BOL: Related items

The Gene Detectives: How a New Computational Tool Is Helping Us Read the History Written in Our Genes

BioStar — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:23:42 -0500

Imagine opening an ancient family album with no names, dates, or captions. Some photographs are missing, others have been copied, and a few show people who look almost identical. Your challenge is to discover who is related to whom and reconstruct the family story. In evolutionary biology, scientists face a similar mystery when they study genes. Every genome contains clues about its past, but genes can be duplicated, lost, and changed over millions of years, making their history difficult to trace.

A recent study published in PLOS Computational Biology introduces REvolutionH-tl 2.0 (https://pypi.org/project/revolutionhtl/), a computational tool designed to help solve this mystery. The software analyzes protein sequences and identifies evolutionary relationships between genes. It can help researchers detect important events such as gene duplication, gene loss, and speciation, allowing them to reconstruct how genes evolved across different organisms.

What makes the tool especially interesting is its focus on both speed and interpretation. The researchers compared REvolutionH-tl 2.0 with several existing computational tools and reported that it achieved competitive accuracy while requiring less computational time in their tests. The tool also includes visualization features, helping researchers turn complicated genetic data into evolutionary stories that are easier to explore.

Genes are more than simple sequences of DNA; they are records of life’s long history. Each surviving gene carries traces of the changes that shaped it. By bringing together computational analysis and visualization, REvolutionH-tl 2.0 acts like a detective, helping scientists uncover these hidden stories. Ultimately, tools like this can improve our understanding of how genomes evolved and how genes acquired the roles they perform today.

More at https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013017

Circleator

Jit — Sun, 25 Jun 2017 18:04:32 -0500

The Charm City Circleator--or Circleator for short--is a Perl-based visualization tool developed at the Institute for Genome Sciences in the University of Maryland's School of Medicine. Circleator produces circular plots of genome-associated data, like this one:

Common uses of the tool include:

Displaying the sequence and/or genes in a GenBank flat file.
Highlighting differences and/or similarities in gene content between related organisms.
Comparing SNPs and indels between closely-related strains or serovars.
Comparing gene expression values across multiple samples or timepoints.
Visualizing coverage plots of RNA-Seq read alignments.

Key Features

Circleator...

Builds on BioPerl and the input file formats that it supports, including:
- GenBank flat files, GFF, FASTA
Accepts a number of other commonly-used datatypes and file formats:
- BSR and TRF output, SAM/BAM files, VCF-encoded SNPs, tab-delimited files
Outputs publication-ready figures in the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format.
Requires only a single configuration file whose layout mirrors that of the figure itself.
- Predefined configuration files and "track" types are supplied for common datasets.
- Advanced features allow limited analyses to be performed as a figure is drawn.
Includes an extensive set of regression tests.
Offers a prototype web-based GUI (under the "Ringmaster" project.)

https://github.com/jonathancrabtree/Circleator

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/jonathancrabtree/Circleator

Pimp your brain: Bioinformatics

Wed, 20 Aug 2014 22:09:21 -0500

Jan Lisec from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology explains, in this "pimp your brain" episode, what bioinformatics is and why bioinformatics is so important and indispensable for biological research. In the video serial "Pimp your brain" scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology describe their research. More videos from the 'Pimp your brain' serial are available on www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-l9VItC9Gn2Ur2Xj6PTOAkjLUlVPbIOO More videos are available on www.mpimp-golm.mpg.de

CHSMiner: a GUI tool to identify chromosomal homologous segments

Jit — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 16:55:49 -0600

Background

The identification of chromosomal homologous segments (CHS) within and between genomes is essential for comparative genomics. Various processes including insertion/deletion and inversion could cause the degeneration of CHSs.

Results

Here we present a Java software CHSMiner that detects CHSs based on shared gene content alone. It implements fast greedy search algorithm and rigorous statistical validation, and its friendly graphical interface allows interactive visualization of the results. We tested the software on both simulated and biological realistic data and compared its performance with similar existing software and data source.

Conclusion

CHSMiner is characterized by its integrated workflow, fast speed and convenient usage. It will be useful for both experimentalists and bioinformaticians interested in the structure and evolution of genomes.

https://github.com/zhenwang100/CHSMiner

Address of the bookmark: https://almob.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1748-7188-4-2

Center for Molecular Dynamics Nepal (CMDN), Nepal

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 13:54:51 -0500

Center for Molecular Dynamics Nepal (CMDN), established 2007 prides itself as a research driven nongovernmental organization. Unlike other civil society organizations, CMDN is dedicated entirely to promoting research in the country. With its team of energetic and highly motivated experts, CMDN is now recognized as the leading public health and wildlife research organization of the country.

