BOL: Related items

Biology, Computers Collide in High-Demand Field of Bioinformatics

Mon, 25 Aug 2014 00:56:10 -0500

Dr. Shivas Amin calls bioinformatics a "collision of biology and computers." Students learn how to use computers and skills in math and biology to analyze genome and proteome projects to prepare for high-demand jobs in the life sciences. Learn more about Amin and hear from student Medina Baitemirova and alumnus Lukas Simon about the fast-growing field of bioinformatics.

GEnView: A phylogeny based comparative genomics software to analyze the genetic environment of genes

Abhi — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 01:49:03 -0600

A phylogeny based comparative genomics software to analyze the genetic environment of genes. The user can select one or several taxa and provide one or several reference protein(s). Genomes and plasmids (based on user choice) will be downloaded from the NCBI Assembly/NR database and searched for the respective gene. Alternatively, custom genomes can be provided. User selected stretches (20kbp by default) of the genes genetic environment are extracted, annotated and aligned between all genomes. The sequences are then visualized, enabling comparison of synteny and gene content.

More at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34951622/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/EbmeyerSt/GEnView

A comprehensive atlas of human gene activity released !!!

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 02 Sep 2014 14:20:24 -0500

A large international consortium of researchers has produced the first comprehensive, detailed map of the way genes work across the major cells and tissues of the human body. The findings describe the complex networks that govern gene activity, and the new information could play a crucial role in identifying the genes involved with disease.

We are able to pinpoint the regions of the genome that can be active in a disease and in normal activity, whether it’s in a brain cell, the skin, in blood stem cells or in hair follicles. This is a major advance that will greatly increase our ability to understand the causes of disease across the body.

The research is outlined in a series of papers published March 27, 2014, two in the journal Nature and 16 in other scholarly journals. The work is the result of years of concerted effort among 250 experts from more than 20 countries as part of FANTOM 5 (Functional Annotation of the Mammalian Genome). The FANTOM project, led by the Japanese institution RIKEN, is aimed at building a complete library of human genes.

Researchers studied human and mouse cells using a new technology called Cap Analysis of Gene Expression (CAGE), developed at RIKEN, to discover how 95% of all human genes are switched on and off. These “switches” — called “promoters” and “enhancers” — are the regions of DNA that manage gene activity. The researchers mapped the activity of 180,000 promoters and 44,000 enhancers across a wide range of human cell types and tissues and, in most cases, found they were linked with specific cell types.

Referene : www.kurzweilai.net/first-comprehensive-atlas-of-human-gene-activity-released

Unlocking Evolutionary Secrets: A Dive into Comparative Genomics Methods

LEGE — Tue, 20 May 2025 00:25:09 -0500

Comparative genomics is the art and science of comparing genomes—across species, within species, or even among individuals—to unravel evolutionary relationships, functional elements, and genetic adaptations. As sequencing technologies have advanced and genome databases have expanded, comparative genomics has become a cornerstone of modern biology, shedding light on everything from antibiotic resistance in bacteria to human disease genetics.

In this post, we’ll explore the core methods used in comparative genomics, the questions they help answer, and how they’re shaping our understanding of life.

1. Whole-Genome Alignment
Whole-genome alignment involves mapping the entire genome of one species to another. Tools like MUMmer, MAUVE, and LASTZ perform large-scale sequence alignments to detect conserved regions, rearrangements, insertions, and deletions.

Use Case:
Comparing human and chimpanzee genomes to identify evolutionary conserved sequences (ECS) and regions of divergence.

Key Challenges:
Handling repetitive sequences and genome rearrangements.

Computational complexity in large genomes.

2. Synteny and Collinearity Analysis
Synteny refers to conserved blocks of gene order across species. Tools like MCScanX, SynMap, or CHITRA (for visualizing synteny interactively) detect these blocks to understand chromosomal evolution.

Use Case:
Studying ancient genome duplications in plants.

Investigating chromosomal rearrangements in cancer genomes.

3. Ortholog and Paralog Detection
Orthologs are genes in different species that evolved from a common ancestor, while paralogs are genes duplicated within a genome. Identifying them is crucial for functional annotation and evolutionary studies.

Popular Tools:
OrthoFinder, Orthologous MAtrix (OMA), InParanoid, and EggNOG.

Use Case:
Functional prediction of uncharacterized genes based on orthologs in model organisms.

Tracing gene family evolution.

4. Phylogenomic Analysis
Phylogenomic methods combine phylogenetics and genomics to infer evolutionary trees based on genome-wide data. These methods can handle dozens to hundreds of genomes, using concatenated alignments or gene trees.

Tools:
RAxML, IQ-TREE, ASTRAL, Phylip, BEAST.

Use Case:
Resolving the evolutionary relationships between microbial species.

Studying speciation events.

5. Pan-Genome Analysis
The pan-genome consists of the core genome (shared by all strains) and the accessory genome (strain-specific genes). This is especially popular in microbial genomics.

Tools:
Roary, Panaroo, BPGA, PGAP.

Use Case:
Understanding virulence factor diversity in E. coli.

Designing broad-spectrum vaccines.

6. Comparative Transcriptomics
Comparing transcriptomes across species or conditions reveals conserved and unique expression patterns. RNA-seq data can be mapped to reference genomes to identify orthologous expression profiles.

Use Case:
Comparing stress response in extremophiles and model species.

Studying conserved regulatory networks.

7. Functional Element Comparison
Beyond genes, comparative genomics also targets non-coding regions—enhancers, promoters, miRNAs. Conservation across species often implies functional importance.

Tools:
PhastCons, GERP, phyloP (based on multiple alignments).

Use Case:
Detecting conserved non-coding elements in vertebrates.

