BOL: Related items

ngs-bits - Short-read sequencing tools

Neel — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 23:14:00 -0600

Binaries of ngs-bits are available via Bioconda. Alternatively, ngs-bits can be built from sources:

Binaries for Linux/macOS
From sources for Linux/macOS
From sources for Windows

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/imgag/ngs-bits

Understanding your reads and mapping !

Neel — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 06:29:55 -0600

One of the best tutorial for beginners ...

https://bioinformatics-core-shared-training.github.io/cruk-summer-school-2017/Day1/Session4-seqIntro.html

Address of the bookmark: https://bioinformatics-core-shared-training.github.io/cruk-summer-school-2017/Day1/Session4-seqIntro.html

SViper: Swipe your Structural Variants called on long (ONT/PacBio) reads with short exact (Illumina) reads.

Neel — Sun, 22 Dec 2019 03:48:28 -0600

Call sviper

~$ ./sviper -s short-reads.bam -l long-reads.bam -r ref.fa -c variants.vcf -o polished_variants

This will output a polished_variants.vcf file, that contains all the refined variants.

Sometimes it is helpful to look at the polished sequence, e.g. with the IGV browser. In that case you want SViper to output the polished and aligned sequences in a bam file via the option --output-polished-bam:

~$ ./sviper -s short-reads.bam -l long-reads.bam -r ref.fa -c variants.vcf -o polished_variants --output-polished-bam

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/smehringer/SViper

WGS Celera Assembler version 8.3rc2

Jit — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 04:45:40 -0500

These are release notes for Celera Assembler version 8.3rc2, which was released on May 24, 2015.

This distribution package provides a stable, tested, documented version of the software. The distribution is usable on most Unix-like platforms, and some platforms have pre-compiled binary distributions ready for installation.

The source code package includes full source code (revision 4627), Makefiles, and scripts. A subset of the kmer package (http://kmer.sourceforge.net/, version r1994), used by some modules of Celera Assembler, is included. This distribution includes [http://samtools.sourceforge.net/ SAMtools], [http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/software/jellyfish/ Jellyfish 2.0], [https://github.com/pbjd/pbutgcns PBUTGCNS], [https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/pbdagcon PBDAGCON], [https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/BLASR BLASR], and parts of the [https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/FALCON/tree/v0.1.3 Falcon assembler].

Full documentation can be found online at http://wgs-assembler.sourceforge.net/.