More at http://www.cmdn.org.np/main/index.php

SMASH: An alignment-free tool to find and visualise rearrangements between pairs of DNA sequences

Jit — Thu, 21 Dec 2017 08:26:57 -0600

SMASH is a completely alignment-free method to find and visualise rearrangements between pairs of DNA sequences. The detection is based on relative compression, namely using a FCM, also known as Markov model, of high context order (typically 20). The method has been approached with a tool (also called SMASH). For visualization, SMASH outputs a SVG image, with an ideogram output architecture, where the patterns are represented with several HSV values (only value varies). The following image, illustrating the information maps between human and chimpanzee for the several chromosomes, depicts an example:

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/pratas/smash

PhD opportunity at Université de Liège - Belgium

Sat, 02 Aug 2014 01:12:43 -0500

PhD opportunity at Université de Liège - Belgium

The Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Unit of Université de Liège (Belgium) is looking for a highly motivated master student with programming skills for a PhD thesis project (4 years, fully funded) with the goal of designing computational tools that use literature, genomic and structural data in order to infer regulatory and metabolic networks.

Applicants are invited to send their resume and a recommendation letter to Prof. Patrick Meyer (more details at www.biosys.ulg.ac.be )

For more information : www.biosys.ulg.ac.be

TAREAN: A computational tool for identification and characterization of satellite DNA from unassembled short reads

Surabhi Chaudhary — Tue, 15 May 2018 02:53:11 -0500

TAndem REpeat ANalyzer -TAREAN – is a computational pipeline for unsupervised identification of satellite repeats from unassembled sequence reads. The pipeline uses low-pass whole genome sequence reads and performs their graph-based clustering. Resulting clusters, representing all types of repeats, are then examined for the presence of circular structures and putative satellite repeats are reported.

How to use TAREAN:

Install a local instance of the pipeline using its source code available from bitbucket repository.
Use public Galaxy-based server at https://repeatexplorer-elixir.cerit-sc.cz/. The server is provided in frame of the Elixir CZ project and is maintained by CESNET and CERIT-SC. Simple registration is required to use this service.

Development of TAREAN was supported by ELIXIR CZ research infrastructure project (MEYS Grant No: LM2015047).

References

Novak, P., Avila Robledillo, L., Koblizkova, A., Vrbova, I., Neumann, P., Macas, J. (2017) – TAREAN: a computational tool for identification and characterization of satellite DNA from unassembled short reads. Nucleic Acids Res., doi:10.1093/nar/gkx257

Address of the bookmark: https://bitbucket.org/petrnovak/repex_tarean

MEGADOCK 4.0

Suleman Khan — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 18:08:54 -0500

An ultra–high-performance protein–protein docking software for heterogeneous supercomputers

Summary: The application of protein–protein docking in large-scale interactome analysis is a major challenge in structural bioinformatics and requires huge computing resources. In this work, we present MEGADOCK 4.0, an FFT-based docking software that makes extensive use of recent heterogeneous supercomputers and shows powerful, scalable performance of over 97% strong scaling.

Availability and Implementation: MEGADOCK 4.0 is written in C++ with OpenMPI and NVIDIA CUDA 5.0 (or later) and is freely available to all academic and non-profit users at: http://www.bi.cs.titech.ac.jp/megadock.

Contact: akiyama@cs.titech.ac.jp

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/06/bioinformatics.btu532.short

BFC: a standalone high-performance tool for correcting sequencing errors from Illumina sequencing data

Jit — Thu, 31 May 2018 09:35:23 -0500

BFC is a standalone high-performance tool for correcting sequencing errors from Illumina sequencing data. It is specifically designed for high-coverage whole-genome human data, though also performs well for small genomes. The BFC algorithm is a variant of the classical spectrum alignment algorithm introduced by Pevzner et al (2001). It uses an exhaustive search to find a k-mer path through a read that minimizes a heuristic objective function jointly considering penalties on correction, quality and k-mer support. This algorithm was first implemented in my fermi assembler and then refined a few times in fermi, fermi2 and now in BFC. In the k-mer counting phase, BFC uses a blocked bloom filter to filter out most singleton k-mers and keeps the rest in a hash table (Melsted and Pritchard, 2011). The use of bloom filter is how BFC is named, though other correctors such as Lighter and Bless actually rely more on bloom filter than BFC. https://github.com/lh3/bfc

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/lh3/bfc