Studying regulatory divergence in human evolution.

8. Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) Detection
In microbes, genes often jump across species boundaries. Comparative genomics can detect HGT by identifying genes that defy the expected phylogenetic pattern.

Tools:
HGTector, DarkHorse, AlienHunter, SIGI-HMM.

Use Case:
Tracing antibiotic resistance genes.

Exploring microbial adaptability in extreme environments.

Final Thoughts
Comparative genomics is a powerful lens to observe the diversity and unity of life. With a broad toolkit—from aligners to orthology pipelines, phylogenetic engines to visualization tools—it allows scientists to ask big questions: How did genomes evolve? What makes species unique? Where do new genes come from?

Whether you're studying extremophiles, building better crops, or exploring human ancestry, comparative genomics offers the methods to connect the dots across the tree of life.

Which of the following programming language is best for a bioinformatics beginner?

Manisha Mishra — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 07:51:16 -0500

I will be doing NGS in the course of my research work and I will like to learn a programming language which is compatible with most bioinformatics tools or software. I basically want to do de-novo assembly, map reads, align reads, and expression analysis. Recommendations welcomed. Which languages would you recommend to a student wishing to enter the world of bioinformatics?

Next generation sequencing(NGS) books

Abhimanyu Singh — Fri, 30 May 2014 04:48:04 -0500

Employing different technologies, the purpose of NGS platform is to decode the identity or modification on the nucleotides. NGS platforms evolve quickly and capture the main stream.

This bookmark is created to provide NGS online books links.

Address of the bookmark: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Sequencing_%28NGS%29/Print_version

Alignment of closely related whole genomes/scaffolds

Rahul Nayak — Fri, 29 Jan 2016 10:37:27 -0600

With the relative ease and low cost of current generation sequencing technologies has led to a dramatic increase in the number of sequenced genomes for species across the tree of life. This increasing volume of data requires tools that can quickly compare multiple whole-genome sequences, millions of base pairs in length, to aid in the study of populations, pan-genomes, and genome evolution.This bookmaks have been created to report new tools for whole genome alignments.

Please report new whole genome alignment tools under comment sections.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~brudno/721.full.pdf

INTERNSHIP @ NIPGR

Sat, 13 Sep 2014 16:02:35 -0500

Applications are invited from suitable candidates for six months ‘Training Fellowship' at National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR).

About National Institute Of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR) http://www.nipgr.res.in/

The National Institute of Plant Genome Research is an autonomous institution supported by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India. It is committed to make the institute a premier Institution for plant genomic research in the country. It was established to contribute in the achievement of such hopes as a part of national effort for meeting the challenges in the midst of fast pace of international genomic research and grasping of opportunities on long-term basis.

About the Internship:

The selected intern(s) will work in the area of in Bioinformatics under the BTISNET program of DBT in the Distributed Information Sub center (DISC) facility at NIPGR, New Delhi, under the supervision of Dr. Gitanjali Yadav, Scientist, NIPGR.

Who can apply:

Students currently pursuing the final year of Masters Degree (or equivalent) in Bioinformatics/Biotechnology with strong interest in Computational Biology and First class/division throughout academic career may apply.

Finishing !!

Jit — Sat, 20 May 2017 15:50:20 -0500

The process of finishing a genome and moving it from a draft stage (the result of sequencing and initial assembly) to a complete genome is typically a time and resource intensive task. The advent of new sequencing technologies has come with its own set of opportunities and pitfalls in the finishing process. While genomes can now be sequenced to high redundancy in a cost-effective manner, the process of assembling the genomes is more challenging and often draft genomes are fragmented into hundreds of contigs. Correspondingly, the task of producing the complete genome can involve months of lab work and thousands of finishing experiments and is usually done in large genome centers.

The work in our lab has focussed on computational approaches to speed-up the finishing process. Specifically, we have explored the use of optical mapping and mate-pair data to augment assemblies and direct finishing experiments. The tools developed in our lab have been used in several finishing projects, producing complete genomes (and near-complete ones) with surprisingly little computational and experimental effort (Nagarajan et al., in submission). The executables (as well as source code) for these tools are freely available here:

Scaffolding using Optical Restriction Mapping
Optical Maps are global, ordered maps of restriction site locations in a genome. This information can be quite useful in scaffolding contigs from a shotgun assembly to guide the finishing process. A set of programs to exploit optical maps for assembly can be found here: SOMA v2.0 (63 MB tar.gz file). This version of SOMA contains several improvements to programs in v1.0 as well as new scripts for working with multiple maps, contig graphs and scaffolds.
Augmenting assemblies with mate-pair data
Mate-pair information can be valuable in augmenting short-read assemblies and reconstructing the genome as larger scaffolds. AMOS-Hybrid is a pipeline written in the AMOS framework (open-source assembly tools) to merge arbitrary mated reads into an existing assembly and merge contigs and create scaffolds where possible. Source code and executables for AMOS-Hybrid are available here: AMOS-Hybrid v1.0 (142 MB tar.gz file).
Assembly and sequence-composition guided finishing
Contigs from a shotgun assembly are typically linked together in a graph structure that can serve to guide finishing and in some case close gaps in-silico. Also, in many cases, sequence composition of contigs can provide clues to fill gaps in scaffolds. A set of scripts to automate some of these tasks can be found here: Finishing Scripts v1.0 (63 MB tar.gz file).

http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/finishing/

Address of the bookmark: http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/finishing/

Java utilities for Next Generation Sequencing by Pierre Lindenbaum

Robert M Willioms — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 17:24:49 -0500

Java utilities for Bioinformatics

https://github.com/lindenb/jvarkit

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/lindenb/jvarkit