Interesting scripts within it

urbe@urbo214b[bin] ls []
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 11K Apr 10 11:41 addCNSToStore
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 575K Apr 10 11:41 addReadsToUnitigs
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 128K Apr 10 11:41 analyzeBest
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 257K Apr 10 11:41 analyzePosMap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,5M Apr 10 11:41 analyzeScaffolds
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 224K Apr 10 11:41 asmOutputFasta
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 448K Apr 10 11:41 asmOutputStatistics
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 2,4K Apr 10 11:41 asmToAGP.pl
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 7,6M Apr 10 11:41 blasr
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,6M Apr 10 11:41 bogart
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 183K Apr 10 11:41 bogus
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 272K Apr 10 11:41 bogusness
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 247K Apr 10 11:41 buildPosMap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 213K Apr 10 11:41 buildRefContigs
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 990K Apr 10 11:41 buildUnitigs
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 18K Apr 10 11:41 ca2ace.pl
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 12K Apr 10 11:41 caqc_help.ini
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 61K Apr 10 11:41 caqc.pl
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 23K Apr 10 11:41 cat-corrects
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 24K Apr 10 11:41 cat-erates
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,9M Apr 10 11:41 cgw
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,4M Apr 10 11:41 cgwDump
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 204K Apr 10 11:41 chimChe
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 201K Apr 10 11:40 chimera
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 220K Apr 10 11:41 classifyMates
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 201K Apr 10 11:41 classifyMatesApply
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 215K Apr 10 11:41 classifyMatesPairwise
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 366K Apr 10 11:41 computeCoverageStat
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 9,8K Apr 10 11:41 convert-fasta-to-v2.pl
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 48K Apr 10 11:41 convertOverlap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 119K Apr 10 11:41 convertSamToCA
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 20K Apr 10 11:41 convertToPBCNS
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 197K Apr 10 11:41 correct-frags
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 259K Apr 10 11:41 correct-olaps
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 520K Apr 10 11:41 correctPacBio
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 540K Apr 10 11:41 ctgcns
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 162K Apr 10 11:40 deduplicate
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 37K Apr 10 11:41 demotePosMap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,5M Apr 10 11:41 dumpCloneMiddles
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 124K Apr 10 11:41 dumpPBRLayoutStore
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,3M Apr 10 11:41 dumpSingletons
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 171K Apr 10 11:41 erate-estimate
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 221K Apr 10 11:40 estimate-mer-threshold
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,5M Apr 10 11:41 extendClearRanges
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,3M Apr 10 11:41 extendClearRangesPartition
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 205K Apr 10 11:40 extractmessages
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 7,2M Apr 10 11:41 falcon_sense
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 9,8K Apr 10 11:41 fastaToCA
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 124K Apr 10 11:40 fastqAnalyze
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 137K Apr 10 11:40 fastqSample
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 62K Apr 10 11:40 fastqSimulate
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 121K Apr 10 11:40 fastqSimulate-sort
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 246K Apr 10 11:40 fastqToCA
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 140K Apr 10 11:41 filterOverlap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 341K Apr 10 11:40 finalTrim
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 228K Apr 10 11:41 fixUnitigs
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 147K Apr 10 11:40 fragmentDepth
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 29K Apr 10 11:41 fragsInVars
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 545K Apr 10 11:41 frgs2clones
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 398K Apr 10 11:40 gatekeeper
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 139K Apr 10 11:40 gatekeeperbench
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 167K Apr 10 11:40 gkpStoreCreate
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 147K Apr 10 11:40 gkpStoreDumpFASTQ
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 184K Apr 10 11:41 greedyFragmentTiling
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,6K Apr 10 11:41 greedy_layout_to_IUM
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 142K Apr 10 11:40 initialTrim
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 967K Apr 10 11:41 jellyfish
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 219K Apr 10 11:41 markRepeatUnique
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 273K Apr 10 11:40 markUniqueUnique
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 114K Apr 10 11:40 mercy
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 3,8K Apr 10 11:41 mergeqc.pl
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 422K Apr 10 11:40 merTrim
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 125K Apr 10 11:40 merTrimApply
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 376K Apr 10 11:40 meryl
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 176K Apr 10 11:41 metagenomics_ovl_analyses
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 297K Apr 10 11:41 olap-from-seeds
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 275K Apr 10 11:41 outputLayout
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 229K Apr 10 11:41 overlapInCore
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 144K Apr 10 11:40 overlap_partition
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 179K Apr 10 11:41 overlapStats
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 179K Apr 10 11:41 overlapStore
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 153K Apr 10 11:41 overlapStoreBucketizer
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 175K Apr 10 11:41 overlapStoreBuild
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 33K Apr 10 11:41 overlapStoreIndexer
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 48K Apr 10 11:41 overlapStoreSorter
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 604K Apr 10 11:40 overmerry
lrwxrwxrwx 1 urbe urbe 4 Apr 10 11:41 pacBioToCA -> PBcR
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 131K Apr 10 11:41 PBcR
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 2,9M Apr 10 11:41 pbdagcon
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,9M Apr 10 11:41 pbutgcns
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 201K Apr 10 11:40 remove_fragment
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 153K Apr 10 11:40 removeMateOverlap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 2,5K Apr 10 11:41 replaceUIDwithName-fastq
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,2K Apr 10 11:41 replaceUIDwithName-posmap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,3M Apr 10 11:41 resolveSurrogates
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 139K Apr 10 11:41 rewriteCache
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 232K Apr 10 11:41 runCA
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 88K Apr 10 11:41 runCA-dedupe
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 14K Apr 10 11:41 runCA-overlapStoreBuild
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 3,6K Apr 10 11:41 run_greedy.csh
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 297K Apr 10 11:40 sffToCA
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 13K Apr 10 11:40 show-corrects
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 557K Apr 10 11:41 splitUnitigs
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,4M Apr 10 11:41 terminator
drwxrwxr-x 2 urbe urbe 4,0K Apr 10 11:41 TIGR
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 526K Apr 10 11:41 tigStore
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 35K Apr 10 11:41 tracearchiveToCA
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 35K Apr 10 11:41 tracedb-to-frg.pl
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 44K Apr 10 11:41 trimFastqByQVWindow
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 18K Apr 10 11:40 uidclient
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 589K Apr 10 11:41 unitigger
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 42K Apr 10 11:40 upgrade-v8-to-v9
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 42K Apr 10 11:40 upgrade-v9-to-v10
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 854 Apr 10 11:41 utg2fasta
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 731K Apr 10 11:41 utgcns
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 561K Apr 10 11:41 utgcnsfix

Address of the bookmark: http://wgs-assembler.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Grinder / Biogrinder - A versatile omics shotgun and amplicon sequencing read simulator

Jit — Wed, 24 May 2017 08:41:41 -0500

Grinder is a versatile program to create random shotgun and amplicon sequence libraries based on DNA, RNA or proteic reference sequences provided in a FASTA file.

