BOL: Related items

Five points for bioinformatics software/tools

Jitendra Narayan — Mon, 05 Aug 2013 04:12:32 -0500

In the bioinformatics sector we mostly spend time on computational analysis of huge amounts of data and try to make sense of it, biologically. But, most of the newbie bioinformaticians are faced with dilemma when they receive biological sequence data for the first time. They mostly found confusing over open source, user friendly GUI, and commercial bioinformatics software. Don’t be surprise this is true and also not an easy task to decide, because analytical step is the most crucial part and believe to be the biggest bottleneck in publishing paper in high impact journals. Through this blog I would like to address the pros and cons of both kind of software/tools and try to assist (Hmmm not really, It looks convince) you to make decision on your software selections.

The most common newbie questions are:

Should I try to use these free open source programs? Why are we not trying GUI software for computational analysis? Should I use commercial bioinformatics programs/software?”

1. Let’s be open

We generally think free and cheap are useless. But this concept is not applicable when we discuss open source software. Mostly, the bioinformatics software is developed by highly competitive biological programmers who believe in open sharing of knowledge. They come under Open Bioinformatics Foundation or O|B|F which is a non-profit, volunteer run organization focused on supporting open source programming in bioinformatics. The best part about open source tools/software is that they’re free to download the source code and read exactly what the program does. If you are so inclined, you can view all of the parts of the program and see the logical flow of the pipeline. In addition, open source makes an excellent learning tool for any beginning bioinformatician. Moreover, you can modify existing open source programs to deal with cutting-edge problems or to customize your pipeline. Apart from your computational and analysis work, most of the reviewer also prefers the open source based results so that they can validate the results if validation required.

2. Code headache

As a bioinformatician you are supposed to know the basics of programming languages, and if you are not good at it, then please learn it as soon as possible because you are not a bio-analyst but biological programmers. The open source programs usually lack dedicated service and support teams (often because they were the product of an overworked doc/postdoc!) so you are responsible for troubleshooting your own errors most of the time. We commonly receive the HELP email to support and assist to setup the pipeline; you can also find this kind of request on any QA forum. I personally believe this coding horror brings the biggest downside of open-source programs; where you need some programming skills in order to implement the program in your pipeline. But, if you are not able to fix the pipeline and modify the open source code according to your requirements them you should re-think on your bioinformatician name tag!!!

3. Dive into the codes

Some of the biologist turn bioinformatician says “if you can do the same thing with commercial software then why to get migraine with weird codes”, well this statement looks to me that guys are keen to learn swimming but still don’t like to get wet. If you are still using paid software and doing your work by customer support and clicking some of the well-designed GUI button then perhaps you are not interested in learning and trying new and challenging bioinformatics works. You are missing the basic flavour of bioinformatics. Let’s dive into the coding world, I am sure your will enjoy it. I recommend your to swim freely in code’s sea, and enjoy the journey; do not merely watch it from the outside.

4. Paid does not mean better

The bioinformatics company which are specializes in bioinformatics solutions develop well designed/packed, user friendly software by using a large number of specialised scientist, programmers and support staff. They also provide good services to accomplice your biological analysis work. This means that if you hit a ‘snag’ with your data, help is likely only a phone call away! These companies price their products competitively against the cost of a dedicated bioinformatician. You may be able to afford the program, but not the additional staff! Additionally, most of the functionality that you need in your analysis is already coded into the program. Need to plot a graph? Just click this button right here. It is that easy. But, as a bioinformatician this is not generally well encouraged approach in biological analysis work, because the software is not available to everyone and your data can’t be validated. Moreover, there is very less chances that anyone will repeat your work or love to do similar kind of research (because not all the labs in the world are rich like yours).

5. Take a caution

In biological analysis work, in which you deal GB/TB of data are having maximum chances of getting errors, so please be careful and always cross check your data before coming to any conclusion. Even an error in two line code can alter your entire analysis and display weird results. Some of the scientist blindly believes on commercial software, which is entirely wrong. Using proprietary tools does not absolve you of the need to actually read and research the type of analysis that you are doing. This is particularly true in the case of genome assembly and annotation.

At the end, I would like to tell only one think that open source solutions allows you to do more cutting edge analysis than the commercial tools. So let’s go for it.

