BOL: Related items

The Genes That Travel Together: A Genomic Detective Story

BioStar — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:00:36 -0500

Imagine looking through thousands of microbial genomes and discovering two genes that repeatedly appear together. The obvious conclusion is that they must somehow be connected—that perhaps they work together, participate in the same pathway, or depend on each other. But evolution has a way of leaving misleading clues. What if these two genes are found together simply because they were inherited from the same ancient ancestor? In that case, their apparent association may have little to do with their biological function; it may simply be a reflection of shared evolutionary history. This is the intriguing problem addressed by CORGIAS (https://github.com/ynishimuraLv/corgias), a computational framework developed to distinguish genuine gene associations from correlations created by common ancestry.

Instead of asking only whether two genes occur together across genomes, CORGIAS asks a deeper question: did these genes actually evolve together, repeatedly gaining or losing their presence in concert, or are they merely travelling together because of their inherited history? The framework introduces two complementary approaches, Ancestral State Adjustment (ASA) and the Simultaneous EVolution test (SEV), which incorporate evolutionary information into the search for gene associations. This distinction becomes increasingly important as genome sequencing continues to uncover enormous numbers of microbial genomes, many from organisms that have never been cultured and whose genes remain functionally mysterious. In this growing genomic landscape, simply finding a gene is no longer enough—we need clues about what that gene might be doing. CORGIAS approaches this problem almost like a genomic detective: rather than treating every association as evidence, it reconstructs the evolutionary story behind the association and asks whether the evidence survives that history. By doing so, it offers a way to separate coincidence from biological connection and potentially uncover functional relationships hidden within the vast microbial genomic landscape. The broader message is beautifully simple: genes do not evolve in isolation, and understanding what they do may require us to look beyond where they are today and reconstruct how they arrived there. Sometimes, the most important clue in a genome is not the gene itself, but the evolutionary journey it has taken.

More at https://academic.oup.com/nargab/article/7/4/lqaf182/8377910?

SDA: Long-read sequence and assembly of segmental duplications

Jit — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 10:00:57 -0600

Segmental Duplication Assembler (SDA; https://github.com/mvollger/SDA) constructs graphs in which paralogous sequence variants define the nodes and long-read sequences provide attraction and repulsion edges, enabling the partition and assembly of long reads corresponding to distinct paralogs.

https://github.com/mvollger/SDA

Address of the bookmark: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-018-0236-3

GRAbB: Selective Assembly of Genomic Regions, a New Niche for Genomic Research

Rahul Nayak — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 18:58:16 -0600

GRAbB is shown to be more efficient than MITObim in terms of speed, memory and disk usage. The other functionalities (handling multiple targets simultaneously and extracting homologous regions) of the new program are not matched by other programs. The program is available with explanatory documentation at https://github.com/b-brankovics/grabb. GRAbB has been tested on Ubuntu (12.04 and 14.04), Fedora (23), CentOS (7.1.1503) and Mac OS X (10.7). Furthermore, GRAbB is available as a docker repository: brankovics/grabb (https://hub.docker.com/r/brankovics/grabb/).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/b-brankovics/grabb

ANGES: reconstructing ANcestral GEnomeS maps

Abhimanyu Singh — Thu, 18 May 2017 05:27:08 -0500

This page contains the software ANGES 1.01, that aims at reconstucting ancestral genome maps from homologous markers in extant related genomes.

Download

Program, version 1.01 (July 10, 2012, documentation updated in August 2014)
Examples with results (featured ancestors: boreoeutherian, amniote, yeasts, Burkholderia, monocots); please refer to the documentation of the distribution above.

Address of the bookmark: http://paleogenomics.irmacs.sfu.ca/ANGES/

Ancestral sequence reconstruction steps !

Surabhi Chaudhary — Fri, 18 May 2018 08:28:26 -0500

Ancestral sequence reconstruction (ASR) – also known as ancestral gene/sequence reconstruction/resurrection – is a technique used in the study of molecular evolution. The method consists of the synthesis of an ancestral gene and expression of the corresponding ancestral protein. The idea of protein 'resurrection' was suggested in 1963 by Pauling and Zuckerkandl. Some early efforts were made in the eighties-nineties, led by the laboratory of Steven A. Benner, showing the potential of this technique – one that only started to be fulfilled in the post-genomic era. Thanks to the improvement of algorithms and of better sequencing and synthesis techniques, the method was developed further in the early 2000s to allow the resurrection of a greater variety of and much more ancient genes. Over the last decade, ancestral protein resurrection has developed as a strategy to reveal the mechanisms and dynamics of protein evolution.

BEAST is the best way to predict the ancestral structure. but, I suggest following steps?

