BOL: Related items

QuorUM: An Error Corrector for Illumina Reads

BioStar — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 23:26:55 -0600

We produce trimmed and error-corrected reads that result in assemblies with longer contigs and fewer errors. We compared QuorUM against several published error correctors and found that it is the best performer in most metrics we use. QuorUM is efficiently implemented making use of current multi-core computing architectures and it is suitable for large data sets (1 billion bases checked and corrected per day per core)

Address of the bookmark: http://www.genome.umd.edu/

Common steps for reads mapping !

BioStar — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 02:48:02 -0600

Mapping reads to a reference genome is an essential step in many types of genomic analysis, such as variant calling and gene expression analysis. Here are some general steps to follow for mapping reads to a genome:

Choose a read mapper: There are many read mappers available, such as BWA, Bowtie, and HISAT2. Choose a mapper that is appropriate for your type of data and research question.
Index the reference genome: Before mapping reads, the reference genome needs to be indexed. This involves creating an index of the genome sequence that allows the mapper to quickly find matches to the reads. Most mappers have their own indexing tools.
Prepare the read data: The reads should be in a format that is compatible with the mapper. Most mappers accept FASTQ or BAM files. Depending on the quality of the data, it may need to be filtered or trimmed before mapping.
Run the mapper: The mapper is run with the command-line interface or using a graphical user interface. The specific command depends on the mapper being used, but typically involves specifying the input data, reference genome, and output file format.
Evaluate the mapping results: After the mapping is complete, the results should be evaluated. This includes assessing the quality of the mapping, such as the mapping rate, the number of mapped reads, and the mapping quality score.
Post-processing: Depending on the analysis being performed, post-processing of the mapped reads may be necessary. This can include filtering reads based on quality, removing duplicate reads, and calling variants.

Overall, mapping reads to a reference genome is a complex process that requires careful consideration of the type of data, the research question, and the specific mapper being used.

Simulating the Unseen: New Tools Reshaping Metagenomic Research

LEGE — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 09:42:30 -0500

When benchmarking a new metagenomic pipeline the first step is generally to face a simple problem. A bioinformatician might have a good deal of real sequencing data, but there's a drawback in that the actual biological composition underlying those reads is almost never known. What organisms really were there? In what quantities? How many sequencing errors occurred? Can the pipeline correctly reconstruct the community? Since the true answers are unknown, it is difficult to deal with these questions.

Metagenomic simulators are a way of dealing with this issue; they produce artificial sequencing datasets in which both the composition of the microorganisms and the expected results are known. Researchers can then test a pipeline on such a controlled dataset and see precisely how well it functions. However, as metagenomic studies have become larger, more diverse, and more complex, simply generating artificial reads is no longer sufficient. The simulators now have to replicate community variation, sequencing errors, different sequencing platforms, massive data volumes, and even laboratory-based biases.

MIDASim (2024) was designed with a particular emphasis on microbial community dynamics. Unlike previous tools which regarded each simulated sample as individual, MIDASim is able to efficiently generate realistic multi-sample microbiome datasets, covering the cases where changes over time are being tracked. This feature is particularly useful when investigating how microbial communities vary between people, different experimental setups, or at various times. By overcoming the computational limitations of earlier simulation methods, MIDASim has made it easier to carry out large and complex microbiome simulation studies.

A major challenge is scale. Since modern metagenomic projects can involve millions or even billions of sequencing reads, generating such large synthetic datasets can become a significant computational problem. In order to tackle this issue, Izzy (2025) was developed. As a high-throughput metagenomic read simulator, Izzy is designed with speed in mind while still reproducing the typical patterns of sequencing errors. The people who developed it stated that it can be as much as 60 times faster than earlier tools, which makes large-scale simulations far more practical. Now, researchers can begin to ask not how long a simulation will take but rather what size dataset they want to test.

At the same time, the sequencing technology became more diverse. Researchers were not any longer restricted to using Illumina short reads since Oxford Nanopore and PacBio long-read sequencing also became important in the field of metagenomic research. In order to address these new requirements, MeSS (Metagenomic Sequence Simulator, 2025) was developed. The programme is based on a Snakemake framework and is therefore compatible with the Illumina, Oxford Nanopore and PacBio platforms. MeSS has also been designed to operate efficiently and to use less memory than earlier tools; it provides ready-made templates for the microbiomes of different sites in the human body, thus giving researchers a simple means of beginning to generate realistic simulated communities.

The simulation problem became even more specialized. Suppose that sequencing is not based on uniform sampling of DNA? In the case of targeted sequencing and hybridization-capture experiments, particular sequences are deliberately enriched, and the probability of capturing a target depends on both the probe and the target sequence. A standard model based on uniform sampling might fail to take into account this important feature of real experiments. That is why RAmpSim has been designed specifically to handle simulations for capture-based and targeted sequencing. Instead of depending solely on the assumption of uniform sampling, it includes a thermodynamic nearest-neighbor energy model to represent probe–target interactions and sequence-dependent enrichment. As a result, it is especially suitable for applications such as hybridization capture in metagenomics, where the efficiency of recovering a sequence can depend strongly on how it relates to the capture probes. RAmpSim thus reflects a wider trend towards simulations that aim not only to reproduce sequencing output but also key aspects of the experimental process itself.

