1. Illumina, Inc. (U.S.)

Illumina, Inc. was founded in 1998 and is headquartered at San Diego, U.S. Illumina, Inc. is one of the leading players in DNA sequencing and array-based technologies, serving customers in the research, clinical, and applied markets. The company offers products for applications in the life sciences, oncology, reproductive health, agriculture, and other emerging segments. The company serves government laboratories, genomic research centers, academics institutions as well as pharmaceutical, biotechnology, agrigenomics, commercial molecular diagnostics laboratories and consumer genomics companies. Illumina, Inc. has its geographic presence in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia-pacific, and others.

2. QIAGEN N.V. (Netherlands)

QIAGEN N.V. was incorporated in 1986 and is headquartered at Venlo, The Netherlands. The Company is engaged in providing Sample to Insight solutions that transform biological samples into molecular insights. QIAGEN provides its workflow to customers in molecular diagnostics, assay technologies, bioservices and automation systems.  The company’s genome services are suitable for custom/tailored projects that allow access to genomic sequence information.  The Company market its products in more than 100 countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Middle-East &Africa through its subsidiaries and channel partners.

3. PerkinElmer, Inc. (U.S.)

PerkinElmer, Inc. was founded in 1947 and is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, the U.S. PerkinElmer, Inc. offers its products & services and solutions for the diagnostics, food, environmental, industrial, life sciences research and laboratory services markets. The company offer comprehensive genetic testing solutions that help to provide insight into the complex nature of rare and inherited diseases. Some of the subsidiaries of the company are Caliper Life Sciences, Improvision, Viacell Inc., ViaCord LLC, among many others. The company has its facilities located in Europe (France, Germany, and Belgium), U.S. and Asia (China, India, and Japan).

4. Eurofins Scientific SE (Luxembourg)

Eurofins Scientific SE was founded in 1987 and is headquartered in Luxembourg, Europe. The company offers a portfolio of over 130,000 analytical methods and more than 150 million assays performed each year to establish the safety, identity, composition, authenticity, origin, traceability, and purity of biological substances and products, as well as carry out human diagnostic services. The company has its geographic presence across 39 countries in Europe, North and South America, and Asia-Pacific.

5. GATC Biotech AG (Germany)

GATC Biotech AG was founded in 1990 and is headquartered in Constance, Germany. The company provides DNA and RNA sequencing and bioservices solutions to academics and industrial areas. It also provides next generation sequencing services including genomes, targeted (re)-sequencing, human sample sequencing, transcriptomes, metagenomes, regulomes, pre-sequencing, NGS barcode labels, and next generation sequencing technologies; and bioservices services, including bioservices tools, pipelines and workflows, compute resources, data analysis reports, and case studies. GATC Biotech AG operates as a subsidiary of Eurofins Scientific SE. It offers its products through distributors in Italy, Japan, Portugal, Spain, and the Czech Republic.

6. Macrogen, Inc. (South Korea)

Macrogen, Inc. was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea. Macrogen, Inc. provides next generation sequencing services such as whole genome, de novo, exome, targeted, transcriptomics, metagenome, and epigenome sequencing.  The company also provides a variety of services such as oligo synthesis, database construction, genome research, and bioservices analysis system consulting services. Macrogen, Inc. provides genome research services in Korea and internationally.

7. Genotypic Technology Pvt. Ltd. (India)

Genotypic Technology Pvt. Ltd. was incorporated in 1998 and is headquartered in Bangalore, India. Genotypic Technology is the first Genomics service provider in India providing Microarray, Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), Bioservices and solutions to domestic/ international pharma, biotech companies and academia. The company provides its services for protocol optimization, probe designing, array layouts, project designing, and nucleic acid analysis to in-depth analysis. Genotypic Technology has its geographic presence in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, and Latin America.

8. GENEWIZ, Inc. (U.S.)

GENEWIZ, Inc. was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in South Plainfield, New Jersey, the U.S.; The company is a leading provider of research service in the field of Next Generation Sequencing, Sanger DNA sequencing, sequencing of bacteria and phage, gene synthesis, DNA cloning, genomics including mutation analysis, single nucleotide polymorphism, and bioservices. GENEWIZ, Inc. has its geographic presence in U.S., China, Germany, France, Japan, and the U.K.

9. Beijing Genomics Institute (China)

Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) is the world’s largest genomics organization and non-profit research institution that was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Shenzhen, China. The Company provides a wide range of commercial next generation sequencing services and genetic tests for medical institutions, agricultural and environmental applications. The Company operates all across the globe through its subsidiaries, namely, BGI China (Mainland), BGI Asia Pacific, BGI Americas (North and South America) and BGI Europe (Europe and Africa).

