BOL: Related items

The Gene Detectives: How a New Computational Tool Is Helping Us Read the History Written in Our Genes

BioStar — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:23:42 -0500

Imagine opening an ancient family album with no names, dates, or captions. Some photographs are missing, others have been copied, and a few show people who look almost identical. Your challenge is to discover who is related to whom and reconstruct the family story. In evolutionary biology, scientists face a similar mystery when they study genes. Every genome contains clues about its past, but genes can be duplicated, lost, and changed over millions of years, making their history difficult to trace.

A recent study published in PLOS Computational Biology introduces REvolutionH-tl 2.0 (https://pypi.org/project/revolutionhtl/), a computational tool designed to help solve this mystery. The software analyzes protein sequences and identifies evolutionary relationships between genes. It can help researchers detect important events such as gene duplication, gene loss, and speciation, allowing them to reconstruct how genes evolved across different organisms.

What makes the tool especially interesting is its focus on both speed and interpretation. The researchers compared REvolutionH-tl 2.0 with several existing computational tools and reported that it achieved competitive accuracy while requiring less computational time in their tests. The tool also includes visualization features, helping researchers turn complicated genetic data into evolutionary stories that are easier to explore.

Genes are more than simple sequences of DNA; they are records of life’s long history. Each surviving gene carries traces of the changes that shaped it. By bringing together computational analysis and visualization, REvolutionH-tl 2.0 acts like a detective, helping scientists uncover these hidden stories. Ultimately, tools like this can improve our understanding of how genomes evolved and how genes acquired the roles they perform today.

More at https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013017

DarkHorse: a method for genome-wide prediction of horizontal gene transfer

Jit — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 07:58:35 -0500

A new approach to rapid, genome-wide identification and ranking of horizontal transfer candidate proteins is presented. The method is quantitative, reproducible, and computationally undemanding. It can be combined with genomic signature and/or phylogenetic tree-building procedures to improve accuracy and efficiency. The method is also useful for retrospective assessments of horizontal transfer prediction reliability, recognizing orthologous sequences that may have been previously overlooked or unavailable. These features are demonstrated in bacterial, archaeal, and eukaryotic examples.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1852411/

GeNeCK (Gene Network Construction Kit) is a comprehensive online tool kit that integrate various statistical methods to construct gene networks

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 09:39:30 -0600

GeNeCK (Gene Network Construction Kit) is a comprehensive online tool kit that integrate various statistical methods to construct gene networks based on gene expression data and optional hub gene information.

It efficiently constructs gene networks from expression data. It allows the user to use ten different network construction methods (such as partial correlation-, likelihood-, Bayesian- and mutual information-based methods) and integrates the resulting networks from multiple methods. Hub gene information, if available, can be incorporated to enhance performance.

GeNeCK is an efficient and easy-to-use web application for gene regulatory network construction. It can be accessed at http://lce.biohpc.swmed.edu/geneck

Address of the bookmark: http://lce.biohpc.swmed.edu/geneck/

homologizer: Phylogenetic phasing of gene copies into polyploid subgenomes

Abhi — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 19:19:10 -0500

This tutorial describes the usage of homologizer to phase gene copies into polyploid subgenomes. The tutorial is an abbreviated version of a soon-to-be published paper in Methods in Molecular Biology. Please see that paper for many more details and practical considerations for running homologizer analyses. If you use homologizer, please cite the paper in which we first describe the method:

Freyman, W.A., Johnson, M.G., and C.J. Rothfels. 2022. Homologizer: phylogenetic phasing of gene copies into polyploid subgenomes. bioRxiv 2020.10.22.351486v4

homologizer is implemented in RevBayes. Please see http://revbayes.com to download and install RevBayes. For users without previous RevBayes experience, we recommend the tutorials at http://revbayes.com.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/wf8/homologizer

RITA: Rapid identification of high-confidence taxonomic assignments for metagenomic data

Jit — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 08:25:33 -0600

RITA is a standalone software package and Web server for taxonomic assignment of metagenomic sequence reads. By combining homology predictions from BLAST or UBLAST with compositional classifications from a Naive Bayes classifier, RITA is able to achieve very high accuracy on short reads. Unlike other hybrid approaches which combine these predictions for all sequences to be classified, RITA uses a pipeline to first identify cases where both types of classifier are in agreement, which constitute the highest-confidence set. Sequences not classified in this manner are subjected to a series of downstream classification steps.