1- Alignments "Mafft - http://mafft.cbrc.jp/alignment/software/source.html"

mafft --maxiterate 1000 --reorder --thread 24 --genafpair Dataset.fasta > Dataset_Alig.fasta

2- Your dataset has a good phylogenetic signal, is possible to perform with Tree-Puzzle "http://www.tree-puzzle.de";

3 - This dataset which the saturation index, I perform with "http://dambe.bio.uottawa.ca/dambe.asp";

4- Has evidence of possible recombination in your dataset, the evaluate if this presence or absence, because this may to influence the grouping of clades, I perform with

---recombination

4.1- Phi-test, implemented in SplitTree4"http://www.splitstree.org", (.nex file)

4.2- GARD deployed in webserver in the DataMonkey "http://www.datamonkey.org/" - turning to the amino acid seaview -> view proteins -> save as ...) Ideally do a tree-based groups.

4.3- RDP4 for download and installation on Windows in "http://web.cbio.uct.ac.za/~darren/rdp.html"

4.4- Hyphy (Mac, Windows, Linux) in "http://hyphy.org/w/index.php/Download"

4.5- Path-o-Gen (temporal structure of a tree input file -> arquivo.tre)

These steps above, I call of pre-processing to inferences phylogenetic...

5- Perform phylogenetic tree, used Bayesian Inference with Molecular Clock, but is necessary Clock Testing:

- This step is performed with program Beast (Beauti, Beast and TreeAnnotator), and Tracer_v1.5 more FigTree to inspection.

- Tutorials: http://beast.bio.ed.ac.uk/tutorials

- Downloads: http://beast.bio.ed.ac.uk/downloads

MGRA: Breakpoint graphs and ancestral genome reconstructions

Jit — Tue, 25 Jul 2017 08:48:25 -0500

MGRA (Multiple Genome Rearrangements and Ancestors) is a tool for reconstruction of ancestor genomes and evolutionary history of extant genomes.

It takes as an input a set of genomes represented as sequences of genes (or synteny blocks) and produces such sequences for ancestral genomes at the internal nodes of the phylogenetic tree.

The phylogenetic tree may be also specified completely or partially, in the latter case MGRA can reconstruct conserved ancestral regions (CARs) of the ancestral genome of interest.

Since version 2 MGRA supports gene insertion and deletions in addition to genome rearrangements and allows the input genomes to have different gene content.

It also can reconstruct most plausible phylogenetic tree based on the rearrangement characters.

Address of the bookmark: http://mgra.cblab.org/

HiCanu: accurate assembly of segmental duplications, satellites, and allelic variants from high-fidelity long reads

BioStar — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 22:49:31 -0500

HiCanu, a significant modification of the Canu assembler designed to leverage the full potential of HiFi reads via homopolymer compression, overlap-based error correction, and aggressive false overlap filtering.

More at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.14.992248v3

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/marbl/canu

Gblocks: eliminates poorly aligned positions and divergent regions of a DNA or protein alignment

Poonam Mahapatra — Sat, 02 Jun 2018 07:36:05 -0500

Gblocks eliminates poorly aligned positions and divergent regions of a DNA or protein alignment so that it becomes more suitable for phylogenetic analysis. This server implements the most important features of the Gblocks program to make its use as simple as possible without loosing the functionality that it is necessary in most of the cases. Other options can be changed in the stand-alone program. You can see here an example output file showing the blocks selected from a protein alignment. Further information can be found in the online documentation.

Address of the bookmark: http://molevol.cmima.csic.es/castresana/Gblocks_server.html

GenoFig: a user-friendly application for the visualization and comparison of genomic regions

BioStar — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 23:06:58 -0500

Tool for graphical vizualisation of annotated genetic regions, and homologous regions comparison. It is an independent recoding of Easyfig 2 initially developped by at the S. Beatson Lab [https://mjsull.github.io/Easyfig/]

Download the GenoFig source code using the 'Download' button on top of this page. Cloning is currently not available for people not member of the INRAE French Institution. After decompression, open a terminal in the folder containing the decompressed files and run:

conda env create -f extras/requirements.yml
extras/SETUP.sh

Address of the bookmark: https://forgemia.inra.fr/public-pgba/genofig

Ancestral Genomes: a resource for reconstructed ancestral genes and genomes across the tree of life

Abhimanyu Singh — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 08:16:27 -0500

Ancestral Genomes (http://ancestralgenomes.org) is a resource for comprehensive reconstructions of these ‘fossil genomes’. Comprehensive sets of protein-coding genes have been reconstructed for 78 genomes of now-extinct species that were the common ancestors of extant species from across the tree of life.

Address of the bookmark: http://ancestralgenomes.org/