Disclaimer:

This is my personal view. I have nothing to do with any company or open source community. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my current/past employers. I do reserve the right to remove comments left by spammers or off-topic comments.

The Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics (Janet Kelso)

Wed, 09 Oct 2013 12:57:45 -0500

The focus of this group is to use computational approaches to gain an insight into genome evolution in primates.

PNAS papers:
http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=Janet+Kelso&sortspec=date&submit=Submit

Jobs:
http://www.eva.mpg.de/genetics/bioinformatics/jobs.html

Contact:
Kelso Group
Department of Evolutionary Genetics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
04103 Leipzig
Germany
Email: kelso@eva.mpg.de

Personalised Medicine - Animation

Tue, 27 Aug 2013 10:07:24 -0500

Two animated case scenarios set now and in the future. These highlight potential differences in the way patients are treated now, and how they might be treated as healthcare becomes more tailored.

Bioinformatics infrastructure speed up Indian agriculture

Rahul Agarwal — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 12:44:44 -0600

"Realizing the paradigm shift it can bring about, the government is focusing on increased bioinformatics intervention in agri-sciences. Currently under process, the national grid on bioinformatics is expected make much better sense out of huge genomic" -

http://www.biospectrumindia.com/biospecindia/features/203849/supercomputing-indian-agriculture-fast-track-mode/page/1

33rd Annual Convention of Indian Association for Cancer Research from 13th to 15th February 2014

Tue, 27 Aug 2013 10:37:08 -0500

RGCB is organizing the 33rd Annual Convention of Indian Association for Cancer Research from 13th to 15th February 2014 with the theme "Discovery, Innovation and Translation in Cancer Research"

Kindly log on to conference website http://rgcb.res.in/IACR2014 for further details and timely updates and registration. We shall truly appreciate if the same be circulated among your friends, scholars and students encouraging them to participate in the meet.

http://210.212.237.38/iacrconference/

7th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICoB)

Rahul Agarwal — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 16:19:36 -0500

In recent years, computational biology and medical informatics have seen significant advances driven by computational techniques in bioinformatics making bioinformatics and computational biology among the most vibrant research areas. The 7th international conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICoB-2015) provides an excellent venue for researchers and practitioners in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology to present and publish their research results and techniques. The BICoB conference seeks original and high quality papers in the fields of bioinformatics, computational biology, systems biology, medical informatics and the related disciplines. We also encourage work in progress and research results in the emerging and evolutionary computational areas. Computational techniques have already enabled unprecedented advances in modern biology and medicine. Work in the computational methods related to, or with application in, bioinformatics is also encouraged including: data mining, text mining, machine learning, modeling and simulation, pattern recognition, data visualization, biostatistics, .etc. The topics of interest include (and are not limited to):
Genome analysis: Genome assembly, genome annotation, gene finding, alternative splicing, EST analysis and comparative genomics.
Sequence analysis: Multiple sequence alignment, sequence search and clustering, function prediction, motif discovery, functional site recognition in protein, RNA and DNA sequences.
Phylogenetics: Phylogeny estimation, models of evolution, comparative biological methods, population genetics.
Structural Bioinformatics: Structure matching, prediction, analysis and comparison; methods and tools for docking; protein design
Analysis of high-throughput biological data: Microarrays (nucleic acid, protein, array CGH, genome tiling, and other arrays), EST, SAGE, MPSS, proteomics, mass spectrometry.
Genetics and population analysis: Linkage analysis, association analysis, population simulation, haplotyping, marker discovery, genotype calling.
Systems biology: Systems approaches to molecular biology, multiscale modeling, pathways,gene networks.
Computational Proteomics: Filtering and indexing sequence databases, Peptide quantification and identification, Genome annotations via mass spectrometry, Identification of post-translational modifications, Structural genomics via mass spectrometry, Protein-protein interactions, Computational approaches to analysis of large scale Mass spectrometry data, Exploration and visualization of proteomic data, Data models and integration for proteomics and genomics, Querying and retrieval of proteomics and genomics data etc.

Authors of selected high quality papers in BICoB-2015 will be invited to submit extended version of their papers for possible publication in bioinformatics journals (Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology JBCB).

