BOL: Related items

Nuclear Dynamics Lab

Thu, 17 Jul 2014 15:03:27 -0500

Lab focus is to elucidate fundamental principles, new mechanisms, machineries and emergent properties that are involved in maintaining the genome and gene expression programmes for improvements in lifelong health and well-being for all.

More at http://www.babraham.ac.uk/our-research/nuclear-dynamics/

Dynamic chromosome breakpoints !!!

Jitendra Narayan — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 18:38:10 -0500

Cell division involves the distribution of identical genetic material, DNA, to two daughters’ cells. During this process, duplicated deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) goes through a condensation and decondensation process. This is followed by nuclear envelope dissolution, mitotic spindle assembly, migration of the sister chromatid pairs to the metaphase plate, division and segregation of identical sets of chromosomes into daughter nuclei and nuclear envelope reformation.

The vital metaphase stage of cell division, when the sister chromatids migrated to the centre and lined up in a row, and pulled apart using attached microtubules in such a way that half the DNA ends up in each daughter cell. However, before the mitotic spindle‐mediated movement gets start and pulled DNA apart, the chromosomes are free to undergo recombination which involves the exchange of genetic material either between multiple chromosomes or between different regions of the same chromosome.

During recombination, the precise breakage of each strand, exchange between the strands, and sealing of the resulting recombined molecules happens. The “chromosomal breakpoints” refers to these places where they break. Mostly, this process occurs with a high degree of accuracy at high frequency in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells. But occasionally this “break and sealing/ break and reattach” process goes wrong and the reattachment happens in the wrong place which usually create disaster (with few exceptions).These chromosome disaster or abnormalities involve the gain, loss or rearrangement of visible amounts of genetic material during cell division. These abnormalities are of two type, the first one is numerical abnormalities where severe disorders are caused by the loss or gain of whole chromosomes, which affect the copy number of hundreds or even thousands of genes. The second are structural abnormalities which can be unbalanced or balanced. The former are similar to numerical abnormalities in that genetic material is either gained or lost. The natural defects in chromosome segregation are linked to cancer and several genetic diseases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders). Therefore, the enzymes involved in regulating cell division are still the attractive drug targets for many diseases.

Apart from certain chromosome abnormalities, these “crossing over” of segments of maternal and paternal chromosomes to form hybrid chromosomes have some evolutionary importance and considered as a driver of genetic variation. Moreover, the chromosome breakage in evolution is considered to be non-random in nature(http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.0020014). In addition the study of breakpoint regions and non-breakpoint (stable) regions of chromosomes indicates both the regions evolved in distinctly different ways ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2675965/). These breakage may lead to genetic diseases or participate to chromosomal rearranmgnets and contributed in development of new species.

I will try to explain the genome hotspots/Evolutionary Breakpoint Regions(EBRs)/fragile regions/weak fragments/ in my next blog.

Software for recombination detection:

RAT http://cbr.jic.ac.uk/dicks/software/RAT/

Breakpointer https://github.com/ruping/Breakpointer

DRP http://web.cbio.uct.ac.za/~darren/rdp.html

RB-finder http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18707535

LDhat2.0 http://ldhat.sourceforge.net/LDhat2.0/instructions.shtml

Reference:

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/genetic-recombination-514#

Image: Wikipedia , sciencelearn.org.nz

Recommended Articles:

http://www.friendshipcircle.org/blog/2012/05/22/13-chromosomal-disorders-youve-never-heard-of/

http://web.udl.es/usuaris/e4650869/docencia/segoncicle/genclin98/recursos_classe_%28pdf%29/revisionsPDF/chromosyndromes.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2775595/table/T2/

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/disorders/chromosomal/

http://www.ncert.nic.in/html/learning_basket/biology/cc&cd.pdf

Nieduszynski Group

Fri, 26 Sep 2014 19:35:06 -0500

Complete, accurate replication of the genome is essential for life. All chromosomes in eukaryotic cells must be duplicated and then segregated to daughter cells to ensure genetic integrity and produce the large number of cells that make up a multicellular organism. We are using genetic, genomic and computational methods to understand how chromosome replication is regulated to ensure genome stability. By focusing on the basic biology that underpins cell growth and division we aim to provide new insights that may help our understanding of diseases such as cancer and congenital disorders.

More http://www.nieduszynski.org/index.php
http://www.path.ox.ac.uk/research/cell-biology-and-pathology/conrad-nieduszynski-group

A 3D Map of the Human Genome

Fri, 12 Dec 2014 22:27:55 -0600

Suhas Rao and Miriam Huntley (of the Aiden Lab) describe a 3D map of the human genome at kilobase resolution, revealing the principles of chromatin looping. Guest Origami Folding: Sarah Nyquist. Suhas S.P. Rao*, Miriam H. Huntley*, Neva C. Durand, Elena K. Stamenova, Ivan D. Bochkov, James T. Robinson, Adrian L. Sanborn, Ido Machol, Arina D. Omer, Eric S. Lander, Erez Lieberman Aiden. (2014). A 3D Map of the Human Genome at Kilobase Resolution Reveals Principles of Chromatin Looping. Cell.

