BOL: Related items

Five key traits to seek out in potential bioinformatics candidates !!!

Jit — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 12:53:50 -0500

Genomics and proteomics data are being collected in bulk, but mostly, traditional biologist don’t know what to do with it. Perhaps this is the reason why (not only this!!! ) computational biologist/bioinformatics scientists are hot commodities in the research world.

In fact, there are huge demands for expert biological data analyst. It’s a fairly new (not exactly) hot area, these bioinformatician are invaluable because they know and understand the significance of biological data for your research and how you can use it for better understanding of biological problems.

The bioinformatics can discover biological patterns and stories in genomic and proteomics data. They can develop the pipeline needed to properly collect, store and analyse it.

Once your research group is ready to make a larger investment and hire a bioinformatician to gain a competitive edge, there are several key traits to seek out in potential candidates. The best bioinformatician are:

1. Highly Skilled - programming skills, experience with the biological software and tools.

The biological data won’t illuminate much if the scientist analysing it doesn’t possess practical programming skills, experience with the biological software and tools and a thorough understanding of basic biological stuff. A solid background in mathematics and statistics is also an indispensable trait.

2. Insight - Real vision, robust understanding and deep insight.

In order to hire the best bioinformatics and computational biologist scientist for your needs, it is always recommended and mostly practiced by the recruiters, to ask each contender to write and develop a sample script/presentation based on a specific set of data you provide. Then, explore the approaches used to deal with data provided and pick up those candidates who convey real vision, robust understanding and deep insight.

3. Energetic – Curiosity to explore

Mostly natural curiosity and enthusiasm for solving big biological problems coupled with an ability to transform data into a scientific stories may place one candidate above the rest. In addition to achieve that, the bioinformatician should be agile enough to quickly modify their methods to suit changes within a particular research.

4. Researcher – Publications

Look for someone who has a keen sense and understanding of concern biological problems. You can judge it by looking at previously published papers and data. It is always recommended to have a look at GitHub and other repository for codes written by her/him.

5. Impressive communicator - Insight that can’t be expressed is worthless.

Good bioinformatics scientists are able to uncover biological patterns and are willing to explain those patterns in clear and helpful ways through thoughtful and open communication. In other words, they should must have good scientific writing skills. A computational biologis/bioinformatician should know how to present the data and tell a scientific story through numbers/images.

MALVA: Genotyping by Mapping-free ALlele Detection of Known VAriants

Jit — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 03:39:22 -0600

MALVA is able to genotype multi-allelic SNPs and indels without mapping reads

MALVA calls correctly more indels than the most widely adopted genotyping pipelines

Mapping-free approaches are as accurate as alignment-based ones, while being faster

More at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004219302366

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004219302366

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/AlgoLab/malva

Computational resources for TE discovery and TE detection

Abhimanyu Singh — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 10:29:18 -0600

Transposable Elements (TEs) to genome structure and evolution as well as their impact on genome sequencing, assembly, annotation and alignment has generated increasing interest in developing new methods for their computational analysis.

Following are the list of resource and location for TE discovery and TE detection:

BLASTER suite http://urgi.versailles.inra.fr/development/blaster/

Censor http://www.girinst.org/censor/download.php

find_ltr http://darwin.informatics.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/evolution/ltr.pl

FINDMITE http://jaketu.biochem.vt.edu/dl_software.htm

HMMER http://hmmer.janelia.org/

LTR_FINDER http://tlife.fudan.edu.cn/ltr_finder/

LTR_STRUC http://www.genetics.uga.edu/retrolab/data/LTR_Struc.html

LTR_MINER http://genomebiology.com/2004/5/10/R79/suppl/s7

LTR_par http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/~ananth/software.htm

MAK http://wesslercluster.plantbio.uga.edu/mak06.html

MaskerAid http://blast.wustl.edu/maskeraid/

mer-engine http://mer-engine.cshl.edu/mer-home.php

mreps http://bioinfo.lifl.fr/mreps/

PILER http://www.drive5.com/piler/

PLOTREP http://repeats.abc.hu/cgi-bin/plotrep.pl

RepBase http://www.girinst.org/

RepeatFinder http://cbcb.umd.edu/software/RepeatFinder/

RepeatGluer http://nbcr.sdsc.edu/euler/intro_tmp.htm

RepeatMasker http://www.repeatmasker.org/

RepeatRunner http://www.yandell-lab.org/repeat_runner/index.html

RepeatScout http://repeatscout.bioprojects.org/

repeat-match http://mummer.sourceforge.net/

REPuter http://www.genomes.de/

RetroMap http://www.burchsite.com/bioi/RetroMapHome.html

SMaRTFinder http://bioinf.dimi.uniud.it/software/software/smartfinder

Tandem Repeats Finder http://tandem.bu.edu/trf/trf.html

Transposon Cluster Finder http://www.mssm.edu/labs/warbup01/paper/files.html

TE nest http://www.plantgdb.org/prj/TE_nest/TE_nest.html

TRANSPO http://alggen.lsi.upc.es/recerca/search/transpo/transpo.html

TSDfinder http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CBBresearch/Landsman/TSDfinder/

Tu Lab TE tools http://jaketu.biochem.vt.edu/dl_software.htm

WU-BLAST http://blast.wustl.edu

ReMILO: reference assisted misassembly detection algorithm using short and long reads.

