BOL: Related items

The Day We Began Reading the DNA of the World

Jitendra Narayan — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 01:43:21 -0500

Picture waking up and knowing that in one lab, a scientist is reading the DNA of a whale. In another, a team is sequencing a rare plant. Meanwhile, researchers in India are decoding the genomes of different human populations.

Many organisms. Many countries. All share one remarkable goal: to understand the genetic story of life.

DNA is nature's instruction manual, written with just four letters: A, T, C, and G. For years, scientists could only read small sections of this huge book. Now, new sequencing technology lets us read entire genomes like never before.

One of the most ambitious projects is the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP). Its goal is to create reference genomes for about 1.5 million known eukaryotic species. This project links genome research across continents, species, and scientific fields.

But this story goes beyond just animals and plants.

A New Chapter in Human Genomics

Large human genome projects are changing how we understand our own genetic diversity.

India's GenomeIndia project has sequenced thousands of people from different populations. This work is uncovering genetic variation that global databases have often missed.

Similar population-scale effSimilar large-scale projects are happening worldwide. The All of Us Research Program in the United States, Europe's 1+ Million Genomes initiative, South Korea's national genomic data program, and projects in Saudi Arabia, Australia, and Singapore are all building huge genomic resources.collect DNA.

The real goal is to link genomes with health, disease, and other biological information. This creates a base for more accurate research and, in time, more personalized medicine.

A Race Against Time

There is also an important twist.

We are sequencing Earth's biodiversity even as many species face growing environmental threats.

A genome alone cannot save a species, but it does keep important information about its biology, evolution, and genetic diversity. This knowledge helps scientists understand risks, guide conservation, and find traits that could help agriculture or medicine.

Projects like the Darwin Tree of Life, which studies species in Britain and Ireland, and the African BioGenome Project, which is growing genomics work across Africa, are key parts of this worldwide effort.

Projects to Watch

Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) - A global effort to sequence and annotate roughly 1.5 million known eukaryotic species and create a comprehensive reference library of Earth's biodiversity.
Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP) - Focuses on producing high-quality reference genomes for vertebrate species, providing a major foundation for the wider Tree of Life.
Darwin Tree of Life - A UK and Ireland initiative aiming to sequence approximately 70,000 species, creating a detailed genomic map of regional biodiversity.
African BioGenome Project (AfricaBP) - A pan-African initiative focused on sequencing Africa's biodiversity while strengthening genomics and bioinformatics capacity across the continent.
European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) - A European effort to generate high-quality reference genomes for Europe's biodiversity and connect national sequencing efforts.
Canada BioGenome Project - Building reference genomes for Canadian biodiversity, supporting conservation, research and the study of ecosystems.
California Conservation Genomics Project - Uses genomics to understand and protect California's biodiversity and help inform conservation decisions.
Bat1K - An ambitious global effort to sequence the genomes of all known bat species, helping scientists study their evolution, longevity, immunity and unique biology.
Bird 10,000 (B10K) - A global project aiming to create genome resources covering the world's bird diversity and reconstruct avian evolutionary history.
Global Invertebrate Genomics Alliance (GIGA) - Builds genomic resources for the enormous and genetically diverse world of invertebrates.
GenomeIndia - India's national human-genome initiative, designed to capture the country's extraordinary population diversity and create a reference resource for Indian genomics.
All of Us Research Program - A US national research program combining genomic information with health and lifestyle data at population scale.
1+ Million Genomes / Genome of Europe - A European effort to enable secure, cross-border use of genomic and health data and develop genome-scale resources involving more than one million people.
Korea National Integrated Bio Big Data Project - South Korea's large-scale national effort combining genomic and health information from a very large population cohort.
Saudi Genome Program - A national genomics initiative focused on genetic diseases, population genomics and precision medicine in Saudi Arabia.
Australian Genomics / Genomics Health Futures Mission - Australia's growing investment in genomic medicine, rare disease research and population-scale health genomics.

