BOL: Related items

Ktrim: an extra-fast and accurate adapter- and quality-trimmer for sequencing data

Jit — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 21:39:05 -0600

Ktrim is written in C++ for GNU Linux/Unix platforms. After uncompressing the source package, you can find an executable file ktrim under bin/ directory compiled using g++ v4.8.5 and linked with libz v1.2.7 for Linux x86_64 system. If you could not run it (which is usually caused by low version of libc++ or libz library) or you want to build a version optimized for your system, you can re-compile the programs:

user@linux$ make clean && make

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/hellosunking/Ktrim

Understand Social Media Importance for Researchers With Benefits to the Strategy !

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 23:21:11 -0600

Why have so many researchers embraced Facebook or Instagram pages? They understand the importance of social media and how it adds value. Now that consumers often experience interactions with companies that are not face-to-face, shifting to social media has become an ideal way to actively engage with researchers.

With social media, you have the opportunity to highlight all the best aspects of your research with one click. What information would be most useful for your potential and current research lab to have easy access to?

Don’t leave this vital question unanswered! Social media’s importance is seen when you realize your social pages become a hub for users to easily find out more about your research and what you care about, without clicking away from the app or website they’re already browsing.

You can use social media as a platform to distinguish your research from competing labs, too. Showing researchers that your research personality is clearly defined and consistent is valuable, but you also want to make sure you are also wrapping your research identity in with common trends on the internet (as appropriate) to show your alike researchers that you are up-to-date on the world around you.

Remember, you don’t want to sound inauthentic! Understanding the importance of social media and investing in it gives you the ability to show that you can connect on a personal level with your alike researchers.

The importance of social media is seen in that it provides value while also creating a low-cost way to market your research. Plus, social media allows you to have direct control over the messages you share with the world.

Although increasing and maintaining your presence effectively on social media is important, it is essential to be realistic about the amount of energy and time you might need to invest in reaching larger audiences.

These days, if you don’t have an online presence it affects which opportunities will come your way. I showed an example of someone looking for ECR conference speakers on Twitter and all suggestions in response to this were for ECRs who were on Twitter.

When someone Googles your name, what do they get? What do you want them to see? I gave my opinion on some profiles:

Google Scholar – essential. Sign up, and once you have a publication, make your profile public. Website – essential. As a minimum we add each person to the lab website with links to their professional profiles.
ORCiD – required. All lab members need an ORCiD for our publications. Easy to set up a profile and link to services that will auto-update it for you, e.g. when you publish a paper.
Twitter – important. Possibly essential these days. Many scientists are on Twitter and there are a lot of benefits to joining. It is somehow more professional than other social networks. Twitter handles can even be included on papers. Great for networking with other scientists and for following meetings. This a great guide to getting started.
LinkedIn – important outside of academia. I personally dislike LinkedIn, but it is essential if you are job-hunting outside of academic circles.
ImpactStory – not essential but fun. You can make a profile based on your ORCiD. It’s a good way to keep track of the attention that your work gets online.
Publons – might become important. This is a way to log your review activity.

Many places to set up an author profile, e.g. researcherid. Most are not worth bothering with if you have ORCiD and/or Google Scholar page.

ResearchGate – not important. It’s incredibly popular but I have never needed it and dislike it for similar reasons to LinkedIn.

How active you are on these platforms determines what you will get out of them, but as a minimum, try and keep them active and up-to-date.

I left it to the people in the lab to setup whatever accounts they like. A possibility is to get people to sign up right there in the session, but I think it’s important for everyone to make a choice about what profile(s) they want to create. The only one I require people in the lab to setup is ORCiD.

String graph based genome assembly software and tools !

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 17:17:38 -0600

In graph theory, a string graph is an intersection graph of curves in the plane; each curve is called a "string". String graphs were first proposed by E. W. Myers in a 2005 publication. In recent Genome Research paper describing an innovative approach for assembling large genomes from NGS data caught our attention for several reasons. i) it give different "string graph" prospective of long lasting genome assembly problem ii) the paper is coauthored by Jared Simpson, the developer of ABySS assembler and Richard Durbin. iii) Simpson-Durbin algorithm is that it does not rely on de Bruijn graphs, and instead employs a different graph construction approach called ‘string graph’.

Following are the genome assembly tools based on string graph:

1.SGA (String Graph Assembler) https://github.com/jts/sga

Assembles large genomes from high coverage short read data. SGA is designed as a modular set of programs, which are used to form an assembly pipeline. SGA implements a set of assembly algorithms based on the FM-index. As the FM-index is a compressed data structure, the algorithms are very memory efficient. The SGA assembly has three distinct phases. The first phase corrects base calling errors in the reads. The second phase assembles contigs from the corrected reads. The third phase uses paired end and/or mate pair data to build scaffolds from the contigs. The output of this software is a PDF report that allows the properties of the genome and data quality to be visually explored. By providing more information to the user at the start of an assembly project, this software will help increase awareness of the factors that make a given assembly easy or difficult, assist in the selection of software and parameters and help to troubleshoot an assembly if it runs into problems.

2. SAGE: String-overlap Assembly of GEnomes https://github.com/lucian-ilie/SAGE2

SAGE, for de novo genome assembly. As opposed to most assemblers, which are de Bruijn graph based, SAGE uses the string-overlap graph. SAGE builds upon great existing work on string-overlap graph and maximum likelihood assembly, bringing an important number of new ideas, such as the efficient computation of the transitive reduction of the string overlap graph, the use of (generalized) edge multiplicity statistics for more accurate estimation of read copy counts, and the improved use of mate pairs and min-cost flow for supporting edge merging. The assemblies produced by SAGE for several short and medium-size genomes compared favourably with those of existing leading assemblers.

3. FSG: Fast String Graph

The new integrated assembler has been assessed on a standard benchmark, showing that fast string graph (FSG) is significantly faster than SGA while maintaining a moderate use of main memory, and showing practical advantages in running FSG on multiple threads. Moreover, we have studied the effect of coverage rates on the running times.

4. BASE https://github.com/dhlbh/BASE

It enhances the classic seed-extension approach by indexing the reads efficiently to generate adaptive seeds that have high probability to appear uniquely in the genome. Such seeds form the basis for BASE to build extension trees and then to use reverse validation to remove the branches based on read coverage and paired-end information, resulting in high-quality consensus sequences of reads sharing the seeds. Such consensus sequences are then extended to contigs. BASE is a practically efficient tool for constructing contig, with significant improvement in quality for long NGS reads. It is relatively easy to extend BASE to include scaffolding.

5. Fermi https://github.com/lh3/fermi/

Fermi is a de novo assembler with a particular focus on assembling Illumina short sequence reads from a mammal-sized genome. In addition to the role of a typical assembler, fermi also aims to preserve heterozygotes which are often collapsed by other assemblers. Its ultimate goal is to find a minimal set of unitigs to represent all the information in raw reads.

If you want to learn about String Graph assembler, please read the following papers -

i) The Fragment Assembly String Graph - E. W. Myers

This paper describes the String Graph concept.

ii) Efficient construction of an assembly string graph using the FM-index - Jared T. Simpson and Richard Durbin

This earlier paper from Simpson and Durbin

iii) Efficient de novo assembly of large genomes using compressed data structures - Jared T. Simpson and Richard Durbin

Genome assembly stats plotting

Jit — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 03:45:39 -0600

A de novo genome assembly can be summarised b

y a number of metrics, including:

Overall assembly length
Number of scaffolds/contigs
Length of longest scaffold/contig
Scaffold/contig N50 and N90Assembly base composition, in particular percentage GC and percentage Ns
CEGMA completeness
Scaffold/contig length/count distribution

assembly-stats supports two widely used presentations of these values, tabular and cumulative length plots, and introduces an additional circular plot that summarises most commonly used assembly metrics in a single visualisation. Each of these presentations is generated using javascript from a common (JSON) data structure, allowing toggling between alternative views, and each can be applied to a single or multiple assemblies to allow direct comparison of alternate assemblies.

Tabular presentation allows direct comparison of exact values between assemblies, the limitations of this approach lie in the necessary omission of distributions and the challenge of interpreting ratios of values that may vary by several orders of magnitude.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/rjchallis/assembly-stats

SWALO: Scaffolding with assembly likelihood optimization

Jit — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 02:45:16 -0500

SWALO (scaffolding with assembly likelihood optimization) is a method for scaffolding based on likelihood of genome assemblies computed using generative models for sequencing. Please email your questions, comments, suggestions, and bug reports to atif.bd@gmail.com.

Address of the bookmark: https://atifrahman.github.io/SWALO/

Converting a VCF into a FASTA given some reference !

Jit — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 10:03:53 -0500

Samtools/BCFtools (Heng Li) provides a Perl script vcfutils.pl which does this, the function vcf2fq (lines 469-528)

This script has been modified by others to convert InDels as well, e.g. this by David Eccles

./vcf2fq.pl -f <input.fasta> <all-site.vcf> > <output.fastq>

https://github.com/gringer/bioinfscripts/blob/master/vcf2fq.pl

https://github.com/lh3/samtools/blob/master/bcftools/vcfutils.pl

SKESA: strategic k-mer extension for scrupulous assemblies

Jit — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 04:45:41 -0600

SKESA is a DeBruijn graph-based de-novo assembler designed for assembling reads of microbial genomes sequenced using Illumina. Comparison with SPAdes and MegaHit shows that SKESA produces assemblies that have high sequence quality and contiguity, handles low-level contamination in reads, is fast, and produces an identical assembly for the same input when assembled multiple times with the same or different compute resources.

Source code for SKESA is freely available at https://github.com/ncbi/SKESA/releases.

Research Paper @ Link

SKESA algorithm are as follows:

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ncbi/SKESA/releases

Versatile genome assembly evaluation with QUAST-LG

Jit — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 22:06:31 -0600

QUAST-LG is an extension of QUAST intended for evaluating large-scale genome assemblies (up to mammalian-size).

QUAST-LG is included in the QUAST package starting from version 5.0.0 (download the latest release). Run QUAST as usual and do not forget to add ‐‐large option to your command!

A short list of the new features (see CHANGES for all):

Significant speedup achieved by both use of new fast aligner (minimap2) and the refactoring of alignment analyzing modules
New k-mer-based completeness and correctness metrics
BUSCO added for enhanced reference-free analysis
The concept of upper bound assembly (theoretical limits on the assembly completeness and contiguity for a given genome and set of reads)

Address of the bookmark: http://cab.spbu.ru/software/quast-lg/

List of tools frequently used while genome assembly

BioStar — Tue, 22 Jan 2019 09:39:02 -0600

List of tools frequently used while genome assembly:

I have used the following assemblers

Spades (v. 3.10.1)
CANU (v. 1.6)
Unicycler (v. v0.4.1)
Miniasm (v. 0.2-r137-dirty)

I have used the following mappers

minimap2 (v. 2.0rc1-r232)
minimap (v. 0.2-r124-dirty)
bwa (v. 0.7.12-r1039)

I have used the following polishing tools

Racon (v. not available)
Pilon (v. 1.18)
Nanopolish (v. 0.8.3)

I have used the following tools to assess genome assembly characteristics

ANI.pl (https://github.com/chjp/ANI)
CheckM (v. 1.0.7)
Prokka (v. 1.12)
QUAST (v. 2.3)
mummer (v. not available)

If you have any ideas or superior tools we have missed please let us know in the comments.

TRITEX sequence assembly pipeline for Triticeae genomes

Jit — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 09:47:14 -0500

The pipeline is open-source and hosted in a public Bitbucket repository.

TRITEX has been run on highly inbred genotypes of barley (Hordeum vulgare), tetraploid wheat (Triticum turgidum) and hexaploid wheat (T. aestivum) with reasonable results: super-scaffold N50 values in the range of dozens of Mb and pseudomolecules with better gene space representation than a BAC-by-BAC assembly. It has never been tested and is not expected to work on heterozygous or autopolyploid genomes.

A protocol for generating chromosome-conformation capture sequencing (Hi-C) data suitable for use with the pipeline is described in Himmelbach et al. 2018. Refer to the technical notes of 10X Genomics on how to generate Chromium data.

Address of the bookmark: https://tritexassembly.bitbucket.io/