MIDASim, Izzy, MeSS and RAmpSim all demonstrate how fast metagenomic simulation is evolving. MIDASim is able to deal with realistic variation within a large number of and changing microbial communities. Izzy overcomes the problem of generating very large datasets. MeSS provides support for a number of sequencing technologies in an efficient and repeatable manner. RAmpSim increases the experimental realism for capture-based sequencing. Although each of these tools addresses a separate issue, they all contribute to advancing the field.

Modern metagenomic simulation therefore aims not only at producing artificial FASTQ files. Researchers nowadays desire simulated datasets that reflect community changes, incorporate the characteristics of the sequencing platform, include real error patterns, take into account computational scale, and account for experimental biases. As metagenomic workflows become more advanced, the simulators have to keep up with this development. The tools are now going beyond that of simple data generators; they produce controlled versions of complex metagenomic experiments and thus provide researchers with something that ordinary sequencing data seldom does: a dataset in which the answer is known before any analysis takes place.

vt: a variant tool set that discovers short variants from Next Generation Sequencing data.

Jit — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 03:44:43 -0600

vt is a variant tool set that discovers short variants from Next Generation Sequencing data.

https://genome.sph.umich.edu/wiki/Vt

https://github.com/atks/vt

Address of the bookmark: https://genome.sph.umich.edu/wiki/Vt

Smash: An alignment-free method to find and visualise rearrangements between pairs of DNA sequences

Jit — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 12:18:49 -0500

Smash is a completely alignment-free method/tool to find and visualise genomic rearrangements. The detection is based on conditional exclusive compression, namely using a FCM (Markov model), of high context order (typically 20). For visualisation, Smash outputs a SVG image, with an ideogramoutput architecture, where the patterns are represented with several HSV values (only value varies). The method can perform both in small- and large-scale. Nevertheless is more directed to large-scale since that the main aim of the research is to know where the large-scale [chromosomal by chromosome] of several primates was equal/different, having at a glance a map of the entire genomes.

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinformatics.ua.pt/software/smash/

Spines

Jit — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 05:33:26 -0600

Spines is a collection of software tools, developed and used by the Vertebrate Genome Biology Group at the Broad Institute. It provides basic data structures for efficient data manipulation (mostly genomic sequences, alignments, variation etc.), as well as specialized tool sets for various analyses. It also features three sequence alignment packages: Satsuma, a highly parallelized program for high-sensitivity, genome-wide synteny; Papaya, an all-purpose alignment tool for less diverged sequences; and SLAP, a context-sensitive local aligner for diverged sequences with large gaps.

Access Spines here.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.broadinstitute.org/genome-sequencing-and-analysis/spines

Harvest

Jit — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 10:57:56 -0600

Harvest is a suite of core-genome alignment and visualization tools for quickly analyzing thousands of intraspecific microbial genomes, including variant calls, recombination detection, and phylogenetic trees.

Tools

Parsnp - Core-genome alignment and analysis
Gingr - Interactive visualization of alignments, trees and variants
HarvestTools - Archiving and postprocessing

Citation

Treangen TJ, Ondov BD, Koren S, Phillippy AM. The Harvest suite for rapid core-genome alignment and visualization of thousands of intraspecific microbial genomes. Genome Biology, 15 (11), 1-15 [PDF]

Address of the bookmark: http://harvest.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

J-Circos

Shruti Paniwala — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 09:06:54 -0600

Circos plot tool (J-Circos) that is an interactive visualization tool that can plot Circos figures, as well as being able to dynamically add data to the figure, and providing information for specific data points using mouse hover display and zoom in/out functions. J-Circos uses the Java computer language to enable it to be used on most operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux). Users can input data into J-Circos using flat data formats, as well as from the GUI. J-Circos will enable biologists to better study more complex chromosomal interactions and fusion transcripts that are otherwise difficult to visualize from next-generation sequencing data.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.australianprostatecentre.org/research/software/jcircos

DIAMOND

Jit — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 04:21:54 -0500

DIAMOND is a sequence aligner for protein and translated DNA searches and functions as a drop-in replacement for the NCBI BLAST software tools. It is suitable for protein-protein search as well as DNA-protein search on short reads and longer sequences including contigs and assemblies, providing a speedup of BLAST ranging up to x20,000.

More at file:///home/urbe/Downloads/diamond_manual.pdf

http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v12/n1/full/nmeth.3176.html

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/bbuchfink/diamond

progressiveCactus

Abhimanyu Singh — Thu, 18 May 2017 05:29:29 -0500

Progressive Cactus is a whole-genome alignment package.

Distribution package for the Prgressive Cactus multiple genome aligner. Dependencies are linked as submodules

https://github.com/glennhickey/progressiveCactus

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/glennhickey/progressiveCactus