This work has been accepted for publication:

MacDonald NJ, Parks DH, and Beiko RG. Rapid identification of taxonomic assignments. Accepted to Nucleic Acids Research April 4, 2012.

If you have any questions or bug reports, please let us know at .

Address of the bookmark: http://kiwi.cs.dal.ca/Software/RITA

PaReBrick: PArallel REarrangements and BReaks identification toolkit

Jit — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 10:20:03 -0500

PaReBrick. The tool takes a collection of strains represented as a sequence of oriented synteny blocks and a phylogenetic tree as input data. It identifies rearrangements, tests them for consistency with a tree, and sorts the events by their parallelism score. The tool provides diagrams of the neighbors for each block of interest, allowing the detection of horizontally transferred blocks or their extra copies and the inversions in which copied blocks are involved.We demonstrated PaReBrick’s efficiency and accuracy and showed its potential to detect genome rearrangements responsible for pathogenicity and adaptation in bacterial genomes

More at https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bioinformatics/btab691/6380551

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ctlab/parallel-rearrangements

SISRS: Site Identification from Short Read Sequences

Abhimanyu Singh — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 08:56:03 -0600

Next-gen sequence data such as Illumina HiSeq reads. Data must be sorted into folders by taxon (e.g. species or genus). Paired reads in fastq format must be specified by _R1 and _R2 in the (otherwise identical) filenames. Paired and unpaired reads must have a fastq file extension.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/rachelss/SISRS

BUSCO: Assessing genome assembly and annotation completeness with Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs

Anjana — Tue, 10 May 2016 07:46:24 -0500

High-throughput genomics has revolutionized biological research, however, while the number of sequenced genomes grows by the day, quality assessment of the resulting assembled sequences remains complicated and mostly limited to technical measures like N50.
BUSCO provides measures for quantitative assessment of genome assembly, gene set, and transcriptome completeness based on evolutionarily informed expectations of gene content from near-universal single-copy orthologs selected from OrthoDB.
BUSCO assessments are implemented in open-source software, with comprehensive lineage-specific sets of Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs for arthropods, vertebrates, metazoans, fungi, eukaryotes, and bacteria.
These conserved orthologs are ideal candidates for large-scale phylogenomics studies, and the annotated BUSCO gene models built during genome assessments provide a comprehensive gene predictor training set for use as part of genome annotation pipelines.
BUSCO assessments offer intuitive metrics, based on evolutionarily informed expectations of gene content from hundreds of species, to gauge completeness of rapidly accumulating genomic data and satisfy an Iberian's quest for quality - "Busco calidad/qualidade".

Address of the bookmark: http://busco.ezlab.org/

The anatomy of successful computational biology software

Jitendra Narayan — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 11:53:08 -0500

Creators of software widely used in computational biology discuss the factors that contributed to their success

Nature Biotechnology spoke with Altschul and several other originators of computational biology software programs widely used today (Table 1). The conversations explored what makes certain software tools successful, the unique challenges of developing them for biological research and how the field of computational biology, as a whole, can move research agendas forward. What follows is an edited compilation of interviews.

Detail @ http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/full/nbt.2721.html

News Source @ Nature

Ten recommendations for creating usable bioinformatics command line software

RAJESH DETROJA — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 10:06:26 -0500

Bioinformatics software varies greatly in quality. In terms of usability, the command line interface is the first experience a user will have of a tool. Unfortunately, this is often also the last time a tool will be used. Here I present ten recommendations for command line software author’s tools to follow, which I believe would greatly improve the uptake and usability of their products, waste less user’s time, and improve the quality of scientific analyses.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/content/2/1/15?utm_content=buffer25ee0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer