BOL: Related items

RGFA: powerful and convenient handling of assembly graphs

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 05:47:53 -0600

RGFA, an implementation of the proposed GFA specification in Ruby. It allows the user to conveniently parse, edit and write GFA files. Complex operations such as the separation of the implicit instances of repeats and the merging of linear paths can be performed. A typical application of RGFA is the editing of a graph, to finish the assembly of a sequence, using information not available to the assembler. We illustrate a use case, in which the assembly of a repetitive metagenomic fosmid insert was completed using a script based on RGFA.

https://github.com/ggonnella/rgfa

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5103826/

FSA: Fast Statistical Alignment

Jit — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 04:26:01 -0600

FSA is a probabilistic multiple sequence alignment algorithm which uses a "distance-based" approach to aligning homologous protein, RNA or DNA sequences. Much as distance-based phylogenetic reconstruction methods like Neighbor-Joining build a phylogeny using only pairwise divergence estimates, FSA builds a multiple alignment using only pairwise estimations of homology. This is made possible by the sequence annealing technique for constructing a multiple alignment from pairwise comparisons, developed by Ariel Schwartz in "Posterior Decoding Methods for Optimization and Control of Multiple Alignments."

FSA brings the high accuracies previously available only for small-scale analyses of proteins or RNAs to large-scale problems such as aligning thousands of sequences or megabase-long sequences. FSA introduces several novel methods for constructing better alignments:

FSA uses machine-learning techniques to estimate gap and substitution parameters on the fly for each set of input sequences. This "query-specific learning" alignment method makes FSA very robust: it can produce superior alignments of sets of homologous sequences which are subject to very different evolutionary constraints.
FSA is capable of aligning hundreds or even thousands of sequences using a randomized inference algorithm to reduce the computational cost of multiple alignment. This randomized inference can be over ten times faster than a direct approach with little loss of accuracy.
FSA can quickly align very long sequences using the "anchor annealing" technique for resolving anchors and projecting them with transitive anchoring. It then stitches together the alignment between the anchors using the methods described above.
The included GUI, MAD (Multiple Alignment Display), can display the intermediate alignments produced by FSA, where each character is colored according to the probability that it is correctly aligned (see the picture and movie at the top of the page).

You can see more information on the FAQ.

Address of the bookmark: http://fsa.sourceforge.net/

Ideoplot

Shruti Paniwala — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 09:47:32 -0600

Simple ideogram plotting and annotation in R.

Basic usage:

Rscript Ideoplot.R --heatmap hm.bed --annotate annotations.bed --out ideogram.pdf
-or-
Rscript Ideoplot.R --annotate annotations.bed

Options
  --ideobed, i      A bed file of reference contig lengths/chromosome names
  --heatmap, -h     Fill chromosomes with normalized heatmap
                   (described below)
  --annotate, -a    Add character annotations.
  --out, -o         PDF output name.
  --stripes, -s     Specify a file containing the layout of the
                    annotations (description below)
  --bars, -b        Add track annotations
  --reference, -f   Either hg19, or hg38
  --topdown, r      Flag, when set, flips the orientation (P arms
                    drawn on top).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/mchaisso/Ideoplot

Laj: viewing and manipulating the output from pairwise alignment programs

Abhimanyu Singh — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 08:35:40 -0600

Laj is a tool for viewing and manipulating the output from pairwise alignment programs such as blastz. It can display interactive dotplot, pip, and text representations of the alignments, a diagram showing the locations of exons and repeats, and annotation links to other web sites containing additional information about particular regions.

The program is written in Java in order to provide a graphical user interface that is portable across a variety of computer platforms; indeed its name stands for "Local Alignments with Java". Currently it exists in two forms, a stand-alone application and a web-based applet, with slightly different capabilities.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.bx.psu.edu/~ratan/

Bioinformatics opening at ICGEB NEW DELHI

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 04:16:36 -0600

ICGEB NEW DELHI

Applications are invited for:

Junior Research Fellow, in a DBT funded project, is available in Translational Health Group, ICGEB, New Delhi

Qualifications:

Education: M.Sc. (preferably in Biotechnology, Life Sciences or Zoology, Chemistry, Bioinformatics). Candidates with hands on experience on GC-MS data acquisition and analysis will be given preference. Bioinformatics expertise required.

