Address of the bookmark: http://omega.omicsbio.org/

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!

So far miniasm is in early development stage. It has only been tested on a dozen of PacBio and Oxford Nanopore (ONT) bacterial data sets. Including the mapping step, it takes about 3 minutes to assemble a bacterial genome. Under the default setting, miniasm assembles 9 out of 12 PacBio datasets and 3 out of 4 ONT datasets into a single contig. The 12 PacBio data sets are PacBio E. coli sample, ERS473430, ERS544009, ERS554120, ERS605484, ERS617393, ERS646601, ERS659581, ERS670327, ERS685285, ERS743109 and a deprecated PacBio E. coli data set. ONT data are acquired from the Loman Lab.

For a C. elegans PacBio data set (only 40X are used, not the whole dataset), miniasm finishes the assembly, including reads overlapping, in ~10 minutes with 16 CPUs. The total assembly size is 105Mb; the N50 is 1.94Mb. In comparison, the HGAP3produces a 104Mb assembly with N50 1.61Mb. This dotter plot gives a global view of the miniasm assembly (on the X axis) and the HGAP3 assembly (on Y). They are broadly comparable. Of course, the HGAP3 consensus sequences are much more accurate. In addition, on the whole data set (assembled in ~30 min), the miniasm N50 is reduced to 1.79Mb. Miniasm still needs improvements.

Miniasm confirms that at least for high-coverage bacterial genomes, it is possible to generate long contigs from raw PacBio or ONT reads without error correction. It also shows that minimap can be used as a read overlapper, even though it is probably not as sensitive as the more sophisticated overlapers such as MHAP and DALIGNER. Coupled with long-read error correctors and consensus tools, miniasm may also be useful to produce high-quality assemblies.

Minimap and miniasm are ultrafast tools for (i) mapping and (ii) assembly. Designed for long, noisy reads, they do not have a correction or consensus step, and therefore the resulting assemblies are contiguous (i.e. long) but very noisy (i.e. full of errors)

We start with an all against all comparison:

minimap -Sw5 -L100 -m0 -t8 reads.fq reads.fq | gzip -1 > reads.paf.gz

Then we can assemble

miniasm -f reads.fq reads.paf.gz > reads.gfa

Convert GFA to FASTA:

awk '/^S/{print ">"$2"\n"$3}' reads.gfa | fold > reads.fa

And then count how many contigs:

grep ">" reads.fa | wc -l

# Download sample PacBio from the PBcR website
wget -O- http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/software/PBcR/data/selfSampleData.tar.gz | tar zxf -
ln -s selfSampleData/pacbio_filtered.fastq reads.fq
# Install minimap and miniasm (requiring gcc and zlib)
git clone https://github.com/lh3/minimap && (cd minimap && make)
git clone https://github.com/lh3/miniasm && (cd miniasm && make)
# Overlap
minimap/minimap -Sw5 -L100 -m0 -t8 reads.fq reads.fq | gzip -1 > reads.paf.gz
# Layout
miniasm/miniasm -f reads.fq reads.paf.gz > reads.gfa

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

C Chiang, R M Layer, G G Faust, M R Lindberg, D B Rose, E P Garrison, G T Marth, A R Quinlan, and I M Hall. SpeedSeq: ultra-fast personal genome analysis and interpretation. Nat Meth (2015). doi:10.1038/nmeth.3505.

http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmeth.3505.html

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/hall-lab/speedseq

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

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

https://github.com/ggonnella/rgfa

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

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/

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• In between lines of code: Lex Nederbragt’s blog on biology, sequencing, bioinformatics, …
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• 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.
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