10. SciGenom Labs Pvt. Ltd (India)

SciGenom Labs Pvt. Ltd was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Cochin, India with offices in Chennai & Hyderabad in India, and San Francisco in the U.S. It is a Genomics R&D services company that provides genomic sequencing and NGS services to life sciences and healthcare businesses globally as well as academic and government institutions in India.

Popular mentions – MedGenome (India), DNA Link, Inc. (South Korea), Otogenetics Corporation (U.S.), Novogene Corporation (China), LGC Limited (U.K.), CD Genomics (U.S.), SeqLL, LLC (U.S.)

Address of the bookmark: http://pacb.com/blog/the-hifi-difference-true-long-reads-vs-synthetic-long-reads/

The prepint version is found on http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/08/09/173872

It uses the pyPaSWAS framework for sequence alignment (https://github.com/swarris/pyPaSWAS)

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/swarris/Pacasus

The most common newbie questions are:

Should I try to use these free open source programs?  Why are we not trying GUI software for computational analysis? Should I use commercial bioinformatics programs/software?”

1. Let’s be open

We generally think free and cheap are useless. But this concept is not applicable when we discuss open source software. Mostly, the bioinformatics software is developed by highly competitive biological programmers who believe in open sharing of knowledge. They come under Open Bioinformatics Foundation or O|B|F which is a non-profit, volunteer run organization focused on supporting open source programming in bioinformatics. The best part about open source tools/software is that they’re free to download the source code and read exactly what the program does. If you are so inclined, you can view all of the parts of the program and see the logical flow of the pipeline. In addition, open source makes an excellent learning tool for any beginning bioinformatician. Moreover, you can modify existing open source programs to deal with cutting-edge problems or to customize your pipeline. Apart from your computational and analysis work, most of the reviewer also prefers the open source based results so that they can validate the results if validation required.

2. Code headache

As a bioinformatician you are supposed to know the basics of programming languages, and if you are not good at it, then please learn it as soon as possible because you are not a bio-analyst but biological programmers. The open source programs usually lack dedicated service and support teams (often because they were the product of an overworked doc/postdoc!) so you are responsible for troubleshooting your own errors most of the time. We commonly receive the HELP email to support and assist to setup the pipeline; you can also find this kind of request on any QA forum. I personally believe this coding horror brings the biggest downside of open-source programs; where you need some programming skills in order to implement the program in your pipeline. But, if you are not able to fix the pipeline and modify the open source code according to your requirements them you should re-think on your bioinformatician name tag!!!

3. Dive into the codes

Some of the biologist turn bioinformatician says “if you can do the same thing with commercial software then why to get migraine with weird codes”, well this statement looks to me that guys are keen to learn swimming but still don’t like to get wet. If you are still using paid software and doing your work by customer support and clicking some of the well-designed GUI button then perhaps you are not interested in learning and trying new and challenging bioinformatics works. You are missing the basic flavour of bioinformatics. Let’s dive into the coding world, I am sure your will enjoy it. I recommend your to swim freely in code’s sea, and enjoy the journey; do not merely watch it from the outside.  

4. Paid does not mean better

The bioinformatics company which are specializes in bioinformatics solutions develop well designed/packed, user friendly software by using a large number of specialised scientist, programmers and support staff. They also provide good services to accomplice your biological analysis work. This means that if you hit a ‘snag’ with your data, help is likely only a phone call away! These companies price their products competitively against the cost of a dedicated bioinformatician. You may be able to afford the program, but not the additional staff! Additionally, most of the functionality that you need in your analysis is already coded into the program. Need to plot a graph? Just click this button right here. It is that easy. But, as a bioinformatician this is not generally well encouraged approach in biological analysis work, because the software is not available to everyone and your data can’t be validated. Moreover, there is very less chances that anyone will repeat your work or love to do similar kind of research (because not all the labs in the world are rich like yours).

5. Take a caution

In biological analysis work, in which you deal GB/TB of data are having maximum chances of getting errors, so please be careful and always cross check your data before coming to any conclusion. Even an error in two line code can alter your entire analysis and display weird results. Some of the scientist blindly believes on commercial software, which is entirely wrong. Using proprietary tools does not absolve you of the need to actually read and research the type of analysis that you are doing. This is particularly true in the case of genome assembly and annotation.

At the end, I would like to tell only one think that open source solutions allows you to do more cutting edge analysis than the commercial tools. So let’s go for it.

Disclaimer:

This is my personal view. I have nothing to do with any company or open source community. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my current/past employers. I do reserve the right to remove comments left by spammers or off-topic comments.

For knowledge about Linux and their importance amongst bioinformatician plesae read this article "An introduction to Linux for bioinformatics" by Paul Stothard.

Linux cheat sheet at http://bioinformaticsonline.com/file/view/87/linux-cheat-sheet

Please browse for futher useful linux pages on right hand side ...