Jit — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 04:27:49 -0500

ReMILO, a reference assisted misassembly detection algorithm that uses both short reads and PacBio SMRT long reads. ReMILO aligns the initial short reads to both the contigs and reference genome, and then constructs a novel data structure called red-black multipositional de Bruijn graph to detect misassemblies. In addition, ReMILO also aligns the contigs to long reads and find their differences from the long reads to detect more misassemblies.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/songc001/remilo

HiTE: a fast and accurate dynamic boundary adjustment approach for full-length Transposable Elements detection and annotation in Genome Assemblies

LEGE — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 09:34:04 -0500

HiTE is a Python software that uses a dynamic boundary adjustment approach to detect and annotate full-length Transposable Elements in Genome Assemblies. In comparison to other tools, HiTE demonstrates superior performance in detecting a greater number of full-length TEs.

panHiTE

We have developed panHiTE, a comprehensive and accurate pipeline for TE detection in large-scale population genomes. It has been successfully applied to hundreds of plant population genomes, demonstrating its effectiveness and scalability.

For detailed instructions, please refer to the panHiTE tutorial.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/CSU-KangHu/HiTE

EMBL Postdoc position in Bacterial Gene Gain Loss

Thu, 20 Aug 2015 14:09:21 -0500

A post-doctoral fellowship is available in the research groups of Nick Goldman (EBI) and John Welch (Genetics Department, Cambridge University) under the EMBL-EBI / Cambridge Computational Biomedical Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme.

The project is on bacterial gene gain and loss and emerging pathogenicity, and is described in full here: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/research/postdocs/ebpods/projects/goldman-welch-2015 . The EMBL-EBI / Cambridge Computational Biomedical Postdoctoral (“EBPOD”)

The closing date for applications is 3 September 2015. Nick Goldman EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute Nick Goldman

More at https://www.ebi.ac.uk/research/postdocs/ebpods/projects/goldman-welch-2015

Research fellow (PhD candidate) in computational biology – 2 positions

Fri, 25 Apr 2014 20:19:58 -0500

At the Department of Informatics two 4-year positions as research fellow are available in the field of computational biology connected to the Computational Biology Unit. The positions are linked to the project “Integrated genomics - linking transcriptional and translational regulation over developmental time” supported by the Bergen Research Foundation

The fate of a cell is ultimately the product of the regulation of its genes. Gene regulation is a coordinated process acting at multiple levels of which transcription and translation are the most prominent. The Valen group is dedicated to the fundamental question of how transcription and translation is integrated to obtain the desired protein abundance. The recent development of high-throughput next generation sequencing techniques to monitor both active translation and transcription has made it possible to study this connection at the genome scale.

This project aims to elucidate the links between regulation of translation and transcription. The applicant will analyze next generation sequencing data and model gene regulation on a genome-wide level to identify the features that affect the translational output of transcripts. The work will be done in close collaboration with experimental scientists who will test the predictions of the computational models.

Additional information on the position can be obtained by contacting Eivind Valen (eivind.valen@ii.uib.no).

The research fellow must take part in the University’s approved PhD program leading to the degree within a time limit of 3 years. Application for admission to the PhD program, including a project plan outline for the training module, will be worked out in collaboration with the research group in question.

In total, the fellowship period is 4 years, 25 % of this will be allocated to teaching and/or administrative duties. The fellowship period may be reduced if the successful applicant has held previous employment as a research fellow or similar.

http://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/102235/research-fellow-phd-candidate-in-computational-biology-2-positions

The 8000 years old Tibetian gene mutation !!!

Neel — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 21:57:44 -0500

A new study has provided insight into how gene mutation around 8,000 years ago helped Tibetans' to survive in the thin air on the Tibetan Plateau, where an average elevation is of 14,800 feet.

A study led by University of Utah scientists is the first to find a genetic cause for the adaptation, a single DNA base pair change that dates back 8,000 years and demonstrate how it contributes to the Tibetans' ability to live in low oxygen conditions.

About 8,000 years ago, the gene EGLN1 changed by a single DNA base pair. Today, a relatively short time later on the scale of human history, 88 percent of Tibetans have the genetic variation, and it was virtually absent from closely related lowland Asians. The findings indicate the genetic variation endows its carriers with an advantage.

In those without the adaptation, low oxygen caused their blood to become thick with oxygen-carrying red blood cells, an attempt to feed starved tissues, which could cause long-term complications such as heart failure. The researchers found that the newly identified genetic variation protected Tibetans by decreasing the over-response to low oxygen.

Reference: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7513/abs/nature13408.html

Katju Lab

Fri, 26 Feb 2016 03:25:32 -0600

TheLab seek to understand the genetic factors contributing to genomic variation and phenotypic diversity. To this end, we employ molecular and bioinformatic tools to study evolutionary processes at the level of populations, both experimental and natural, and genomes. Our research interests encompass a wide range of topics, including the evolution of organellar and nuclear genomes, gene duplication and the origin of novel function, and the fitness and phenotypic consequences of mutation in evolution. For details regards ongoing projects, please see the Research page.

http://katjulab.com/research.html

GeneValidator - Identify problems with predicted genes

Poonam Mahapatra — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 06:00:03 -0500

GeneValidator helps in identifing problems with gene predictions and provide useful information extracted from analysing orthologs in BLAST databases. The results produced can be used by biocurators and researchers who need accurate gene predictions.

If you would like to use GeneValidator on a few sequences, see our online GeneValidator Web App -http://genevalidator.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk.

If you use GeneValidator in your work, please cite us as follows:

Dragan M‡, Moghul MI‡, Priyam A, Bustos C & Wurm Y. 2016. GeneValidator: identify problems with protein-coding gene predictions. Bioinformatics, doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btw015.

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