Scientists face a big challenge with the human genome. They can read its letters, but understanding their roles is much harder. Only about 2 percent of the genome codes for proteins. The rest acts like a huge control panel, deciding when and where genes turn on. With about 9 billion possible single-letter changes, testing them all in a lab just isn’t possible.

So, Google DeepMind asked a new question: what if we could predict what those changes might do?

This question led to the AlphaGenome Atlas (https://deepmind.google.com/science/alphagenome/atlas?), a detailed map of nearly every possible single-letter change in the human genome. Instead of checking each change one by one, researchers can use the Atlas to spot the ones most likely to matter. The AlphaGenome Variant Impact (AVI) score works like a trail marker, pointing scientists toward the changes worth a closer look.

This is where the Atlas gets especially useful. Much of the genome lies outside the protein-coding regions, where DNA acts as a switch or controller for genes. AlphaGenome lets researchers explore these areas and see how small changes could affect gene activity.

An atlas isn't the destination; it's a guide.

The AlphaGenome Atlas doesn’t replace experiments or solve every mystery. Instead, it helps scientists decide where to begin. From billions of possibilities, it turns the vast genetic landscape into something researchers can start to explore.

There are nine billion possibilities, a vast map, and maybe among them therWith nine billion possibilities and a huge map to explore, there may be clues hidden here to some of medicine’s toughest mysteries.

More at https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/DeepMind.com/Blog/alphagenome-atlas-a-predictive-map-of-every-possible-dna-letter-change-in-the-human-genome/alphagenome-atlas.pdf

This is where KiNext comes into the picture. Introduced in a 2024 study published in BMC Bioinformatics, KiNext is a computational workflow designed to identify and classify protein kinases from predicted protein sequences. Instead of relying on a single search method, it brings together several approaches, including Hidden Markov Models, sequence alignment, phylogenetic analysis, and structural comparison.

The search begins with a simple question: does a protein contain the characteristics of a kinase? Protein kinases can change considerably during evolution, but important regions of their sequences often retain recognizable patterns. KiNext uses Hidden Markov Models, or HMMs, to detect these patterns. An HMM does not require a protein to be an exact match to a known kinase. Instead, it looks for a statistical sequence signature associated with kinase proteins, making it possible to detect more distant candidates.

Once potential kinases are identified, KiNext takes the analysis further. It distinguishes conventional eukaryotic protein kinases from atypical protein kinases and then attempts to classify them into different kinase groups and families. This distinction is important because simply identifying a protein as a kinase does not tell the complete story. Different kinase families can have very different evolutionary histories and biological functions.

The next stage brings evolution into the picture. KiNext can align kinase sequences and construct phylogenetic trees, allowing researchers to examine how newly identified proteins are related to previously characterized kinases. When sequence evidence alone is difficult to interpret, structural information can provide another clue. The workflow can incorporate AlphaFold-predicted structures and Foldseek-based structural comparisons to investigate whether an unusual protein resembles known kinase structures.

The researchers tested KiNext using two very different organisms: the Pacific oyster, Crassostrea gigas, and the green alga Ostreococcus tauri. In C. gigas, KiNext recovered previously reported kinases while identifying additional candidates. Structural analysis provided further evidence for many of the newly detected proteins. In O. tauri, the workflow similarly recovered most previously reported kinases and identified additional candidates while refining some of their classifications.

What makes KiNext particularly interesting is not just its ability to find kinases, but how the entire analysis is organized. The workflow uses Nextflow, allowing the different computational steps to be connected into a reproducible pipeline. Containers can also help manage software dependencies, making it easier to run the workflow across different computing environments.

This reproducibility becomes increasingly important as the number of available genomes continues to grow. A researcher studying one organism may be able to perform an analysis manually, but repeating the same process across hundreds or thousands of genomes quickly becomes impractical. A standardized workflow provides a way to perform the analysis consistently while keeping track of how the results were generated.

At its core, KiNext demonstrates a broader change taking place in modern genomics. Sequencing a genome provides an enormous amount of information, but the real scientific challenge begins afterward: understanding what all those sequences mean. Protein kinases are only one part of this larger puzzle, yet they are particularly important because they act as molecular switches throughout the cell.

By combining sequence profiles, evolutionary analysis, and structural evidence within a reproducible computational framework, KiNext provides researchers with a systematic way to uncover these molecular switches. Its real value lies not only in finding more kinases, but in making the process scalable, repeatable, and easier to apply to new genomes.

As genome sequencing continues to expand across the tree of life, tools such as KiNext can help turn enormous collections of protein sequences into meaningful biological stories—one kinase at a time.

Read more about it @

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12859-024-05953-w

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/CSB5/INC-Seq

Reads are simulated from both strands of a provided or randomly generated reference sequence.

Address of the bookmark: https://bitbucket.org/genomeinformatics/simlord/

sudo apt-get install build-essential libtool automake zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev pkg-config

On MacOS, the Apple Developer tools and Fink (or MacPorts or Brew) must be installed, then:

sudo fink install bzip2-dev pkgconfig

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/neufeld/pandaseq

~$ ./sviper -s short-reads.bam -l long-reads.bam -r ref.fa -c variants.vcf -o polished_variants

This will output a polished_variants.vcf file, that contains all the refined variants.

Sometimes it is helpful to look at the polished sequence, e.g. with the IGV browser. In that case you want SViper to output the polished and aligned sequences in a bam file via the option --output-polished-bam:

~$ ./sviper -s short-reads.bam -l long-reads.bam -r ref.fa -c variants.vcf -o polished_variants --output-polished-bam

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/smehringer/SViper

Here is an illustration of this pipeline:

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/BGI-Qingdao/SLR-superscaffolder

mixtureS that can de novo identify bacterial strains from shotgun reads of a clonal or metagenomic sample, without prior knowledge about the strains and their variations. Tested on 243 simulated datasets and 195 experimental datasets, mixtureS reliably identified the strains, their numbers and their abundance. Compared with three tools, mixtureS showed better performance in almost all simulated datasets and the vast majority of experimental datasets.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~xiaoman/mixtureS/

1. Co-assembly procedure with read mapping for estimation of the abundances of genes in each metagenome
2. Co-assembly of a large number of metagenomes via merging of individual metagenomes
3. Includes binning and bin checking, for retrieving individual genomes
4. The results are stored in a database, where they can be easily exported and shared, and can be inspected anywhere using a web interface.
5. Internal checks for the assembly and binning steps inform about the consistency of contigs and bins, allowing to spot potential chimeras.
6. Metatranscriptomic support via mapping of cDNA reads against reference metagenomes

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/jtamames/SqueezeMeta

More at http://www.bioinf.uni-leipzig.de/Software/segemehl/

Manual http://www.bioinf.uni-leipzig.de/Software/segemehl/segemehl_manual_0_1_7.pdf

Address of the bookmark: http://hoffmann.bioinf.uni-leipzig.de/LIFE/segemehl.html