BOL: Related items

The Genes That Travel Together: A Genomic Detective Story

BioStar — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:00:36 -0500

Imagine looking through thousands of microbial genomes and discovering two genes that repeatedly appear together. The obvious conclusion is that they must somehow be connected—that perhaps they work together, participate in the same pathway, or depend on each other. But evolution has a way of leaving misleading clues. What if these two genes are found together simply because they were inherited from the same ancient ancestor? In that case, their apparent association may have little to do with their biological function; it may simply be a reflection of shared evolutionary history. This is the intriguing problem addressed by CORGIAS (https://github.com/ynishimuraLv/corgias), a computational framework developed to distinguish genuine gene associations from correlations created by common ancestry.

Instead of asking only whether two genes occur together across genomes, CORGIAS asks a deeper question: did these genes actually evolve together, repeatedly gaining or losing their presence in concert, or are they merely travelling together because of their inherited history? The framework introduces two complementary approaches, Ancestral State Adjustment (ASA) and the Simultaneous EVolution test (SEV), which incorporate evolutionary information into the search for gene associations. This distinction becomes increasingly important as genome sequencing continues to uncover enormous numbers of microbial genomes, many from organisms that have never been cultured and whose genes remain functionally mysterious. In this growing genomic landscape, simply finding a gene is no longer enough—we need clues about what that gene might be doing. CORGIAS approaches this problem almost like a genomic detective: rather than treating every association as evidence, it reconstructs the evolutionary story behind the association and asks whether the evidence survives that history. By doing so, it offers a way to separate coincidence from biological connection and potentially uncover functional relationships hidden within the vast microbial genomic landscape. The broader message is beautifully simple: genes do not evolve in isolation, and understanding what they do may require us to look beyond where they are today and reconstruct how they arrived there. Sometimes, the most important clue in a genome is not the gene itself, but the evolutionary journey it has taken.

More at https://academic.oup.com/nargab/article/7/4/lqaf182/8377910?

Applied Computational Genomics Course at UU: Spring 2020

Shruti Paniwala — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 03:30:44 -0600

This course will provide a comprehensive introduction to fundamental concepts and experimental approaches in the analysis and interpretation of experimental genomics data. It will be structured as a series of lectures covering key concepts and analytical strategies. A diverse range of biological questions enabled by modern DNA sequencing technologies will be explored including sequence alignment, the identification of genetic variation, structural variation, and ChIP-seq and RNA-seq analysis. Students will learn and apply the fundamental data formats and analysis strategies that underlie computational genomics research. The primary goal of the course is for students to be grounded in theory and leave the course empowered to conduct independent genomic analyses.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/quinlan-lab/applied-computational-genomics

WEGO : simple but useful tool for visualizing, comparing and plotting GO (Gene Ontology) annotation results

BioStar — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 10:02:22 -0500

WEGO (Web Gene Ontology Annotation Plot) is a simple but useful tool for visualizing, comparing and plotting GO (Gene Ontology) annotation results. As the GO vocabulary became more and more popular, WEGO was widely adopted and used in many researches. Therefore we have updated WEGO 2.0 in 2018. Here are some changes we’ve made:
1. The limit of input file numbers was cancelled. Now the users could upload as many files as they want with one operation.
2. We have added the reference data of 9 species for users selection.
3. Besides the traditional WEGO histogram, WEGO 2.0 outputs an additional type of bar graph showing GO terms with significant gene number differences.

Address of the bookmark: http://wego.genomics.org.cn/

Kaiju

Jit — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 11:23:04 -0500

Kaiju is a program for the taxonomic classification of metagenomic high-throughput sequencing reads. Each read is directly assigned to a taxon within the NCBI taxonomy by comparing it to a reference database containing microbial and viral protein sequences.

By default, Kaiju uses either the available complete genomes from NCBI RefSeq or the microbial subset of the non-redundant protein database nr used by NCBI BLAST, optionally also including fungi and microbial eukaryotes.

Kaiju translates reads into amino acid sequences, which are then searched in the database using a modified backward search on a memory-efficient implementation of the Burrows-Wheeler transform, which finds maximum exact matches (MEMs), optionally allowing mismatches in the protein alignment. The search can process up to millions of reads per minute using, for example, only 10 GB RAM with a protein database comprising 4821 microbial genomes. Kaiju can also be used for querying any other protein database without taxonomic classification, using either protein or nucleotide queries.

