BOL: Related items

GeneMates: an R package for Detecting Horizontal Gene Co-transfer between Bacteria Using Gene-gene Associations Controlled for Population Structure

Rahul Nayak — Sat, 07 Mar 2020 05:52:20 -0600

GeneMates is an R package implementing a network approach to identify horizontal gene co-transfer (HGcoT) between bacteria using whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data. It is particularly useful for investigating intra-species HGcoT, where presence-absence status of acquired genes is usually confounded by bacterial population structure due to clonal reproduction.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.29.970970v1

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/wanyuac/GeneMates

G-NEST: The Gene NEighborhood Scoring Tool

Neel — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 20:09:18 -0500

The Gene NEighborhood Scoring Tool (G-NEST) combines genomic location, gene expression, and evolutionary sequence conservation data to score putative gene neighborhoods across all window sizes. Primary author of final code = William F. Martin. Example data files are in the separate repository.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/dglemay/G-NEST

NVIDIA and Arc Institute Unveil Evo 2: A Breakthrough AI for DNA Design

BioStar — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:39:47 -0600

NVIDIA and the Arc Institute have introduced Evo 2, a groundbreaking AI model designed to understand, predict, and generate DNA sequences. This marks a major advancement in computational biology, offering scientists an unprecedented tool to decode the genetic blueprint of life and even design entirely new biological systems.

The Power of Evo 2: AI Meets DNA

Evo 2 is the largest AI model for biology ever created, trained on an astonishing 9.3 trillion DNA "letters" (nucleotides) carefully selected from genomes spanning the entire tree of life. This massive dataset ensures that Evo 2 can recognize patterns and relationships in genetic sequences at an unparalleled scale.

For the first time, scientists can design DNA with AI, moving beyond simple sequence analysis to active DNA generation. Evo 2 enables researchers to predict, modify, and even create entire genetic sequences, opening new possibilities in medicine, agriculture, and synthetic biology.

Decoding the Dark Genome

One of the biggest challenges in genetics is understanding the non-coding regions of DNA—vast stretches of the genome that do not code for proteins but play crucial roles in regulating gene expression. These regions control when and how genes are activated, influencing everything from development to disease.

Evo 2 is designed to decode these non-coding elements, helping researchers uncover their functions and use this knowledge to develop gene-based therapies, synthetic life forms, and precision agriculture solutions.

From Reading DNA to Writing It

To put Evo 2’s impact into perspective:

Previous AI models could "read" DNA like a book, analyzing genetic sequences and identifying patterns.
Evo 2 can "write" entirely new DNA, designing functional genes, chromosomes, and even full genomes from scratch.

This means scientists can now engineer biological systems with AI, designing new proteins, metabolic pathways, and genetic circuits to address real-world challenges.

A Step Toward Generative Biology

The Arc Institute describes Evo 2 as a major step toward "generative biology"—a revolutionary approach where AI is used to create novel biological structures rather than just analyzing existing ones. This could lead to breakthroughs such as:

New medicines: AI-generated enzymes and proteins tailored for targeted therapies.
Disease-resistant crops: Genetically optimized plants for higher yield and climate resilience.
Synthetic organisms: Custom-designed microbes for bioremediation, biofuel production, and industrial applications.

An Open-Source Revolution

Unlike many proprietary AI models, Evo 2 is open source, making its capabilities accessible to researchers worldwide. This democratization of AI-driven biology means that scientists from different disciplines can collaborate, experiment, and innovate, accelerating discoveries in genetic engineering and synthetic biology.

With Evo 2, the boundaries of what’s possible in DNA design, genetic engineering, and biological innovation are being redrawn. The future of life sciences is no longer just about understanding life’s code—it’s about writing it.

EuGI: a novel resource for studying genomic islands to facilitate horizontal gene transfer detection in eukaryotes

Surabhi Chaudhary — Sat, 12 May 2018 07:26:59 -0500

SWGIS v2.0 along with the EuGI database, which houses GIs identified in 66 different eukaryotic species, and the EuGI web-resource, provide the first comprehensive resource for studying HGT in eukaryotes.

https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-018-4724-8

Address of the bookmark: https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-018-4724-8

EGAD: Ultra-fast functional analysis of gene networks

Rahul Nayak — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 04:10:35 -0600

With the EGAD (Extending ‘Guilt-by-Association’ by Degree) package, we present a series of highly efficient tools to calculate functional properties in networks based on the guilt-by-association principle. These allow rapid controlled comparisons and analyses. Two of the core features are: a function prediction algorithm which is fully vectorized (neighbor_voting), allowing network characterization across even thousands of functional groups to be accomplished in minutes in cross-validation and an analytic determination of the optimal prior to guess candidates genes across multiple functional sets (calculate_multifunc, auc_multifunc).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/sarbal/EGAD

gggenes: a ggplot2 extension for drawing gene arrow maps.

BioStar — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 11:43:34 -0500

Install the stable version of gggenes from CRAN:

install.packages("gggenes")

If you want the development version, install it from GitHub:

devtools::install_github("wilkox/gggenes")

More at https://github.com/wilkox/gggenes

Address of the bookmark: http://wilkox.org/gggenes

MetaEuk - sensitive, high-throughput gene discovery and annotation for large-scale eukaryotic metagenomics

Jit — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 19:29:32 -0600

MetaEuk is a modular toolkit designed for large-scale gene discovery and annotation in eukaryotic metagenomic contigs. Metaeuk combines the fast and sensitive homology search capabilities of MMseqs2 with a dynamic programming procedure to recover optimal exons sets. It reduces redundancies in multiple discoveries of the same gene and resolves conflicting gene predictions on the same strand. MetaEuk is GPL-licensed open source software that is implemented in C++ and available for Linux and macOS. The software is designed to run on multiple cores.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/soedinglab/metaeuk

Janet Iwasa: How animations can help scientists test a hypothesis

Sun, 10 Aug 2014 15:26:04 -0500

3D animation can bring scientific hypotheses to life. Molecular biologist (and TED Fellow) Janet Iwasa introduces a new open-source animation software designed just for scientists. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more. Find closed captions and translated subtitles in many languages at http://www.ted.com/translate Follow TED news on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tednews Like TED on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TED Subscribe to our channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/TEDtalksDirector

ETE 3: Reconstruction, Analysis, and Visualization of Phylogenomic Data

Jit — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 06:46:15 -0600

ETE v3, featuring numerous improvements in the underlying library of methods, and providing a novel set of standalone tools to perform common tasks in comparative genomics and phylogenetics.

The new features include

(i) building gene-based and supermatrix-based phylogenies using a single command,

(ii) testing and visualizing evolutionary models,

(iii) calculating distances between trees of different size or including duplications, and

(iv) providing seamless integration with the NCBI taxonomy database.

ETE is freely available at http://etetoolkit.org

Address of the bookmark: http://etetoolkit.org

InfoGenomeR: Integrative reconstruction of cancer genome karyotypes

Jit — Wed, 05 May 2021 01:02:18 -0500

InfoGenomeR is the Integrative Framework for Genome Reconstruction that uses a breakpoint graph to model the connectivity among genomic segments at the genome-wide scale. InfoGenomeR integrates cancer purity and ploidy, total CNAs, allele-specific CNAs, and haplotype information to identify the optimal breakpoint graph representing cancer genomes.

More at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22671-6

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/dmcblab/InfoGenomeR