BOL: Related items

parallelLastz: Lastz with multi-threads support.

BioStar — Sat, 22 Aug 2020 05:58:40 -0500

Running Lastz (https://github.com/lastz/lastz) in parallel mode. This program is for single computer with multiple core processors.

When the query file format is fasta, you can specify many threads to process it. It can reduce run time linearly, and use almost equal memory as the original lastz program. This is useful when you lastz a big query file to a huge reference like human whole genome sequence.

The program is an extension on the original lastz program which was written by Bob Harris (the LASTZ guy).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/jnarayan81/parallelLastz

AlfaPang: alignment free algorithm for pangenome graph construction

BioStar — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 02:56:35 -0500

AlfaPang constructs variation graphs, leveraging its alignment-free and reference-free approach, based solely on intrinsic sequence properties. This design allows AlfaPang's runtime and memory usage to scale linearly with the size of input sequences, enabling it to handle significantly larger genome sets compared to other methods.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/AdamCicherski/AlfaPang

Meta-Transcriptomics: Dynamic World of RNA in Diverse Environments

Abhi — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 02:40:49 -0500

Meta-transcriptomics combines high-throughput sequencing technologies with computational biology to profile the RNA content of a sample. This technique allows researchers to capture a snapshot of gene expression and metabolic activities across diverse microbial communities, such as those found in soil, water, and the human gut.

Key Components

Sample Collection: Meta-transcriptomics begins with the collection of environmental samples. These samples are often complex, containing a wide range of microorganisms.
RNA Extraction: RNA is extracted from the sample, which includes mRNA, rRNA, tRNA, and other non-coding RNAs. This step is crucial as it determines the quality and representativeness of the data.
Sequencing: High-throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) technologies are used to obtain sequences of the RNA transcripts. This step provides a vast amount of data on the RNA molecules present in the sample.
Data Analysis: Computational tools and bioinformatics methods are employed to process and analyze the sequencing data. This involves mapping RNA sequences to reference genomes or transcriptomes, identifying expressed genes, and quantifying their abundance.
Functional Annotation: The functional roles of identified transcripts are inferred based on known gene functions, allowing researchers to understand the metabolic and ecological functions of the microbial community.

Applications

Environmental Monitoring: Meta-transcriptomics can be used to monitor the health and functional status of ecosystems. For example, it can help assess the impact of pollution on microbial communities by revealing changes in gene expression related to stress response and degradation processes.
Microbiome Research: In human health, meta-transcriptomics offers insights into the gut microbiome’s functional state. It helps in understanding how microbial communities interact with their host, how they respond to dietary changes, and their role in health and disease.
Biotechnology: The technique can aid in the discovery of novel enzymes and bioactive compounds by profiling microbial communities in extreme environments or industrial processes.
Disease Pathogenesis: By analyzing RNA profiles from disease-associated environments, researchers can uncover pathogen-host interactions and identify potential targets for therapeutic interventions.

Challenges

Complexity of Data: The sheer volume and complexity of data generated by meta-transcriptomics can be overwhelming. Effective data management and advanced computational tools are required to extract meaningful insights.
Sampling Bias: Environmental samples can be heterogeneous, and RNA extraction methods may introduce biases, potentially affecting the accuracy of the results.
Reference Databases: Incomplete or biased reference databases can hinder the accurate functional annotation of transcripts, especially when studying novel or poorly characterized organisms.

Future Directions

Meta-transcriptomics is a rapidly evolving field, with ongoing advancements in sequencing technologies and bioinformatics. Future research may focus on improving data integration, developing more comprehensive reference databases, and enhancing our understanding of microbial community dynamics in various environments. As these challenges are addressed, meta-transcriptomics will continue to provide valuable insights into the functional roles of microorganisms and their interactions within ecosystems.

Conclusion

Meta-transcriptomics represents a powerful tool for exploring the functional aspects of microbial communities in their natural environments. By capturing a snapshot of gene expression and metabolic activities, this approach offers a deeper understanding of ecological interactions, health implications, and biotechnological potentials. As technology and methodologies advance, meta-transcriptomics is poised to make significant contributions to our knowledge of the microbial world.

Des Higgins: Visualizing Multiple Sequence Alignments

Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:50:08 -0600

Copyright Broad Institute, 2013. All rights reserved. Des Higgins (http://www.bioinf.ucd.ie) gives a very entertaining introduction to the visualization of multiple sequence alignment, and to his widely-used Clustal tool. He highlights the emerging challenge of managing alignments with a very large number of sequences, and presents several approaches to this challenge, including faster algorithms and abstract views of clusters of alignments. This talk was presented at VIZBI 2011, an international conference series on visualizing biological data (http://www.vizbi.org) funded by NIH & EMBO. For information about data visualization efforts at the Broad Institute, please visit: http://www.broadinstitute.org/node/1363/

deepTools

Martin Jones — Sat, 08 Nov 2014 15:02:08 -0600

deepTools addresses the challenge of handling the large amounts of data that are now routinely generated from DNA sequencing centers. To do so, deepTools contains useful modules to process the mapped reads data to create coverage files in standard bedGraph and bigWig file formats. By doing so, deepTools allows the creation of normalized coverage files or the comparison between two files (for example, treatment and control). Finally, using such normalized and standardized files, multiple visualizations can be created to identify enrichments with functional annotations of the genome.

