BOL: Related items

Basics of BLAST Programs !

BioStar — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 06:04:26 -0500

The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) is a powerful bioinformatics program used to compare an input sequence (such as DNA, RNA, or protein sequences) against a database of sequences to find regions of similarity. Developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), BLAST is widely used for identifying species, finding functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences, and predicting the function of novel sequences.

Key Features of BLAST:
1. Sequence Comparison: BLAST searches for local alignments between the query sequence and sequences in a database. It identifies regions of similarity, which can help infer functional and evolutionary relationships.

2. Speed and Efficiency: BLAST uses heuristic algorithms, making it faster than exhaustive search methods, suitable for large-scale database searches.

3. Versatility: There are several versions of BLAST for different types of sequence comparisons:
- blastn: Compares a nucleotide query sequence against a nucleotide sequence database.
- blastp: Compares a protein query sequence against a protein sequence database.
- blastx: Compares a nucleotide query sequence translated in all reading frames against a protein sequence database.
- tblastn: Compares a protein query sequence against a nucleotide sequence database translated in all reading frames.
- tblastx: Compares the six-frame translations of a nucleotide query sequence against the six-frame translations of a nucleotide sequence database.

4. Scoring and E-value: BLAST results are scored based on the quality and length of the alignments. The E-value (expect value) indicates the number of alignments one can expect to find by chance, with lower E-values representing more significant matches.

5. Output Formats: BLAST provides results in various formats, including plain text, HTML, XML, and JSON, making it adaptable for different types of analyses and integrations with other tools.

Applications of BLAST:
- Genomic Research: Identifying genes, understanding genetic diversity, and mapping genome sequences.
- Protein Function Prediction: Inferring the function of unknown proteins by comparing them to known protein sequences.
- Evolutionary Studies: Exploring evolutionary relationships between organisms by comparing their genetic material.
- Medical Research: Identifying pathogens, understanding disease mechanisms, and developing treatments by comparing sequences of interest.

Overall, BLAST is an essential tool in bioinformatics, offering a reliable and efficient way to analyze and interpret biological sequence data.

D-GENIES: A tool for Dotplot large Genomes in an Interactive, Efficient and Simple way

Jit — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 09:41:22 -0500

D-GENIES – for Dotplot large Genomes in an Interactive, Efficient and Simple way – is an online tool designed to compare two genomes. It supports large genome and you can interact with the dot plot to improve the visualisation. We use minimap version 2 to align the two genomes. Then, the PAF file is parsed and plotted into an interactive plot written with d3.js library. D-Genies also allows to display dot plots from other aligners by uploading their PAF or MAF alignment file. http://dgenies.toulouse.inra.fr/

Address of the bookmark: http://dgenies.toulouse.inra.fr/

minialign: fast and accurate alignment tool for PacBio and Nanopore long reads

Jit — Thu, 24 May 2018 08:33:26 -0500

Minialign is a little bit fast and moderately accurate nucleotide sequence alignment tool designed for PacBio and Nanopore long reads. It is built on three key algorithms, minimizer-based index of the minimap overlapper, array-based seed chaining, and SIMD-parallel Smith-Waterman-Gotoh extension.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ocxtal/minialign

Jaeger : an accurate and fast deep-learning tool to detect bacteriophage sequences

LEGE — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 06:30:16 -0500

Jaeger is a tool that utilizes homology-free machine learning to identify phage genome sequences that are hidden within metagenomes. It is capable of detecting both phages and prophages within metagenomic assemblies.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/MGXlab/Jaeger

SMASH: An alignment-free tool to find and visualise rearrangements between pairs of DNA sequences

Jit — Thu, 21 Dec 2017 08:26:57 -0600

SMASH is a completely alignment-free method to find and visualise rearrangements between pairs of DNA sequences. The detection is based on relative compression, namely using a FCM, also known as Markov model, of high context order (typically 20). The method has been approached with a tool (also called SMASH). For visualization, SMASH outputs a SVG image, with an ideogram output architecture, where the patterns are represented with several HSV values (only value varies). The following image, illustrating the information maps between human and chimpanzee for the several chromosomes, depicts an example:

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/pratas/smash

Nucl2Vec: Local alignment of DNA sequences using Distributed Vector Representation

Jit — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 05:45:44 -0500

We demonstrate a novel approach forlocal alignment of DNA reads with respect to reference genome.For this process we have used Skip-gram model for creatingencoding(Nucl2Vec) and k-nearest neighbor for the alignment.With our new approach we have reduced computation cost forlocal alignment , while achieving accuracy comparable to existingdefacto standard BWA-MEM tool.

https://prakharg24.github.io/papers/401851.full.pdf

Address of the bookmark: https://prakharg24.github.io/papers/401851.full.pdf

Heap: a highly sensitive and accurate SNP detection tool for low-coverage high-throughput sequencing data

Jit — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 08:06:03 -0500

Heap, that enables robustly sensitive and accurate calling of SNPs, particularly with a low coverage NGS data, which must be aligned to the reference genome sequences in advance. To reduce false positive SNPs, Heap determines genotypes and calls SNPs at each site except for sites at the both end of reads or containing a minor allele supported by only one read. Performance comparison with existing tools showed that Heap achieved the highest F-scores with low coverage (7X) restriction-site associated DNA sequencing reads of sorghum and rice individuals. This will facilitate cost-effective GWAS and GP studies in this NGS era. Code and documentation of Heap are freely available from https://github.com/meiji-bioinf/heap and our web site (http://bioinf.mind.meiji.ac.jp/lab/en/tools.html).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/meiji-bioinf/heap

MSAProbs - Parallel and accurate multiple sequence alignment

Neel — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 23:58:44 -0500

MSAProbs is a well-established state-of-the-art multiple sequence alignment algorithm for protein sequences. The design of MSAProbs is based on a combination of pair hidden Markov models and partition functions to calculate posterior probabilities. Assessed using the popular benchmarks: BAliBASE, PREFAB, SABmark and OXBENCH, MSAProbs achieves statistically significant accuracy improvements over the existing top performing aligners, including ClustalW, MAFFT, MUSCLE, ProbCons and Probalign. In addition, MSAProbs is optimized for shared-memory CPUs by employing a multi-threaded design, and further parallelized for distributed-memory systems using MPI to overcome high memory overhead barrier and achieve good parallel and data-size scalability.

Address of the bookmark: http://msaprobs.sourceforge.net/homepage.htm#latest

HELIANO: A fast and accurate tool for detection of Helitron-like elements

LEGE — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 07:16:34 -0500

Helitron-like elements (HLE1 and HLE2) are DNA transposons. They have been found in diverse species and seem to play significant roles in the evolution of host genomes. Although known for over twenty years, Helitron sequences are still challenging to identify. Here, we propose HELIANO (Helitron-like elements annotator) as an efficient solution for detecting Helitron-like elements.

https://academic.oup.com/nar/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nar/gkae679/7730539?login=true

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/Zhenlisme/heliano/

Salzberg lab

Mon, 15 May 2017 05:14:01 -0500

We are a computational biology lab that develops novel methods for analysis of DNA and RNA sequences. Our research includes software for aligning and assembling RNA-seq data, whole-genome assembly, and microbiome analysis. We work closely with biomedical scientists to apply these methods to current problems arising in a broad spectrum of biological and medical research areas. We’re also part of the Center for Computational Biology, a group of 20+ faculty members and their labs at Johns Hopkins working on computational, statistical, and mathematical methods that can turn massive genomic data sets into biologically and clinically useful information.

https://salzberg-lab.org/