In the mid 1960's scientists discovered that many genomes contain stretches of highly repetitive DNA sequences ( see Reassociation Kinetics Experiments, and C-Value Paradox ). These sequences were later characterized and placed into five categories:

Simple Repeats - Duplications of simple sets of DNA bases (typically 1-5bp) such as A, CA, CGG etc.
Tandem Repeats - Typically found at the centromeres and telomeres of chromosomes these are duplications of more complex 100-200 base sequences.
Segmental Duplications - Large blocks of 10-300 kilobases which are that have been copied to another region of the genome.
Interspersed Repeats
Processed Pseudogenes, Retrotranscripts, SINES - Non-functional copies of RNA genes which have been reintegrated into the genome with the assitance of a reverse transcriptase.
DNA Transposons
Retrovirus Retrotransposons
Non-Retrovirus Retrotransposons ( LINES )

Currently up to 50% of the human genome is repetitive in nature and as improvements are made in detection methods this number is expected to increase.

On the other hand; In genetics, the term palindrome refers to a sequence of nucleotides along a DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) or RNA (ribonucleic acid) strand that contains the same series of nitrogenous bases regardless from which direction the strand is analyzed. Akin to a language palindrome—wherein a word or phrase is spelled the same left-to-right as right-to-left (e.g., the word RADAR or the phrase "able was I ere I saw elba")—with genetic palindromes it does not matter whether the nucleic acid strand is read starting from the 3' (three prime) end or the 5' (five prime) end of the strand.

Recent research on palindromes centers on understanding palindrome formation during gene amplification. Other studies have attempted to relate palindrome formation to molecular mechanisms involved in double stranded breaks and in the formation of inverted repeats. Assisted by high speed computers, other groups of scientists link palindrome formation to the conservation of genetic information.

Related to the direction of transcription by RNA polymerase, DNA strands have upstream and downstream terminus defined by differing chemical groups at each end. The ends of each strand of DNA or RNA are termed the 5' (phosphate bound to the 5' position carbon) and 3' (phosphate bound to the 3' carbon) ends to indicate a polarity within the molecule. Using the letters A, T, C, G, to represent the nitrogenous bases adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine found in DNA, and the letters A, U, C, G to represent the nitrogenous bases adenine, uracil, cytosine, guanine found in RNA (Note that uracil in RNA replaces the thymine found in DNA), geneticists usually represent DNA by a series of base codes (e.g., 5' AATCGGATTGCA 3'). The base codes are usually arranged from the 5' end to the 3' end.

Because of specific base pairing in DNA (i.e., adenine (A) always bonds with (thymine (T) and cytosine (C) always bonds with guanine (G)) the complimentary stand to the sequence 5' AATCGGATTGCA 3' would be 3' TTAGCCTAACGT 5'.

With palindromes the sequences on the complimentary strands read the same in either direction. For example, a sequence of 5' GAATTC3' on one strand would be complimented by a 3' CTTAAG 5' strand. In either case, when either strand is read from the 5' prime end the sequence is GAATTC. Another example of a palindrome would be the sequence 5' CGAAGC 3' that, when reversed, still reads CGAAGC.

Palindromes are important sequences within nucleic acids. Often they are the site of binding for specific enzymes (e.g., restriction endobucleases) designed to cut the DNA strands at specific locations (i.e., at palindromes).

Palindromes may arise from brakeage and chromosomal inversions that form inverted repeats that compliment each other. When a palindrome results from an inversion, it is often referred to as an inverted repeat. For example, the sequence 5' CGAAGC 3', if inverted (reversed 180°), still reads CGAAGC.

The European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite (EMBOSS) includes some basic tools for finding tandem repeats and inverted repeats (see B.6.22. Applications in group Nucleic:repeats). There are many on-line services providing the EMBOSS tools, for example:

• Wageningen Bioinformatics Webportal EMBOSS explorer
• Mobyle@Pasteur
• Soaplab2 Web Services at Vital-IT

For more sophisticated repeat finding you will want to look at tools using Repbase for example:

• CENSOR
  • CENSOR@GIRI
  • CENSOR@EMBL-EBI
• RepeatMasker
• MUMmer (scan_for_match)
• Emboss Palindrome

Other nucleotide repeat finding methods found by a couple of web searches:

• Tandem Repeats Finder
• RECON
• RepeatRunner
• REPuter
• Imperfect Microsatellite Extractor (IMEx)
• Spectral Repeat Finder (SRF)
• REPFIND
• CRISPRfinder
• GrailEXP
• CONREPP
• find_palindromes
• Palindrome
• EMBOSS Palindrome
• Palindrome Search

Currently CSBB provides 13 modules focused on analytical tasks like performing upper-quantile normalization on expression data or convert genome wide gene expression to z-scores when comparing expression data from different platforms.