Grinder can produce genomic, metagenomic, transcriptomic, metatranscriptomic, proteomic, metaproteomic shotgun and amplicon datasets from current sequencing technologies such as Sanger, 454, Illumina. These simulated datasets can be used to test the accuracy of bioinformatic tools under specific hypothesis, e.g. with or without sequencing errors, or with low or high community diversity. Grinder may also be used to help decide between alternative sequencing methods for a sequence-based project, e.g. should the library be paired-end or not, how many reads should be sequenced.

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/biogrinder/files/biogrinder/

CoverM: Read coverage calculator for metagenomics

Neel — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 23:39:14 -0500

CoverM aims to be a configurable, easy to use and fast DNA read coverage and relative abundance calculator focused on metagenomics applications.

CoverM calculates coverage of genomes/MAGs coverm genome (help) or individual contigs coverm contig (help). Calculating coverage by read mapping, its input can either be BAM files sorted by reference, or raw reads and reference genomes in various formats.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/wwood/CoverM

BamView: a free interactive display of read alignments in BAM data files

Neel — Fri, 09 Nov 2018 13:43:22 -0600

To run the application on UNIX from the downloaded jar file run the UNIX:

java -mx512m -jar BamView.jar

and extra command line options are given when '-h' is used:

java -jar BamView.jar -h

BAM files can be specified on the command line with the '-a' option:

java -mx512m -jar BamView.jar -a pathToFile/sorted.bam

If a BAM filename is not given on the command line BamView will prompt for a file to be entered. The BAM index file should have the same name as the BAM file but with a '.bai' suffix. Multiple BAM files can be loaded and overlaid in the viewer. To make this easier BamView will read in files that contain a list of filenames.

Address of the bookmark: http://bamview.sourceforge.net/

Must read paper and books in evolution biology !

Abhi — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 18:33:01 -0500

1.       *Nick Barton:*

- The textbook "Evolution" by Nick Barton, with resources for
  exploring the literature: Barton, N. H., Briggs, D. E. G., Eisen, J.
  A., Goldstein, D. B., & Patel, N. H. (2007). Evolution. Cold Spring
  Harbor Laboratory Press.

- Papers from a course named "Classics in Evolutionary Biology":

Evolutionary Synthesis
1. Haldane, J. B. S. 1932. The causes of evolution. Longmans. New York.
   (esp. Ch. IV).
2. Fisher, R. A. 1930. The genetical theory of natural selection. Oxford
   University Press, Oxford. Selected Sections - Fundamental Theorem.

Genetic Variation
1a. Lewontin, R. C., and J. L. Hubby. 1966. A molecular approach to
the study of genic heterozygosity in natural populations. II. Amount
of variation and degree of heterozygosity in natural populations of
Drosophila pseudoobscura. Genetics. 54:595-609.

1b. Sachidandam et al. 2001. A map of human genome sequence variation
containing 1.42 million single nucleotide polymorphisms. 409: 928-33.

2. Wright S., Dobzhansky T., Hovanitz W. 1942 Genetics of natural
populations VII The allelism of lethals in the third chromosome of
Drosophila pseudoobscura. Genetics 27: 363-394.

Recombination and evolution
1. Hill, W. G., and A. Robertson. 1966. The effect of linkage on limits
to artificial selection. Genet. Res. 8:269-294.

2. Maynard Smith and Haigh. 1974. The hitch-hiking effect of a favourable
gene. Genet. Res. 23: 23-35.

Understanding sequence variation
1. Begun D. J., Aquadro C. F., 1992 Levels of naturally occurring DNA
polymorphism correlate with recombination rate in Drosophila melanogaster.
Nature 356: 519-520.

2. Green R. E., Reich D., Pääbo S., 2010 A draft sequence of the
Neandertal genome. Science 328: 710-722.

Quantitative Genetics:  variation in complex traits
1. Galton F., 1877 Typical laws of heredity. Nature 15: 492-495-
512-514- 532-533.

