Job Description: We are interested in finding an excellent postdoc with interests in protein functional annotation, machine learning and computer grids. The position is open for 3.5 years at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in the heart of paris.

Research topic: Protein function annotation, multiple probabilistic models, domain architecture, machine learning, combinatorial optimization, computer grid.

Title: A novel integrative platform for large scale protein annotation that exploits a multitude of diversified probabilistic models in several protein signature databases.

We propose a novel integrated approach for large scale protein annotation that will exploit an unprecedented amount of genomic data as well as sophisticated machine learning techniques and combinatorial optimization approaches taking advantages of High Performance Computing (HPC) environments. The idea is to uncover as much as possible the evolutionary processes of protein sequences that took place throughout the whole tree of life and that affected the evolution of a protein family. We have already demonstrated in a previous work that the problem of functional annotation is inherent to the ability of uncovering such paths. Now, we shall extend this approach to large scale genome annotation by considering 11 different protein databases, constituted by about 10^9 protein sequences, and by producing a large pool of diversified probabilistic models coding for about 10^7 evolutionary protein pathways. Such models will be used to search for specific domains in genomes to be annotated. Our previous methodology needs to be fundamentally improved to deal with this large amount of biological data. In this project, we shall work on the algorithms to reduce the space of models and the search complexity, and we shall implement some important algorithmic changes towards the realization of a powerful integrated annotation tool.

Where: This project is run on the Laboratoire de Biologie Computationnelle et Quantitative UMR7238 CNRS-UPMC – Analytical Genomics team, headed by A.Carbone. It is co-advised with Pierre-Henri Wuillemin, Laboratoire d’Informatique de Paris 6 – Equipe DECISION.

Start date: September 1st, 2014
Contact Person: Alessandra Carbone
Contact: alessandra.carbone@lip6.fr

Lift over is the process of transferring annotations from one genome assembly to another. Usually lift over is done because there is a new, improved genome assembly for the species and good quality annotations (maybe manually curated or experimentally verified) are available on the old assembly.

The idea is simple: align the new assembly with the old one (e.g., with BLAT), process the alignment data to define how a coordinate or coordinate range on the old assembly should be transformed to the new assembly (e.g., as a chain file), transform the coordinates (e.g., with liftOver).

https://github.com/wurmlab/flo

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/wurmlab/flo

More at https://sourceforge.net/projects/sb2nhri/files/MyPro/

Address of the bookmark: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167701215001207

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/nextgenusfs/funannotate

Some of the prominent features of the package are:

• visualizing polyploidy simultaneously on the same plot.
• annotating groups of elements as distinct colors.
• creating chromosome heatmaps.
• adjusting chromosome range or visualizing chromosome regions such as genes
• adding labels to the plot
• adding hyperlinks to each element

Address of the bookmark: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/chromoMap/vignettes/chromoMap.html

Address of the bookmark: http://genomearchitect.github.io/

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

MFannot is a program for the annotation of mitochondrial and plastid genomes. It is a PERL wrapper around a set of diverse, external independent tools.

It makes intense use of RNA/intron detection tools including HMMER, Exonerate, Erpin and others.

http://megasun.bch.umontreal.ca/cgi-bin/mfannot/mfannotInterface.pl

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/BFL-lab/Mfannot

NucDiff provides information about the types of differences and their locations. It is possible to upload the results into genome browser for visualization and further inspection. It was written in Python and uses the NUCmer package from MUMmer[1] for sequence comparison.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/uio-cels/NucDiff