The Library of Life

The fuThe future of genomics is not just about sequencing one genome at a time. Now, it is about creating a worldwide network of genomes—human and non-human, individual and species—linked by powerful databases and advanced computational tools.ine a library without shelves.

In this library, the books are genomes. The pages are made of DNA. Scientists and machines are the readers. And this library is still being written. Each genome sequenced today adds a new page to the story of life and helps us better understand our place in it.

SneakySnake: A Fast and Accurate Universal Genome Pre-Alignment Filter for CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs

Neel — Sun, 20 Dec 2020 01:39:54 -0600

The first and the only pre-alignment filtering algorithm that works efficiently and fast on modern CPU, FPGA, and GPU architectures. SneakySnake greatly (by more than two orders of magnitude) expedites sequence alignment calculation for both short (Illumina) and long (ONT and PacBio) reads. Described by Alser et al. (preliminary version at https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09020).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/SneakySnake

SRF Vacancy at NIPGR

Tue, 25 Mar 2014 19:20:44 -0500

Applications are invited from suitable candidates for filling up the purely temporary position of one Senior Research Fellow in DST’s Indo-Australian Joint project (with ICRISAT) entitled “Genomic Approach for Stress Tolerant Chickpea” under the guidance of Dr. Mukesh Jain, Scientist, NIPGR.

(A) Senior Research Fellow (One Post): Emoluments as per DST/DBT norms.

Candidates having M.Sc. degree (with minimum of 55% marks) or equivalent in Life Sciences/Biotechnology/Bioinformatics/ Molecular Biology or any other related field with minimum of two years of post M.Sc. research experience are eligible to apply. The candidate having computer skill (Linux, Perl, Java, MySQL) and/or experience in advanced molecular biology, next generation sequencing data analysis and molecular markers analysis will be preferred.

The position is completely on temporary basis and co-terminus with the project. The initial appointment will be for one year, which can be curtailed/extended on the basis of assessment of the candidate’s performance and discretion of the Competent Authority. NIPGR reserves the right to select the candidate against the above posts depending upon the qualifications and experience of the candidates. Reservation of posts shall be as per Govt. of India norms.

Eligible candidates may apply by sending hard copy of completed application in the given format with a cover letter showing interest and attested copies of the certificates and proof of research experience. The applications should reach at the address given below within 15 days from the date of the advertisement. The subject line on envelope must be superscribed by “Application for the Post of SRF in DST - AISRF project”.

Note: ONLY hard copy of the application in the given format will be accepted.

Last date April 03, 2014

Dr. Mukesh Jain
Staff Scientist
National Institute of Plant Genome Research
Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, P.O. Box NO. 10531,
New Delhi - 110067

Advertisement: http://www.nipgr.res.in/careers/vacancies_latest.php#

Genomic Basis of Evolutionary Innovations (GEvol)

BioStar — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 06:11:00 -0600

The Priority Programme (SPP 2349) funded by German Science Foundation (DFG) started 2022: „Genomic Basis of Evolutionary Innovations (GEvol)“

GEvol is unique as it will use, for the first time, a large taxonomic group to focus on one goal: to characterise the dynamics and mechanisms of genomic innovations underlying novel traits using comparative evolutionary genomics (and related data).
Thus, projects participating in GEvol we will ask fundamental evolutionary questions such as:
1. At what level is evolution repeatable?
2. How does genomic plasticity interfere with phenotypic plasticity during evolution?
3. How do inter- and intra-specific interactions influence genomic architectures?
4. How predictable is phenotypic variation given some knowledge about the dynamics and mechanisms of underlying genome evolution?

