BOL: Related items

The Gene Detectives: How a New Computational Tool Is Helping Us Read the History Written in Our Genes

BioStar — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:23:42 -0500

Imagine opening an ancient family album with no names, dates, or captions. Some photographs are missing, others have been copied, and a few show people who look almost identical. Your challenge is to discover who is related to whom and reconstruct the family story. In evolutionary biology, scientists face a similar mystery when they study genes. Every genome contains clues about its past, but genes can be duplicated, lost, and changed over millions of years, making their history difficult to trace.

A recent study published in PLOS Computational Biology introduces REvolutionH-tl 2.0 (https://pypi.org/project/revolutionhtl/), a computational tool designed to help solve this mystery. The software analyzes protein sequences and identifies evolutionary relationships between genes. It can help researchers detect important events such as gene duplication, gene loss, and speciation, allowing them to reconstruct how genes evolved across different organisms.

What makes the tool especially interesting is its focus on both speed and interpretation. The researchers compared REvolutionH-tl 2.0 with several existing computational tools and reported that it achieved competitive accuracy while requiring less computational time in their tests. The tool also includes visualization features, helping researchers turn complicated genetic data into evolutionary stories that are easier to explore.

Genes are more than simple sequences of DNA; they are records of life’s long history. Each surviving gene carries traces of the changes that shaped it. By bringing together computational analysis and visualization, REvolutionH-tl 2.0 acts like a detective, helping scientists uncover these hidden stories. Ultimately, tools like this can improve our understanding of how genomes evolved and how genes acquired the roles they perform today.

More at https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013017

genoPlotR - plot gene and genome maps project!

Abhimanyu Singh — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 08:33:41 -0600

genoPlotR is a R package to produce reproducible, publication-grade graphics of gene and genome maps. It allows the user to read from usual format such as protein table files and blast results, as well as home-made tabular files.

Features

Linear representation of several segments of DNA
Comparisons represented by areas between the segments (like Artemis, for example)
Reads from common formats: Genbank, EMBL, blast, Mauve, and from user-generated tab files
Plot several subsegments of the same segment on the same line, separated by a //
Automatic or manual placement of the segments on the plot
Add annotations to all the lines
Create smart, automatic annotations for genomes, based on gene names
Add a user-generated tree
Add a global scale or a scale to each line
Use user-defined graphical functions to represent genes

Address of the bookmark: http://genoplotr.r-forge.r-project.org/

MetaEuk - sensitive, high-throughput gene discovery and annotation for large-scale eukaryotic metagenomics

Jit — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 19:29:32 -0600

MetaEuk is a modular toolkit designed for large-scale gene discovery and annotation in eukaryotic metagenomic contigs. Metaeuk combines the fast and sensitive homology search capabilities of MMseqs2 with a dynamic programming procedure to recover optimal exons sets. It reduces redundancies in multiple discoveries of the same gene and resolves conflicting gene predictions on the same strand. MetaEuk is GPL-licensed open source software that is implemented in C++ and available for Linux and macOS. The software is designed to run on multiple cores.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/soedinglab/metaeuk

DarkHorse

Jit — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 05:37:38 -0500

DarkHorse is a bioinformatic method for rapid, automated identification and ranking of phylogenetically atypical proteins on a genome-wide basis. It works by selecting potential ortholog matches from a reference database of amino acid sequences, then using these matches to calculate a lineage probability index (LPI) score for each genome protein.

LPI scores are inversely proportional to the phylogenetic distance between database match sequences and the query genome. These scores are useful not only for large-scalede novo predictions of horizontally transferred proteins, but can also serve as an independent quality control test for potential horizontal transfer candidates identified by alternative methods, especially those based on nucleic acid signatures. Candidates having high LPI scores are unlikely to have been horizontally transferred, since they are highly conserved among closely related organisms.

One unique and powerful feature of the DarkHorse HGT Candidate database is the opportunity to explore the phylogenetic background of potential HGT donors as well as recipients. The breadth of the database allows not only query sequences, but also their database match partners to be evaluated for sequence similarity or novelty compared to taxonomically related organisms.