Fellowship: As per DBT guidelines.

Tenure: The position is purely on temporary basis with an initial tenure of six months and based on satisfactory performance may continue until the completion of the project.

Closing date for applications: 04/03/2017

Please send a "TWO PAGE" CV by email to: th.icgeb@gmail.com on or before the last date.

Research Associate, in a DBT funded project, is available in Translational Health Group, ICGEB, New Delhi

Qualifications:

Education: Ph.D. (in Biology, Biotechnology, Chemistry, Bioinformatics). Candidates with hands on experience on GC-MS data acquisition and analysis will be given preference.

Fellowship: As per DBT guidelines.

Tenure: The position is purely on temporary basis with an initial tenure of six months and based on satisfactory performance may continue until the completion of the project.

Closing date for applications: 04/03/2017

Please send a "TWO PAGE" CV by email to: th.icgeb@gmail.com on or before the last date.

SNPGenie

Jit — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 17:38:02 -0500

SNPGenie is a Perl script for estimating evolutionary parameters, mainly from pooled next-generation sequencing (NGS) single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) variant data. SNP reports (acceptable in a variety of formats) much each correspond to a single population, with variants called relative to a single reference sequence (one sequence in one FASTA file). Just run the main script, snpgenie.pl, in a directory containing the necessary input files, and we take care of the rest! For the earlier version, see Hughes Lab Bioinformatics Resource.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/hugheslab/snpgenie

ChromHMM: Chromatin state discovery and characterization

Abhimanyu Singh — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 04:06:23 -0500

ChromHMM is software for learning and characterizing chromatin states. ChromHMM can integrate multiple chromatin datasets such as ChIP-seq data of various histone modifications to discover de novo the major re-occuring combinatorial and spatial patterns of marks. ChromHMM is based on a multivariate Hidden Markov Model that explicitly models the presence or absence of each chromatin mark. The resulting model can then be used to systematically annotate a genome in one or more cell types. By automatically computing state enrichments for large-scale functional and annotation datasets ChromHMM facilitates the biological characterization of each state. ChromHMM also produces files with genome-wide maps of chromatin state annotations that can be directly visualized in a genome browser.

Address of the bookmark: http://compbio.mit.edu/ChromHMM/

Mapping NGS

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 02 May 2017 07:58:07 -0500

NGS data are just a bunch of sequences, you have no idea which region in the genome each sequences comes from, which gene it represents...
To know that you have to align the sequences to the reference sequence. The reference sequence is in most cases the full genome sequence but sometimes, a library of EST sequences is used.
In either way, aligning your sequence reads to the reference sequence is called mapping.

The most used mappers of DNA-seq data are BWA and Bowtie for DNA-Seq data and Tophat, STAR or HISAT for RNA-Seq data. Mappers differ in which options they can take in, how fast and how accurate they are. Bowtie is faster than BWA, but looses some sensitivity (does not map an equal amount of reads to the correct position in the genome).

Address of the bookmark: http://wiki.bits.vib.be/index.php/Mapping_of_NGS_data

StringTie Transcript assembly and quantification for RNA-Seq

Jit — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 05:21:11 -0500

StringTie is a fast and highly efficient assembler of RNA-Seq alignments into potential transcripts. It uses a novel network flow algorithm as well as an optional de novo assembly step to assemble and quantitate full-length transcripts representing multiple splice variants for each gene locus. Its input can include not only alignments of short reads that can also be used by other transcript assemblers, but also alignments of longer sequences that have been assembled from those reads. In order to identify differentially expressed genes between experiments, StringTie's output can be processed by specialized software like Ballgown, Cuffdiff or other programs (DESeq2, edgeR, etc.).

Address of the bookmark: https://ccb.jhu.edu/software/stringtie/

Ten International Scholarships for Indian Biotechnology and Bioinformatics Students

Priya Singh — Wed, 10 May 2017 04:51:02 -0500

Wherever you go around the world, Indian students are in demand. With countries such as Canada and Australia providing huge incentives to Indian students to lure them to their shores, there are many institutions around the world that offer scholarships exclusively to Indian students. Historically these scholarships tend to be aimed towards Masters and PhD programmes however on the rise are scholarships for undergraduate students. Student World Online takes a look at ten international scholarships for Indian undergraduate students abroad.

1. TATA SCHOLARSHIP - Cornell University, New York State, USA
Tata, the Indian multinational conglomerate company, have a foundation known as the Tata Education & Development Trust which has endowed a multi million dollar sum to Cornell University to provide undergraduate scholarships to 20 Indian students every year. In another example of supporting American universities, the Tata group also pledged US$50 million to Harvard University in recent years, whose executive management programme Ratan Tata attended in the 1970s. Read more...

2. BRADMAN FOUNDATION SCHOLARSHIP - University of Wollongong, Australia.
Named after Australia's cricket legend Donald Bradman, the UOW Bradman Foundation Scholarship was launched in 2012, with the help of Adam Gilchrist no less, to offer one successful Indian student each year a 50% reduction in tuition fees. Read more...

3. HUAWEI MAITREE SCHOLARSHIPS - Various Universities, China
Along with Tata, Huawei are the other huge corporation to be featured. China's massive telecoms equipment vendor are involved in these scholarships offered to Indian students studying in China. In 2013 there are 10 generous scholarships available which provide full tuition fees and living expenses. The courses on which the scholarships are offered include Science and Technology courses, Social Sciences and Culture and Development courses. Read more...

4. DR. MANMOHAN SINGH SCHOLARSHIPS - Cambridge University, England, UK
These scholarships have been designed to help budding Indian minds follow in the footsteps of Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh by studying at the prestigious Cambridge University. The scholarships can be applied to any undergarduate course (with the two exceptions of medicine and veterinary science) and cover everything, i.e. tuition and college fees, living expenses and an additional grant to go towards travel expenses. Read more...

5. OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE SOCIETY OF INDIA - Oxford & Cambridge Universities, England, UK
As the name might suggest, these are scholarships available for students wishing to study at Oxford or Cambridge (cleverly known together as Oxbridge). It is only available for applicants who are completing or have completed a degree at an Indian university, however these scholarships are for both undergraduate and graduate students. Read more...

6. EDINBURGH NAPIER UNIVERSITY - Scotland, UK
This one applies to all countries in the Indian subcontinent and is for both undergraduate and graduate courses. Edinburgh Napier University offers a merit based discount of £2,000 Pounds. Read more...

7. SHEFFIELD UNIVERSITY - Sheffield, UK
Provides merit-based scholarships for undergraduate and graduate programmes across all subjects. Read more...

8. INDIA 4EU II - Several Universities across Europe
Pioneered by the European Union and involving partner universities in France, Finland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, the India 4EU II initiative is aimed at encouraging Indian students to study, work and live in Europe. The initiative is well funded and allows the successful students tuition fees, expenses for living and travel costs as well as insurance during their time at one of the partner universities. Read more...

9. TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN - Ireland
Valid for undergraduate courses in the faculties of Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Science, Computer Science or Engineering, the Trinity College Dublin offers Indian students scholarships to the tune of €9,000 per annum over a year degree course. Read more...

10. UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN - Ireland
Another of Ireland and Dublin's finest, the UCD awards one Global Excellence Undergraduate Scholarship which provides the worthy student a substantial 50% towards their tuition fees and is valid for all courses save medicine, radiography and veterinary medicine. UCD also offers a Global Undergraduate Scholarship scheme for undergrads accepted on science, social sciences, arts and business courses. This is all thanks to a €250,000 fund that will allow for 57 Indian students to benefit from scholarships at UCD. Read more...