Address of the bookmark: https://g-evol.uni-muenster.de/open-positions/

Taxoblast : Taxoblast is a pipeline to identify contamination in genomic sequence

Jit — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 08:37:15 -0600

Modern genome sequencing strategies are highly sensitive to contamination making the detection of foreign DNA sequences an important part of analysis pipelines. Here we use Taxoblast, a simple pipeline with a graphical user interface, for the post-assembly detection of contaminating sequences in the published genome of the kelp Saccharina japonica. Analyses were based on multiple blastn searches with short sequence fragments. They revealed a number of probable bacterial contaminations as well as hybrid scaffolds that contain both bacterial and algal sequences. This or similar types of analysis, in combination with manual curation, may thus constitute a useful complement to standard bioinformatics analyses prior to submission of genomic data to public repositories. Our analysis pipeline is open-source and freely available at http://sdittami.altervista.org/taxoblast and via SourceForge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/taxoblast).

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/taxoblast/files/

TACOA: Taxonomic classification of environmental genomic fragments using a kernelized nearest neighbor approach

Poonam Mahapatra — Tue, 15 May 2018 09:52:28 -0500

TACOA is a software that can accurately predict the taxonomic origin of genomic fragments from metagenomic data sets by combining the advantages of the k -NN approach with a smoothing kernel function. TACOA can be easily installed and run on a desktop computer, therefore allowing researchers to locally analyze their metagenomic sequence data or integrate it into their pipelines.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de/index.php/2-uncategorised/99-tacoa

S-plot2: creates an interactive, two-dimensional heatmap of sequences

Jit — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 05:36:19 -0500

S-plot2 creates an interactive, two-dimensional heatmap capturing the similarities and dissimilarities in nucleotide usage between genomic sequences (partial or complete). In S-plot2, whole eukaryotic chromosomes and smaller prokaryotic genomes can be efficiently compared. The tool includes functionality to extract, analyze, and automate BLAST queries of regions of interest within the heatmap. This facilitates the investigation of quickly evolving coding regions, novel coding regions, and laterally transferred elements.

http://www.putonti-lab.com/uploads/4/5/3/0/45307835/s-plot2_tutorial.pdf

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1176934318797354

Address of the bookmark: https://bitbucket.org/lkalesinskas/splot

UPhO: Scripts for homology and orthology assessment from genomic sequences.

BioStar — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 10:36:42 -0600

UPhO finds orthologs with and without inparalogs from input gene family trees. Refer to the Documentation.pdf for more detailed explanations on its usage, installation and dependencies. Type UPhO.py -h for help.

The only input requierement for UPhO is a tree (or trees) in Newick format in which the leaves are named with a species idenfifier, a field separator, and sequence identifier. By default, the field separator is the character "|" but custom delimiters can be defined. Examples of trees to test UPhO are provided in the TestData folder.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ballesterus/UPhO

Sequence Tube Maps: displays multiple genomic sequences in the form of a tube map

Jit — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 01:12:06 -0500

A JavaScript module for the visualization of genomic sequence graphs. It automatically generates a "tube map"-like visualization of sequence graphs which have been created with vg. (https://github.com/vgteam/vg)

Link to working demo: https://vgteam.github.io/sequenceTubeMap/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/vgteam/sequenceTubeMap

sourmash: Quickly search, compare, and analyze genomic and metagenomic data sets.

BioStar — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 04:24:06 -0500

sourmash is a k-mer analysis multitool, and we aim to provide stable, robust programmatic and command-line APIs for a variety of sequence comparisons. Some of our special sauce includes:

FracMinHash sketching, which enables accurate comparisons (including ANI) between data sets of different sizes
sourmash gather, a combinatorial k-mer approach for more accurate metagenomic profiling

Please see the sourmash publications for details.

The name is a riff off of Mash, combined with @ctb's love of whiskey. (Sour mash is used in making whiskey.)

Maintainers: C. Titus Brown (@ctb), Luiz C. Irber, Jr (@luizirber), and N. Tessa Pierce-Ward (@bluegenes).

sourmash was initially developed by the Lab for Data-Intensive Biology at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, and now includes contributions from the global research and developer community.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/sourmash-bio/sourmash