BOL: Related items

YAHA

Jit — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 05:38:05 -0600

YAHA, a fast and flexible hash-based aligner. YAHA is as fast and accurate as BWA-SW at finding the single best alignment per query and is dramatically faster and more sensitive than both SSAHA2 and MegaBLAST at finding all possible alignments. Unlike other aligners that report all, or one, alignment per query, or that use simple heuristics to select alignments, YAHA uses a directed acyclic graph to find the optimal set of alignments that cover a query using a biologically relevant breakpoint penalty. YAHA can also report multiple mappings per defined segment of the query. We show that YAHA detects more breakpoints in less time than BWA-SW across all SV classes, and especially excels at complex SVs comprising multiple breakpoints.

Availability: YAHA is currently supported on 64-bit Linux systems. Binaries and sample data are freely available for download from http://faculty.virginia.edu/irahall/YAHA.

Contact:

http://genome.wustl.edu/people/groups/detail/hall-lab/

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3463118/

Pacbio Long Reads Compatible Software and Tools

Archana Malhotra — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 14:19:01 -0500

The following software packages are known to be compatible with PacBio® data, in addition to PacBio's own SMRT® Analysis suite. All packages are believed to be open source or freely available for non-commercial use. See the individual project sites for up-to-date license information. A separate page lists commercial software.

Know of any other open source software for PacBio data? Email us.

Software categories:

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/DevNet/wiki/Compatible-Software

Understanding HiFi Reads !

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 19:48:11 -0500

While little public data is available for either of the new synthetic long read approaches, Illumina showed an example comparison earlier this year at the Festival of Genomics & Biodata conference (FoG 2022). In the IGV screenshot presented (below), synthetic Infinity reads – labeled “Longas” – are at the top, followed by standard Illumina short reads, and PacBio HiFi reads labeled “CCS” depicted at the bottom:

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

QuasR: Quantification and annotation of short reads in R

Neel — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 07:44:05 -0500

The QuasR package (short for Quantify and annotate short reads in R) integrates the functionality of several R packages (such as IRanges (Lawrence et al. 2013) and Rsamtools) and external software (e.g. bowtie, through the Rbowtie package, and HISAT2, through the Rhisat2 package). The package aims to cover the whole analysis workflow of typical high throughput sequencing experiments, starting from the raw sequence reads, over pre-processing and alignment, up to quantification. A single R script can contain all steps of a complete analysis, making it simple to document, reproduce or share the workflow containing all relevant details.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.bioconductor.org/packages/devel/bioc/vignettes/QuasR/inst/doc/QuasR.html

Consed--A Finishing Package (BAM File Viewer, Assembly Editor, Autofinish, Autoreport, Autoedit, and Align Reads To Reference Sequence)

Neel — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 07:16:22 -0600

Supports Illumina, 454, other Next-Gen and Sanger Reads and allows mixtures of these read types
Consed includes BamScape which can view bam files with unlimited numbers of reads. BamScape can bring up consed to edit reads and the reference sequence in targeted regions.
Consed is compatible with Newbler, Cross_match, Phrap, MIRA, Velvet and PCAP output.
Quickly takes the user to each variant site for viewing (also available as an automated report)
Overview of assembly can help detect and fix misassemblies
Editing time reduced by the program's ability to pin-point problem areas
Editing is guided by error probabilities

Address of the bookmark: http://www.phrap.org/consed/consed.html

Structure of Binary files used for storing sequencing data-bam and sff

Rahul Agarwal — Sun, 11 Aug 2013 14:29:49 -0500

Many times bioinformatician needs to parse binary files like bam and sff. Advantage of binary files is that they occupy less space in memory with maximum information content.

Link for those who looking for structure of Bam and sff file:

Bam:

http://samtools.sourceforge.net/SAMv1.pdf (from page 12)

sff file (for Ion torrent and 454 files):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Traces/trace.cgi?cmd=show&f=formats&m=doc&s=format#sff

Binary file Editor and Viewer:

http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

Trust But Verify: Sequencing Your Cell Lines Might Reveal an Uninvited Guest

LEGE — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:07:57 -0500

High-throughput sequencing has become indispensable in cell biology, enabling detailed insights into chromatin structure, gene expression, and regulatory dynamics. Yet, when faced with unexpectedly low mapping rates to the human genome, researchers often rush to troubleshoot technical parameters—sequencer quality, adapter trimming, or aligner settings.

Before you go down that path, consider this critical biological question:
Are you sequencing human cells—or bacterial contamination?

The Silent Saboteur: Mycoplasma in Cell Cultures

Mycoplasma contamination remains one of the most widespread and underdiagnosed issues in tissue culture work. Studies suggest that 15–35% of cell lines in use may be contaminated, often without visible signs. Unlike other microbial infections, Mycoplasma does not produce cloudiness, odor, or a change in pH. Many researchers won’t detect it unless they specifically test for it.

