancer, or to certain lifestyle-related diseases, by understanding their personal genome data. So, I think it's amply possible that we can make use of such information effectively, to help people live longer and be free from disease, by thinking about their lifestyle habits. Bioinformatics is only two decades old. In this field, many areas are still unknown. Professor Sakakibara, having been involved since the beginning, will continue tackling new, challenging research projects.

Bioinformatics Infrastructure Facility

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 09:22:25 -0500

The Bioinformatics Infrastructure Facility has started working in the year 2007 at Presidency College, Kolkata. It is one of the premier institutes of India and boasts of a rich heritage and great alumni. The Infrastructure Facility has a dedicated team headed by Sayak Ganguli and ably supported by Priayanka Dhar. The coordinator of the facility is Abhijit Datta of the Post Graduate Department of Botany. The lab mainly focusses on the analysis of the RNA Induced Silencing Complex. Recent highlights include the presentation of a paper at the RNAi World Congress.

More @ http://bioinfo-presiuniv.edu.in/index.php

Public Databases for Bioinformatics !

Jit — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 05:32:15 -0500

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17155-y

Server Infrastructure:

File Server:

dhara: Synology 3614 Storage Appliance
4 Core Xeon
108TB disk storage
10Gb ethernet to SCG3
Access atx: dhara:5000
Has btsync server (try it - its much better than dropbox)

Compute Servers:

nandi: Kundaje and Phi Server
24 intel cores
256GB RAM
500GB of SSD storage 
36TB RAID6 local storage
4 Intel Phi's (space for 4 more GPU's)


durga: Montgomery and sensitive data
24 intel cores
256GB RAM
500GB of SSD RAID0 storage 
60TB RAID6 local storage

mitra: Bassik and Web/DB Server
24 core
256GB RAM 
500GB of SSD RAID0 storage 
36TB RAID6 local storage

vayu: Kundaje GPU server
4 core
64GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
8TB RAID10 local storage
4 Nvidia GTX 970 4GB GPUs

amold: Bickel and SGE server
32 AMD core
128GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
12TB RAID5 local storage

wotan: Bickel and SGE server
64 AMD core
256GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
12TB RAID5 local storage

Filesystem:

/users/$USER
default home directory
full backups nightly 
nfs mount to dhara
should store code, papers, and other highly processed data here

/mnt/data/
globally accessible data
should store common data here
e.g. genomes and indexes, annotations, ENCODE data  
if you dont want this to count towards your quote you must chown

/mnt/lab_data/$LAB/
lab accessible data
should store lab project data here 
e.g. ATAC-seq prediction data, enhancer prediction, motif calls

/srv/scratch/$USER
fast local storage
not backed up, but on raid and data will never be deleted
most analysis should be performed here

/srv/persistent/$USER
fast local storage
synced nightly, but not backed up
       ie if the hard drives fail or you delete something and notice 
       within 24 hours we can recover. Otherwise not. (vs home which is 
       properly backed up )  
intermediate analysis products that would be hard to recover should be stored here 
       e.g. stochastic analysis results that need to be kept so that paper 
       results can be reproduced

/srv/www/$LABNAME/
web accessible from mitra.stanford.edu
*NOT BACKED UP*

Some parallel programming patterns:

# gzip a bunch of files
parallel gzip -- *.FILESTOGZIP

# fork example in python:
(for more detailed examples look at 
 https://github.com/nboley/grit/ grit/lib/multiprocessing_utils.py)

import os
import time
import random

import multiprocessing

class ProcessSafeOPStream( object ):
    def __init__( self, writeable_obj ):
        self.writeable_obj = writeable_obj
        self.lock = multiprocessing.Lock()
        self.name = self.writeable_obj.name
        return
    
    def write( self, data ):
        self.lock.acquire()
        self.writeable_obj.write( data )
        self.writeable_obj.flush()
        self.lock.release()
        return
    
    def close( self ):
        self.writeable_obj.close()

def worker(queue, ofp):
    # Try without this
    random.seed()
    while True:
        i = queue.get()
        if i == 'FINISHED': return
        # simulate an expensive function
        x = random.random()
        time.sleep(x/10)
        print i, x
        ofp.write("%i\t%s\n" % (i, x))

NSIMS = 10000
NPROC = 25

# populate queue
todo = multiprocessing.Queue()
for i in xrange(NSIMS): todo.put(i)
for i in xrange(NPROC): todo.put('FINISHED')

ofp = ProcessSafeOPStream( open("output.txt", "w") )

pids = []
for i in xrange(NPROC):
    pid = os.fork()
    if pid == 0:
       worker(todo, ofp)
       os._exit(0)
    else:
       pids.append(pid)  

for pid in pids:
    os.waitpid(pid, 0)

ofp.close()

print "FINISHED"

For use case 1 we obtained the following ENCODE and ROADMAP datasets https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF446WOD/@@download/ENCFF446WOD.bed.gz, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF546PJU/@@download/ENCFF546PJU.bam, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF059BEU/@@download/ENCFF059BEU.bam. Blacklisted regions were obtained from http://mitra.stanford.edu/kundaje/akundaje/release/blacklists/hg38-human/hg38.blacklist.bed.gz. The human genome version hg38 was obtained from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg38/bigZips/hg38.fa.gz.