Sequencing By Xpansion

Jitendra Narayan — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 20:58:11 -0500

Sequencing By Xpansion (SBX) is a DNA sequencing method that uses a simple biochemical reaction to encode the sequence of a DNA molecule into a highly measurable surrogate called an Xpandomer. This single molecule approach produces enough Xpandomer in a single drop reaction to sequence an entire human genome 1000X over. To achieve this, an Xpandomer replaces each DNA sequence with a sequence of large, high signal reporter molecules using the SBX molecular expansion technology. The DNA sequence is then read out as the Xpandomer reporters pass sequentially through a nanopore detector. SBX is a molecular engineering platform that benefits from core design principles that separate the multiple molecular functions. This systems approach enables efficient development and incorporation of improvements to SBX and is key to reconfiguring and optimizing Xpandomer measurement for different detection platforms.

http://www.stratosgenomics.com/stratos-genomics-technology

MAKER

Jitendra Narayan — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 15:59:24 -0600

MAKER is a portable and easily configurable genome annotation pipeline.Its purpose is to allow smaller eukaryotic and prokaryotic genome projects to independently annotate their genomes and to create genome databases. MAKER identifies repeats, aligns ESTs and proteins to a genome, produces ab-initio gene predictions and automatically synthesizes these data into gene annotations having evidence-based quality values.

More at http://www.yandell-lab.org/software/maker.html

Address of the bookmark: http://www.yandell-lab.org/software/maker.html

UCSC Genome Browser and Blat software !

Jit — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 03:18:57 -0600

This directory contains Genome Browser and Blat application binaries built for standalone
command-line use on various supported Linux and UNIX platforms. To determine which set of binaries
to download, type "uname -a" on the command line to display your machine type. In most cases the
usage statement for the application can be viewed by running the binary with no arguments.

The UCSC Genome Browser and Blat software are free for academic, nonprofit, and personal use. A
license is required for commercial download and installation of these binaries, with the exception
of items built from the following source code directories, which are freely available for all uses:

- kent/src/utils (includes big* tools)
- kent/src/lib
- kent/src/hg/autoSql
- kent/src/hg/autoXml

For information about commercial licensing of the Genome Browser software, see
http://genome.ucsc.edu/license/. The Blat and In-Silico PCR software may be commercially
licensed through Kent Informatics (http://www.kentinformatics.com).

More at http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/admin/exe/

Address of the bookmark: http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/admin/exe/

Efficient genome searching with Biostrings and the BSgenome data package

Aasha — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 05:18:06 -0600

Address of the bookmark: https://www.bioconductor.org/packages/3.3/bioc/vignettes/BSgenome/inst/doc/GenomeSearching.pdf

CANU: Assembling Large Genomes with Single-Molecule Sequencing and Locality Sensitive Hashing.

Jit — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 11:38:10 -0500

Canu is a fork of the Celera Assembler designed for high-noise single-molecule sequencing (such as the PacBio RSII or Oxford Nanopore MinION). The software is currently alpha level, feel free to use and report issues encountered.

Canu is a hierachical assembly pipeline which runs in four steps:

Detect overlaps in high-noise sequences using MHAP
Generate corrected sequence consensus
Trim corrected sequences
Assemble trimmed corrected sequences

Read the documentation

New release https://github.com/marbl/canu/releases

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/marbl/canu

YASS :: genomic similarity search tool

Jit — Mon, 02 May 2016 09:26:00 -0500

YASS is a genomic similarity search tool, for nucleic (DNA/RNA) sequences in fasta or plain text format (it produces local pairwise alignments). Like most of the heuristic pairwise local alignment tools for DNA sequences (FASTA, BLAST, PATTERNHUNTER, BLASTZ/LASTZ, LAST ...), YASS uses seeds to detect potential similarity regions, and then tries to extend them to local alignments. This genomic search tool uses multiple transition constrained spaced seeds that enable to search more fuzzy repeats, as non-coding DNA/RNA. Another simple, but interesting feature is that you can specify the seed pattern used in the search step (as provided for example by iedera).

Main features of YASS are:

multiple, possibly overlapping seeds and a new hit criterion to ensure a good sensitivity/selectivity trade-off
transition-constrained spaced seeds to improve sensitivity (transition mutations are purine to purine [A<->G] or pyrimidine to pyrimidine [C<->T])
using different scoring schemes with bit-score and E-value evaluated according to the sequence background frequencies
parameterizable output filter for low complexity repeats
reporting of various alignment statistical parameters (mutation bias along triplets, transition/transversion)
post-processing step to group gapped alignments

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinfo.lifl.fr/yass/