2. Turelli M., 1984 Heritable genetic variation via
mutation-selection balance: Lerch's Zeta meets the abdominal
bristle. Theor. Popul. Biol. 25: 138-193.

Quantitative Genetics:  finding the genes
1. Shrimpton A. E., Robertson A., 1988 The Isolation of polygenic factors
controlling bristle score in Drosophila melanogaster II Distribution of
third chromosome bristle effects within chromosome sections. Genetics
118: 445-459.

2. Boyle E. A., Li Y. I., Pritchard J. K., 2017 An expanded view of
complex traits: from polygenic to omnigenic. Cell 169: 1177-1186.

Neutral Evolution
1. Kimura, M. 1968. Evolutionary rate at the molecular level. Science.
217:624-626.

2a. Kern A. D., Hahn M. W., 2018 The Neutral Theory in Light of Natural
Selection. Molecular Biology and Evolution 110: 21077-6.

2b. Jensen J. D., Payseur B. A., Stephan W., Aquadro C. F., Lynch M.,
Charlesworth D., Charlesworth B., 2018 The importance of the Neutral Theory
in 1968 and 50 years on: a response to Kern and Hahn 2018. Evolution 112:
2109-4.

2c. Ellegren & Galtier. 2016. Determinants of genetic diversity. Nature
Reviews Genetics.

Mutation and Genetic Variability
1. Luria, S. E., and M. Delbrück. 1943. Mutations of Bacteria from Virus
Sensitivity to Virus Resistance. Genetics. 28(6):491-511.

2. Hill, W G. 1982. "Rates of Change in Quantitative Traits From Fixation
of New Mutations." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.A.)
79: 142-45.

Testing for selection
1. McDonald & Kreitman. 1991. Adaptive protein evolution at the Adh locus
in Drosophila. Nature.

2. Begun, et al. Mol. Biol. Evol. 16, 1816-1819 (1999).

3. Siddiq et al. 2016. Experimental test and refutation of a classic case
of molecular adaptation in Drosophila melanogaster.  Nature Ecology &
Evolution.

The shifting balance
1. Wright, S. 1932. The roles of mutation, inbreeding, crossbreeding and
selection in evolution. Proceedings of the VI International Congress of
Genetics: 1. pp 356-366.

2. Coyne, J.A., N.H. Barton, and M. Turelli. 1997. A critique of Wright's
shifting balance theory of evolution.  Evolution 51: 643-671.

3. Barton. 2016. Sewall Wright on Evolution in Mendelian Populations and
the "Shifting Balance". Genetics.

Evolution of Sex
1.  Muller, H.J. 1964. The relation of recombination to mutational advance.
Mutation Res. 1(1):2-9

2. McDonald et al. 2016. Sex speeds adaptation by altering the dynamics of
molecular evolution. Nature.

Kin Selection, Cooperation, and Conflict
1. Hamilton, W. D. 1964. The genetical evolution of social behaviour I.
Journal of Theoretical Biology. 7:1-52.

2. Trivers, R. L. 1974 Parent-offspring conflict. American Zoologist.
14(1):249-264.

Sexual Selection
1. Zahavi, A. 1975. Mate selection - a selection of a handicap. J. Theor.
Biol. 53:205-214.

2. Kirkpatrick, M., and Ryan, M.J. 1991. The evolution of mating
preferences and the paradox of the lek. Nature. 350:33-38.

Fitness Landscapes
1. Dean, A. 1995. A Molecular Investigation of Genotype by Environment
Interactions. Genetics. 139:19-33.

2. Costanzo et al. 2010. The Genetic Landscape of a Cell. Science.

Speciation
1. Coyne, J. A., and H. A. Orr. 1989. Patterns of speciation in Drosophila.
Evolution. 43:362-381.

2. Corbett-Detig et al. 2013. Genetic incompatibilities are widespread
within species. Nature.

2.       *Marcos Antezana:*

Valen, L. v. 1975. Energy and Evolution. University of Chicago, Department
of Biology.

3.       *Remco Folkertsma:*

1. The work by Hopi Hoekstra on local adaptation and oldfield mice

2. Poelstra, J. W., Vijay, N., Bossu, C. M., Lantz, H., Ryll, B., Müller,
I., ... & Wolf, J. B. (2014). The genomic landscape underlying phenotypic
integrity in the face of gene flow in crows. Science, 344(6190), 1410-1414.