Publicaton: http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/05/05/nar.gku365.full

Source Code and Wiki: https://github.com/fidelram/deepTools/wiki

Galaxy Tool Shed repository: http://toolshed.g2.bx.psu.edu/view/bgruening/deeptools

and example Galaxy workflows: http://toolshed.g2.bx.psu.edu/view/bgruening/deeptools_workflows

RCircos: an R package for Circos 2D track plots

Jit — Fri, 20 May 2016 11:01:13 -0500

RCircos package provides a simple and flexible way to make Circos 2D track plots with R and could be easily integrated into other R data processing and graphic manipulation pipelines for presenting large-scale multi-sample genomic research data. It can also serve as a base tool to generate complex Circos images.

More at https://bitbucket.org/henryhzhang/rcircos/src

Address of the bookmark: https://bitbucket.org/henryhzhang/rcircos/src

QuIN’s web server

Jit — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 10:44:16 -0500

Recent studies of the human genome have indicated that regulatory elements (e.g. promoters and enhancers) at distal genomic locations can interact with each other via chromatin folding and affect gene expression levels. Genomic technologies for mapping interactions between DNA regions, e.g., ChIA-PET and HiC, can generate genome-wide maps of interactions between regulatory elements. These interaction datasets are important resources to infer distal gene targets of non-coding regulatory elements and to facilitate prioritization of critical loci for important cellular functions. With the increasing diversity and complexity of genomic information and public ontologies, making sense of these datasets demands integrative and easy-to-use software tools. Moreover, network representation of chromatin interaction maps enables effective data visualization, integration, and mining. Currently, there is no software that can take full advantage of network theory approaches for the analysis of chromatin interaction datasets. To fill this gap, we developed a web-based application, QuIN, which enables: 1) building and visualizing chromatin interaction networks, 2) annotating networks with user-provided private and publicly available functional genomics and interaction datasets, 3) querying network components based on gene name or chromosome location, and 4) utilizing network based measures to identify and prioritize critical regulatory targets and their direct and indirect interactions.

AVAILABILITY: QuIN’s web server is available at http://quin.jax.org QuIN is developed in Java and JavaScript, utilizing an Apache Tomcat web server and MySQL database and the source code is available under the GPLV3 license available on GitHub:https://github.com/UcarLab/QuIN/.

Address of the bookmark: http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004809

Fancy Oneliner for Bioinformatics !!

Poonam Mahapatra — Thu, 07 Jul 2016 12:05:50 -0500

This webpage lists some of the one-liners that we frequently use in metagenomic analyses. You can click on the following links to browse through different topics. You can copy/paste the commands as they are in your terminal screen, provided you follow the same naming conventions and folder structures as we have. We are sharing these codes with the intention that if they are useful and help you in your analyses, then we will be appropriately credited as considerable effort has been put into devising them.

Address of the bookmark: http://userweb.eng.gla.ac.uk/umer.ijaz/bioinformatics/oneliners.html

iTOL: interactive Tree Of Life

Jit — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 05:56:30 -0600

Interactive Tree Of Life is an online tool for the display and manipulation of phylogenetic trees. It provides most of the features available in other tree viewers, and offers a novel circular tree layout, which makes it easy to visualize mid-sized tree (up to several thousand leaves). Trees can be exported to several graphical formats, both bitmap and vector based.

There are several pre-computed trees available for display, including the main Tree Of Life, described in Ciccarelli, et al., 2006. In addition to the precomputed trees, users can upload and display personal trees and data, using the 'Data upload' page or through a personal user account.

Address of the bookmark: http://itol.embl.de/

ETE 3: Reconstruction, Analysis, and Visualization of Phylogenomic Data

Jit — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 06:46:15 -0600

ETE v3, featuring numerous improvements in the underlying library of methods, and providing a novel set of standalone tools to perform common tasks in comparative genomics and phylogenetics.

The new features include

(i) building gene-based and supermatrix-based phylogenies using a single command,

(ii) testing and visualizing evolutionary models,

(iii) calculating distances between trees of different size or including duplications, and

(iv) providing seamless integration with the NCBI taxonomy database.

ETE is freely available at http://etetoolkit.org

Address of the bookmark: http://etetoolkit.org