DarkHorse is configurable for varying degrees of phylogenetic granularity and protein sequence conservation. Users should consult the references cited below for a complete explanation of parameter selection and result interpretation. A brief tutorial page is also available on-line.

Address of the bookmark: http://darkhorse.ucsd.edu/download.html

Senior Bioinformatics Scientist @ Strand Life Sciences -- Bangalore, India

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 09:23:49 -0600

RESPONSIBILITIES
The candidate is expected to work on a variety of projects related to analysis of data from NGS, Mass Spectrometry, Flow Cytometry and other related modalities. The position expects hands-on work and a strong eye for detail. The candidate will be able to contribute to impactful work spanning patient care, clinical research, and new assay and method development.
REQUIREMENTS
A PhD in a quantitative field (statistics, math, bioinformatics, computer science, physics or similar) and work experience or post-doc experience handling high throughout genomics data.
PREFERENCES
Experience in working in inter-disciplinary groups and ability to author research publications are additional desired qualities.
LOCALE
The position is in Bangalore and reports to the Chief Scientific Officer.
HOW TO APPLY
Write to ramesh[at]strandls.com.

RITA: Rapid identification of high-confidence taxonomic assignments for metagenomic data

Jit — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 08:25:33 -0600

RITA is a standalone software package and Web server for taxonomic assignment of metagenomic sequence reads. By combining homology predictions from BLAST or UBLAST with compositional classifications from a Naive Bayes classifier, RITA is able to achieve very high accuracy on short reads. Unlike other hybrid approaches which combine these predictions for all sequences to be classified, RITA uses a pipeline to first identify cases where both types of classifier are in agreement, which constitute the highest-confidence set. Sequences not classified in this manner are subjected to a series of downstream classification steps.

This work has been accepted for publication:

MacDonald NJ, Parks DH, and Beiko RG. Rapid identification of taxonomic assignments. Accepted to Nucleic Acids Research April 4, 2012.

If you have any questions or bug reports, please let us know at .

Address of the bookmark: http://kiwi.cs.dal.ca/Software/RITA

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/

Environment for Tree Exploration (ETE) is a Python programming toolkit that assists in the recontruction, manipulation, analysis and visualization of phylogenetic trees

Rahul Nayak — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 05:32:33 -0600

The Environment for Tree Exploration (ETE) is a Python programming toolkit that assists in the recontruction, manipulation, analysis and visualization of phylogenetic trees (although clustering trees or any other tree-like data structure are also supported).

Other tools

https://github.com/shenwei356/taxonkit

ETE, version: 3.1.1
BioPython, version: 1.73
taxadb, version: 0.10.1
TaxonKit, version: 0.5.0

Address of the bookmark: https://pypi.org/project/ete3/3.1.1/

FigTree

Rahul Nayak — Wed, 19 Jul 2017 08:06:45 -0500

FigTree is designed as a graphical viewer of phylogenetic trees and as a program for producing publication-ready figures. As with most of my programs, it was written for my own needs so may not be as polished and feature-complete as a commercial program. In particular it is designed to display summarized and annotated trees produced by BEAST.

Address of the bookmark: http://tree.bio.ed.ac.uk/software/figtree/

k-mers tutorial - classification and taxonomy

Neel — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 10:28:43 -0500

DNA k-mers underlie much of our assembly work, and we (along with many others!) have spent a lot of time thinking about how to store k-mer graphs efficiently, discard redundant data, and count them efficiently.

More recently, we've been enthused about using k-mer based similarity measures and computing and searching k-mer-based sketch search databases for all the things.

But I haven't spent too much talking about using k-mers for taxonomy, although that has become an ahem area of interest recently, if you read into our papers a bit.

In this blog post I'm going to fix this by doing a little bit of a literature review and waxing enthusiastic about other people's work. Then in a future blog post I'll talk about how we're building off of this work in fun! and interesting? ways!

Address of the bookmark: http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2017-something-about-kmers.html