Deadlines:

Paper Submission Deadline October 24, 2014
Notification of Acceptance December 15, 2014
Camera-Ready Manuscript January 16, 2015

Address of the bookmark: http://www.cs.umb.edu/bicob/

IMTECH Lab

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 09:41:04 -0500

Computer Aided Protein Structure Prediction; Identification of Vaccine
Candidates (T-Epitope prediction); Analysis of Nucleotide/Protein Sequences; Development of Web Server/

Software; Creation of Public Domain Resources in Biology
Present Status::

Developing prediction methods for gene, beta-turn, secondary structure and MHC-binding sites.
Area of Interest ::

Comparison of force field simulations. Analysis of DNA-protein interactions using molecular mechanics methods.Drug Target Identification using in silico biology.

More @ http://www.imtech.res.in/bic/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65

PIs: http://www.imtech.res.in/bic/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=69

Marie Curie PhD position available immediately

Fri, 24 Apr 2015 09:23:57 -0500

Sub-project 10: Development of bioinformatic tools for the analysis of MACE data
Host Organizations GenXPRO (Germany)
Objectives : The ESR will be in charge of standardising pipelines that will be used for RNA-seq and MACE analyses by all the participants. He will be involved in performing next generation sequencing to characterise environmental adaptation. A single pipeline to analyse listerial transcriptomic and proteomic data will be developed and implemented by each partner for the sake of uniformity of all the data produced within List_MAPS. The ESR will be involved in the interpretation of transcriptomic and proteomic data for which pathway analyses and good data visualization will be required. A cytoscape app will be developed as visualization tool.
Expected Results: MACE analysis pipeline. Database. Transcriptome comparisons in selected habitats. Data visualization tool.
Duration (months) 24
Contact Dr. Bjorn ROTTER: rotter@genxpro.de

11. Development of innovative tools for rapid phenotypic characterisation of intraspecific diversity of Listeria monocytogenes (Joint supervision PhD)
Host Organizations BioFilm Control (France) and GenXPRO (Germany)
Objectives
1. The ESR will develop an assay to test biofilm phenotype in a large array of food processing-related environmental conditions (salt, acides, disinfectants, preservatives) in BFC facilities. He will be in charge of the development and validation of an in silico virulence assay. This assay will target specific mRNAs in order to estimate the virulence potential of strains of L. monocytogenes. Transcript targets will be selected and tested by qPCR in GXP premises. In the process of validation, virulence results of several strains collected in a humanised mouse model will be compared with the in silico analysis. Once these innovative tools will be validated, intraspecific phenotypic diversity (biofilm and virulence) will be assessed on a collection of environmental and clinical isolates of L. monocytogenes. Genotypic diversity will be assessed under the supervision of GPX.
Expected Results : Adaptation of the BioFilm Ring test R to test food processing environmental conditions. Development of an innovative in silico virulence assay surrogate to animal models. Diversity results will inform stakeholders on the level of health hazard according to the strain. This in turn will help secure food safety all along the shelf life of foodstuff.
Duration (months) 36
Contact : Dr. Thierry BERNARDI: thbe@biofilmcontrol.com
Dr. Bjorn ROTTER: rotter@genxpro.de
ELIGIBLE CRITERIA of Marie Sklokowska Curie actions:
Researchers may be of any nationality
Candidates shall at the time of recruitment by the host organization, be in the first four years (full-time equivalent research experience) of their research careers. Full-time equivalent research experience is measured from the date when a researcher obtained the degree which would formally entitle him or her to embark on a doctorate, either in the co

What is the objective of BINC examination?

Neel — Mon, 12 Aug 2013 09:36:53 -0500

I personally did not understand the objective behind BINC examination. Is government only try to show off that they are doing something to promote Indian bioinformatics sector?

Moreover, It looks like BINC indirectly putting an extra burden to bioinformatician, mentally and financially.

Candidates required in Bioinformatics and Genomics UK ONLY

Fri, 03 Jul 2015 08:22:41 -0500

I have various permanent positions available based in London, Manchester, Herftfordshire, Oxford and Belfast, as well as other areas throughout the UK.

If you are looking for a new opportunity and have skills within any sector of Bioinformatics with an IT skill then I would love to hear from you. I have various exciting opportunities from programmers to researchers to scientists.

Call me now on 01772 278050 or email me your cv and requirements and I will call you back dareen.evans@itworkshealth.co.uk