More at https://github.com/skygenomics/CSBB-v1.0

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/skygenomics/CSBB-v1.0

TMAP is a fast and accurate alignment software for short and long nucleotide sequences produced by next-generation sequencing technologies.

• The latest TMAP is unsupported. To use a supported version, please see the TMAP version associated with a Torrent Suite release below.

• Get the latest source code:

  git clone git://github.com/iontorrent/TMAP.git
   cd TMAP
   git submodule init
   git submodule update

https://github.com/iontorrent/TS/tree/master/Analysis/TMAP

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/iontorrent/TS/tree/master/Analysis/TMAP

Pockets Identification

CASTp

Pocket-Finder

PocketPicker

##################################################
[Mon May 7 11:29:18 2018] Reduction...
#file name genome size contigs heterozygous size [%] heterozygous contigs [%] identity [%] possible joins homozygous size [%] homozygous contigs [%]
/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/matplotlib/font_manager.py:273: UserWarning: Matplotlib is building the font cache using fc-list. This may take a moment.
warnings.warn('Matplotlib is building the font cache using fc-list. This may take a moment.')
test/run1/contigs.fa 163897 245 66377 40.50 221 90.20 94.854 0 97520 59.50 24 9.80

##################################################
[Mon May 7 11:29:29 2018] Estimating parameters of libraries...
Aligning 19504 mates per library...
Insert size statistics Mates orientation stats
FastQ files read length median mean stdev FF FR RF RR
test/5000_1.fq.gz test/5000_2.fq.gz 50 4998 4990.20 721.47 0 4674 0 0
test/600_1.fq.gz test/600_2.fq.gz 100 599 598.63 47.68 0 10000 0 0

##################################################
[Mon May 7 11:29:29 2018] Scaffolding...
iteration 1.1: test/run1/contigs.reduced.fa 24 97520 39.355 17 94157 7321 2195 0 29603
19505 pairs. 17302 passed filtering [88.71%]. 1627 in different contigs [8.34%].
1526 pairs. 558 in different contigs [36.57%].
iteration 1.2: test/run1/_sspace.1.1.fa 3 97626 39.344 3 97626 87536 6063 821 87536
19505 pairs. 17607 passed filtering [90.27%]. 182 in different contigs [0.93%].
1077 pairs. 124 in different contigs [11.51%].
iteration 2.1: test/run1/_sspace.1.2.fa 3 97626 39.344 3 97626 87536 6063 821 87536
19505 pairs. 15112 passed filtering [77.48%]. 1295 in different contigs [6.64%].
3417 pairs. 396 in different contigs [11.59%].
iteration 2.2: test/run1/_sspace.2.1.fa 1 99133 39.344 1 99133 99133 99133 2328 99133
19505 pairs. 15152 passed filtering [77.68%]. 0 in different contigs [0.00%].
3398 pairs. 0 in different contigs [0.00%].

##################################################
[Mon May 7 11:29:34 2018] Gap closing...
iteration 1.1: test/run1/scaffolds.fa 1 99133 39.344 1 99133 99133 99133 2328 99133

##################################################
[Mon May 7 11:29:35 2018] Final reduction...
#file name genome size contigs heterozygous size [%] heterozygous contigs [%] identity [%] possible joins homozygous size [%] homozygous contigs [%]
[WARNING] Nothing reduced!
test/run1/scaffolds.filled.fa 99390 1 0 0.00 0 0.00 0.000 0 99390 100.00 1 100.00

##################################################
[Mon May 7 11:29:35 2018] Reporting statistics...
#fname contigs bases GC [%] contigs >1kb bases in contigs >1kb N50 N90 Ns longest
test/contigs.fa 245 163897 40.298 24 117391 3975 233 0 29603
test/run1/contigs.fa 245 163897 40.298 24 117391 3975 233 0 29603
test/run1/contigs.reduced.fa 24 97520 39.355 17 94157 7321 2195 0 29603
test/run1/_sspace.1.1.fa 3 97626 39.344 3 97626 87536 6063 821 87536
test/run1/_sspace.1.2.fa 3 97626 39.344 3 97626 87536 6063 821 87536
test/run1/_sspace.2.1.fa 1 99133 39.344 1 99133 99133 99133 2328 99133
test/run1/_sspace.2.2.fa 1 99133 39.344 1 99133 99133 99133 2328 99133
test/run1/scaffolds.fa 1 99133 39.344 1 99133 99133 99133 2328 99133
test/run1/_gapcloser.1.1.fa 1 99390 39.689 1 99390 99390 99390 2 99390
test/run1/scaffolds.filled.fa 1 99390 39.689 1 99390 99390 99390 2 99390
test/run1/scaffolds.reduced.fa 1 99390 39.689 1 99390 99390 99390 2 99390

##################################################
[Mon May 7 11:29:35 2018] Cleaning-up...
#Time elapsed: 0:00:17.376924