The consequences, however, are profound. Mycoplasma can significantly alter:

Host gene expression patterns
Cell proliferation rates
Epigenetic profiles and chromatin accessibility
Cytokine signaling and immune responses

In short, it can skew your results, compromise your biological conclusions, and invalidate weeks or months of research.

A Simple Diagnostic Step: Map Against Mycoplasma Genomes

If you encounter poor alignment rates to the human genome, consider mapping your reads to a Mycoplasma reference genome—or better yet, use a combined human + Mycoplasma reference. There have been cases where over half of all reads, initially assumed to be from human cells, were in fact bacterial in origin. This check is fast, easy, and could save your project.

How Contamination Happens—and Persists

Mycoplasma is small (0.1–0.3 μm), lacks a cell wall, and can pass through standard filters undetected. Common sources include:

Contaminated reagents (e.g., FBS)
Infected cell lines obtained from other labs
Poor aseptic technique or shared equipment

Once present, it spreads quickly between cultures and can persist for months, silently affecting results.

Why Treatment Is Difficult

While antibiotics such as Plasmocin or BM-Cyclin are sometimes used, they often offer only partial resolution and may themselves alter cell behavior. In many cases, the best course of action is to discard the contaminated culture and start with a fresh, verified stock.

Practical Recommendations for Researchers

Routinely test for Mycoplasma using PCR, qPCR, or fluorescence-based assays
Incorporate contamination screens into your sequencing QC pipeline
Use combined reference genomes when mapping ambiguous reads
Practice strict aseptic technique and monitor all incoming cell lines
Don’t ignore unexplained data anomalies—they might point to contamination

Closing Thought: Contamination Is a Biological Variable

It’s easy to view poor mapping as a technical issue, but sometimes the problem lies deeper—in the biology itself. Mycoplasma contamination doesn’t just interfere with sequencing; it interferes with science. As a research community, we must treat contamination not as an afterthought, but as a key variable to control.

So next time your reads won’t align, don’t just tune the aligner. Ask if your cells are telling the truth—or if they're hiding something.

Shinyheatmap

Jit — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 05:12:11 -0500

Background: Transcriptomics, metabolomics, metagenomics, and other various next-generation sequencing (-omics) fields are known for their production of large datasets. Visualizing such big data has posed technical challenges in biology, both in terms of available computational resources as well as programming acumen. Since heatmaps are used to depict high-dimensional numerical data as a colored grid of cells, efficiency and speed have often proven to be critical considerations in the process of successfully converting data into graphics. For example, rendering interactive heatmaps from large input datasets (e.g., 100k+ rows) has been computationally infeasible on both desktop computers and web browsers. In addition to memory requirements, programming skills and knowledge have frequently been barriers-to-entry for creating highly customizable heatmaps. Results: We propose shinyheatmap: an advanced user-friendly heatmap software suite capable of efficiently creating highly customizable static and interactive biological heatmaps in a web browser. shinyheatmap is a low memory footprint program, making it particularly well-suited for the interactive visualization of extremely large datasets that cannot typically be computed in-memory due to size restrictions. Conclusions: shinyheatmap is hosted online as a freely available web server with an intuitive graphical user interface: http://shinyheatmap.com. The methods are implemented in R, and are available as part of the shinyheatmap project at: https://github.com/Bohdan-Khomtchouk/shinyheatmap.

More at http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/09/21/076463

Address of the bookmark: http://shinyheatmap.com/

JBrowse: Embeddable genome browser built completely with JavaScript and HTML5

Jit — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 09:19:56 -0500

JBrowse is a fast, embeddable genome browser built completely with JavaScript and HTML5, with optional run-once data formatting tools written in Perl. Headline Features: Fast, smooth scrolling and zooming. Explore your genome with unparalleled speed. Scales easily to multi-gigabase genomes and deep-coverage sequencing. Quickly open and view data files on your computer without uploading them to any server. Supports GFF3, BED, FASTA, Wiggle, BigWig, BAM, VCF (with either .tbi or .idx index), REST, and more. BAM, BigBed, BigWig, and VCF data are displayed directly from chunks of the compressed binary files, no conversion needed. Includes an optional “faceted” track selector (see demo) suitable for large installations with thousands of tracks. Very light server resource requirements. In fact, JBrowse has no back-end server code, just tools for formatting data files to be read directly over HTTP. Serve huge datasets from a single low-cost cloud instance. Can run as a stand-alone app on OSX and Windows using the Electron platform Highly extensible plugin architecture, with a large plugin registry of existing examples here https://gmod.github.io/jbrowse-registry https://jbrowse.org/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/GMOD/jbrowse

SPAdes

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 08:37:08 -0500

SPAdes – St. Petersburg genome assembler – is intended for both standard isolates and single-cell MDA bacteria assemblies. This manual will help you to install and run SPAdes. SPAdes version 3.7.1 was released under GPLv2 on March 8, 2016 and can be downloaded from http://bioinf.spbau.ru/en/spades.

Manual at http://spades.bioinf.spbau.ru/release3.7.1/manual.html

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinf.spbau.ru/spades