BOL: Related items

ACANA: An accurate and consistent alignment tool for DNA sequences

Jit — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 09:45:29 -0600

ACANA is an accurate and consistent alignment tool for DNA sequences. ACANA is specifically designed for aligning sequences that share only some moderately conserved regions and/or have a high frequency of long insertions or deletions. It attempts to combine the best of local and global alignments algorithms in searching for evolutionarily related regions of sequences in order to achieve the best alignment. ACANA is also robust to the small changes of alignment parameters, particularly the gap extension score. As an accurate alignment tool, ACANA is particularly useful in comparative sequence analysis for identifying conserved functional regulatory elements.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/resources/software/biostatistics/acana/index.cfm

Bienko and Crosetto Labs

Fri, 12 May 2017 07:42:15 -0500

We are two groups of scientists doing frontier research in quantitative biology and biomedicine. The Bienko group is interested in exploring the fundamental design principles controlling how DNA is packed in the eukaryotic nucleus and its relation to gene expression regulation. The Crosetto group engineers new molecular methods for single-cell and spatially resolved omic measurements of DNA, RNA, and proteins, with a strong focus on tumor heterogeneity. By sharing ideas and resources, we work synergistically towards a more quantitative understanding of life’s processes in healthy and diseased conditions.

https://bienkocrosettolabs.org/

Cancer's origins revealed

Jitendra Narayan — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 13:06:56 -0500

Researchers have provided the first comprehensive compendium of mutational processes that drive tumour development. Together, these mutational processes explain most mutations found in 30 of the most common cancer types. This new understanding of cancer development could help to treat and prevent a wide-range of cancers.

More at >> http://www.sanger.ac.uk/about/press/2013/130814.html

Bioinformatics Scientist, Production Bioinformatics @ South San Francisco, CA

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 08:45:24 -0500

wist is looking for a Bioinformatics Scientist to join our Production Bioinformatics Team. You will work alongside research scientists, software engineers and data scientists to further deliver on our mission to expand access to best-in-class synthetic biology and next-generation sequencing applications. You will be developing and engineering tools to better evaluate and build hardened, production quality pipelines, optimize data quality, and automate lab and bioinformatics processes. Our ideal candidate is an organized problem solver with a background in developing and building novel production-quality bioinformatics tools and packages. Equally excellent communication skills and a proven ability to work independently are required.

More at https://boards.greenhouse.io/twistbioscience/jobs/3135495?gh_src=9ecc0b941us

Anders Krogh Lab

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 19:07:40 -0500

In a lot of my work in bioinformatics, I have been using hidden Markov models (HMMs). As a postdoc with David Haussler at UCSC we developed the so-called profile HMMs (refs). Since then I have applied HMMs to membrane proteins (refs) and gene identification (refs) and have worked on methods for such things as discriminative estimation of HMMs (refs) and alternative decoding algorithms etc. (refs).

Now my main interests are in gene regulation, where we work on promoter analysis; non-coding RNA, where miRNAs and structure prediction are the main areas; and protein structure, where the group is working on methods for structure prediction from sequence. To read more about these topics, please see the research pages.

Lab page @ http://wiki.binf.ku.dk/User:Krogh

SOWDHAMINI Lab

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 09:19:12 -0500

Genome sequencing projects have enormous potential for benefiting human endeavors. However, just as acquiring a language's vocabulary does not enable one to speak it, databases that list the amino acid composition of proteins do not directly tell us much about these proteins' higher-level structure and function. The most productive way to indirectly exploit these databases has been to start with the small number of proteins that are fully-characterised and to assume that other "similar" proteins will have a related structure and function. Proteins with very similar amino acid sequence are "no-brainers", but the real test, which our group largely focuses on, is to detect the "essential" similarity in proteins whose non-critical sections have experienced random rearrangements during evolution. In such cases functionally similar proteins may have less than 25% sequence overlap.

More @ http://www.ncbs.res.in/sowdhamini/groups_sowdhamini.htm

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

dcGOR

Martin Jones — Sat, 08 Nov 2014 14:54:28 -0600

An R package for analysing ontologies and protein domain annotations has been published in PLoS Computational Biology (http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003929). The package is distributed as part of CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org/package=dcGOR), and also at GitHub for version control.

The dedicated website is available in http://supfam.org/dcGOR, from which several demos are also provided:

1. Analysing SCOP domains: http://supfam.org/dcGOR/demo-Fang.html

2. Analysing Pfam domains: http://supfam.org/dcGOR/demo-Basu.html

3. Analysing InterPro domains: http://supfam.org/dcGOR/demo-Customisation.html

MetaPred2CS

Manisha Mishra — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 05:15:07 -0600

MetaPred2CS Web server is a meta-predictor based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) that combines 6 individual sequence based protein-protein interaction prediction methods to predict prokaryotic two-component system protein-protein interactions (PPIs). The methods implemented in MetaPred2CS are 2 co-evolutionary methods: in-silico two hybrid (i2h) and mirror tree (MT) methods and 4 genomics context based methods: phylogenetic profiling (PP), gene fusion (GF), gene neighbourhood (GN) and and gene operon methods (GO).

http://metapred2cs.ibers.aber.ac.uk/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/martinjvickers/MetaPred2CS

Find predicted CRISPR sites using Ensembl

Jit — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 03:15:59 -0500

Did you know that you can now use Ensembl to help design your CRISPR experiments? Just turn on the brand new track that shows you the CRISPR sites that have been predicted by the WGE group (http://www.sanger.ac.uk/science/tools/wge)

Find out more on our blog:
http://www.ensembl.info/…/find-predicted-crispr-sites-usin…/