4.       *Joshka Kaufmann and Leslie Turner*

They offer us a link to 'papers every evolutionary biologist should read',
the papers are collected by Leslie Turner.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53e8cb7ce4b02c4bc3aeeee4/t/5ab8fcb670a6ad55c67fcdf4/1522072758665/EvoBioClassicsRefList.pdf

5.       *Sarah Stockwell*

Matt Ridley collected classic papers in evolutionary biology and printed
part of these papers in his book Evolution (see Matt Ridley. Evolution
(Univ. of Oxford Press, 2nd edition, 2004))

The Hidden Pages of Our DNA

LEGE — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 01:04:22 -0500

Imagine opening the instruction manual for life.

It is enormous, billions of letters long. Some of those letters are easy to understand because they contain instructions for building proteins, the tiny machines that keep our cells alive.

But what if some of the most important instructions aren't in those obvious chapters?

Scientists have long suspected that the mysterious stretches of DNA between protein-coding genes may contain some of life's most interesting secrets. These regions can act like switches, telling genes when, where, and how strongly to turn on. Among them are conserved non-coding elements, or CNEs DNA sequences that have remained remarkably similar across different species.

Think of a CNE as a sentence that nature has copied into several editions of the same book.

A mouse has it.

A bird has it.

A human has it.

And despite millions of years of evolution, much of the sentence remains almost unchanged.

That conservation is a clue: this piece of DNA probably matters.

But there was a problem. Finding these hidden sentences across enormous genomes is difficult. Researchers needed to compare many genomes, identify conserved regions, and then determine which of those regions might have evolved unusually quickly in particular branches of the evolutionary tree.

Enter CNEwrap. https://github.com/YanCCscu/CNEwrap

The researchers developed CNEwrap as a streamlined toolkit capable of handling large-scale genome comparisons, conserved-element detection, and evolutionary analysis. Inside it is a new algorithm called EvoAcc, designed to identify CNEs that show accelerated evolution in specific species or lineages.

Why does that matter?

Because evolution isn't just about what stays the same.

Sometimes, the most interesting story is hidden in what changed.

Imagine that nearly every species carries the same regulatory sentence, but one lineage suddenly has several unusual edits. Perhaps those changes helped shape a new body structure, a different adaptation, or another distinctive trait.

EvoAcc is designed to help researchers find these evolutionary clues. In the study's tests, it performed particularly well in scenarios involving two or three accelerated lineages and showed improved sensitivity to insertion and deletion mutations compared with several existing approaches.

The researchers also tested CNEwrap using functional genomic regions from mammals and found that EvoAcc could recover human-specific accelerated regions while identifying some signals that other methods missed.

So the story of CNEwrap is really a story about looking beyond the obvious.

For decades, scientists have often focused on the DNA that directly encodes proteins. But the genome is more like a vast library: the protein-coding genes are the main text, while non-coding regions may contain punctuation, instructions, switches, annotations, and editing notes that tell the cell how to read the book.

CNEwrap gives researchers a new way to search that hidden material.

And perhaps somewhere inside those billions of DNA letters is an evolutionary story we haven't read yet.

The exciting part is that we now have better tools to find it.

Read more about it https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/54/14/gkag709/8738333?

QuorUM: An Error Corrector for Illumina Reads

Jit — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 11:40:41 -0600

Illumina Sequencing data can provide high coverage of a genome by relatively short (most often 100 bp to 150 bp) reads at a low cost. Even with low (advertised 1%) error rate, 100 × coverage Illumina data on average has an error in some read at every base in the genome. These errors make handling the data more complicated because they result in a large number of low-count erroneous k-mers in the reads. However, there is enough information in the reads to correct most of the sequencing errors, thus making subsequent use of the data (e.g. for mapping or assembly) easier. Here we use the term “error correction” to denote the reduction in errors due to both changes in individual bases and trimming of unusable sequence. We developed an error correction software called QuorUM. QuorUM is mainly aimed at error correcting Illumina reads for subsequent assembly. It is designed around the novel idea of minimizing the number of distinct erroneous k-mers in the output reads and preserving the most true k-mers, and we introduce a composite statistic π that measures how successful we are at achieving this dual goal. We evaluate the performance of QuorUM by correcting actual Illumina reads from genomes for which a reference assembly is available.

QuorUM is distributed as an independent software package and as a module of the MaSuRCA assembly software. Both are available under the GPL open source license at http://www.genome.umd.edu.

Address of the bookmark: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0130821