Kaiju is described in Menzel, P. et al. (2016) Fast and sensitive taxonomic classification for metagenomics with Kaiju. Nat. Commun. 7:11257 (open access).

Address of the bookmark: http://kaiju.binf.ku.dk/

STELLAR: fast and exact local alignments

Neel — Wed, 29 Aug 2018 16:00:46 -0500

STELLAR is very practical and fast on very long sequences which makes it a suitable new tool for finding local alignments between genomic sequences under the edit distance model. Binaries are freely available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X at http://www.seqan.de/projects/stellar.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.seqan.de/apps/stellar/

Syri compares alignments between two chromosome-level assemblies and identifies synteny and structural rearrangements.

Shruti Paniwala — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 02:01:13 -0500

Syri compares alignments between two chromosome-level assemblies and identifies synteny and structural rearrangements.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/schneebergerlab/syri

MEGAHIT: an ultra-fast single-node solution for large and complex metagenomics assembly via succinct de Bruijn graph

Jit — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 04:50:27 -0600

MEGAHIT is a single node assembler for large and complex metagenomics NGS reads, such as soil. It makes use of succinct de Bruijn graph (SdBG) to achieve low memory assembly. MEGAHIT can optionally utilize a CUDA-enabled GPU to accelerate its SdBG contstruction. The GPU-accelerated version of MEGAHIT has been tested on NVIDIA GTX680 (4G memory) and Tesla K40c (12G memory) with CUDA 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5. MEGAHIT v1.0 or greater also supports IBM Power PC and has been tested on IBM POWER8.

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/31/10/1674/177884

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/voutcn/megahit

HNADOCK: a nucleic acid docking server for modeling RNA/DNA–RNA/DNA 3D complex structures

Poonam Mahapatra — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 23:19:07 -0500

The HNADOCK server is to predict the binding complex structure between two nucleic acid molecules through a hierarchical docking algorihtm of an FFT-based global search strategy and an intrinsic scoring function for nucleic acid interactions. Users are required to provide the three-dimensional (3D) structures of the two molecules to be docked.

Address of the bookmark: http://huanglab.phys.hust.edu.cn/hnadock/

Tigers genome sequenced

Rahul Agarwal — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 16:48:24 -0500

Fifteen scientists led by Dr Jong Bhak of Genome Research Foundation, South Korea, decoded as many as 3 billion nucleotides (organic molecules that form the basic building blocks of nucleic acids, such as DNA). They identified 20,000 genes related to various functions of the tiger.

The biggest and perhaps most fearsome of the world's big cats, the tiger, shares 95.6 percent of its DNA with humans' cute and furry companions, domestic cats.

The new research showed that big cats have genetic mutations that enabled them to be carnivores. The team also identified mutations that allow snow leopards to thrive at high altitudes.

Reference:

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/your-cat-ferocious-tigers-share-lot-95-6-percent-their-4B11182690

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/flora-fauna/Gene-mapping-of-tiger-completed/articleshow/22671681.cms

Paper:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130917/ncomms3433/full/ncomms3433.html

Opera: An optimal genome scaffolding program

Jit — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 10:18:20 -0600

Opera (Optimal Paired-End Read Assembler) is a sequence assembly program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_assembly ). It uses information from paired-end or long reads to optimally order and orient contigs assembled from shotgun-sequencing reads.

An updated version called OPERA-LG has been re-engineered with features for the assembly of large and complex genomes.

Song Gao, Denis Bertrand, Burton K. H. Chia and Niranjan Nagarajan. OPERA-LG: efficient and exact scaffolding of large, repeat-rich eukaryotic genomes with performance guarantees. Genome Biology, May 2016, doi: 10.1186/s13059-016-0951-y.

Song Gao, Wing-Kin Sung, Niranjan Nagarajan. Opera: reconstructing optimal genomic scaffolds with high-throughput paired-end sequences. Journal of Computational Biology, Sept. 2011, doi:10.1089/cmb.2011.0170.

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-0951-y

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/operasf/