For use case 2 we used the set of narrowPeak files summarized in https://github.com/wkopp/janggu_usecases/tree/master/extra/urls.txt (archived version v1.0.1). The human genome version hg19 was obtained from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg19/bigZips/hg19.fa.gz

For use case 3 we used the ENCODE datasets https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF591XCX/@@download/ENCFF591XCX.bam, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF736LHE/@@download/ENCFF736LHE.bigWig, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF177HHM/@@download/ENCFF177HHM.bam as we as the GENCODE annotation v29 from ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/gencode/Gencode_human/release_29/gencode.v29.annotation.gtf.gz.

Address of the bookmark: http://mitra.stanford.edu/

PLOS Computational Biology: Translational Bioinformatics educational resources

Jitendra Narayan — Fri, 16 Aug 2013 12:24:56 -0500

PLOS present collection of Education articles: “Translational Bioinformatics”. This collection is presented as an online “book” which could serve as a reference tool for a graduate level introductory course, marking a step in an exciting new direction for the Education section of the journal.

Blog : http://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2012/12/28/translational-bioinformatics-plos-computational-biology-presents-an-educational-resource-for-an-emerging-field/

Educational Material : http://www.ploscollections.org/article/browseIssue.action?issue=info:doi/10.1371/issue.pcol.v03.i11

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ploscollections.org/article/browseIssue.action?issue=info:doi/10.1371/issue.pcol.v03.i11

Translational Bioinformatics: Transforming 300 Billion Points of Data

Tue, 20 Aug 2013 19:03:47 -0500

Translational Bioinformatics: Transforming 300 Billion Points of Data into Diagnostics, Therapeutics, and New Insights into Disease Air date: Wednesday, June 20, 2012, 3:00:00 PM Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local Description: There is an urgent need to translate genome-era discoveries into clinical utility, but the difficulties in making bench-to-bedside translations haven't been well described. The nascent field of translational bioinformatics may help. Dr. Butte's lab at Stanford University builds and applies tools that convert more than 300 billion points of molecular, clinical, and epidemiological data (measured by researchers and clinicians over the past decade) into diagnostics, therapeutics, and new insights into disease. Dr. Butte, a bioinformatician and pediatric endocrinologist, will highlight his lab's work on using publicly available molecular measurements to find new uses for drugs, discovering new treatable mechanisms of disease in type 2 diabetes, and evaluating patients presenting with whole genomes sequenced. The NIH Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series includes weekly scientific talks by some of the top researchers in the biomedical sciences worldwide. For more information, visit: The NIH Director's Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series Author: Atul Butte, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University Runtime: 01:07:42 Permanent link: http://videocast.nih.gov/launch.asp?17321

jobTree based python wrapper to run the genome simulation tool suite Evolver

Jit — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 16:26:32 -0600

evolverSimControl (eSC) can be used to simulate multi-chromosome genome evolution on an arbitrary phylogeny (Newick format). In addition to simply running evolver, eSC also automatically creates statistical summaries of the simulation as it runs including text and image files. Also included are convenience scripts to: check on a running simulation and see detailed status and logging information; extract fasta sequence files from the leaf nodes of a completed simulation; extract pairwise multiple alignment files (.maf) from leaf and branch nodes from a completed simulation and with the help of mafJoin, join them together into a single maf covering the entire simulation.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/dentearl/evolverSimControl

Baumbach Lab

Wed, 21 Aug 2013 10:56:35 -0500

The Computational Biology research group was established in October 2012 at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (IMADA) at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). It emerged from the Computational Systems Biology group, founded in March 2010 at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII) and the Cluster of Excellence for Multimodel Computing and Interaction (MMCI) at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.

The group is headed by Prof. Dr. Jan Baumbach and currently hosts nine PhD students and one postdoctoral fellow at both, IMADA/SDU and MMCI/MPII.

More at >> http://www.baumbachlab.net/

AliTV—interactive visualization of whole genome comparisons

Jit — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 07:08:17 -0600

AliTV, which provides interactive visualization of whole genome alignments. AliTV reads multiple whole genome alignments or automatically generates alignments from the provided data. Optional feature annotations and phylo- genetic information are supported. The user-friendly, web-browser based and highly customizable interface allows rapid exploration and manipulation of the visualized data as well as the export of publication-ready high-quality figures. AliTV is freely available at https://github.com/AliTVTeam/AliTV

https://alitvteam.github.io/AliTV/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/AliTVTeam/AliTV

Look up a biological numbers

Jitendra Narayan — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 03:27:45 -0500

Did you ever need to look up a number like the volume of a cell or the cellular concentration of ATP, only to find yourself spending much more time than you wanted on the Internet or flipping through textbooks - all without much success?

Well, it didn’t happen only to you. It is often surprising how difficult it can be to find concrete biological numbers, even for properties that have been measured numerous times. To help solve this for one and all, BioNumbers (the database of key numbers in molecular biology) was created. Along with the numbers, you'll find the relevant references to the original literature, useful comments, and related numbers.

To cite BioNumbers please refer to: Milo et al. Nucl. Acids Res. (2010) 38: D750-D753. When using a specific entry from the database it is highly recommended that you also specify the BioNumbers 6 digit ID, e.g. "BNID 100986, Milo et al 2010".

Address of the bookmark: http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/