Scientists face a big challenge with the human genome. They can read its letters, but understanding their roles is much harder. Only about 2 percent of the genome codes for proteins. The rest acts like a huge control panel, deciding when and where genes turn on. With about 9 billion possible single-letter changes, testing them all in a lab just isn’t possible.

So, Google DeepMind asked a new question: what if we could predict what those changes might do?

This question led to the AlphaGenome Atlas (https://deepmind.google.com/science/alphagenome/atlas?), a detailed map of nearly every possible single-letter change in the human genome. Instead of checking each change one by one, researchers can use the Atlas to spot the ones most likely to matter. The AlphaGenome Variant Impact (AVI) score works like a trail marker, pointing scientists toward the changes worth a closer look.

This is where the Atlas gets especially useful. Much of the genome lies outside the protein-coding regions, where DNA acts as a switch or controller for genes. AlphaGenome lets researchers explore these areas and see how small changes could affect gene activity.

An atlas isn't the destination; it's a guide.

The AlphaGenome Atlas doesn’t replace experiments or solve every mystery. Instead, it helps scientists decide where to begin. From billions of possibilities, it turns the vast genetic landscape into something researchers can start to explore.

There are nine billion possibilities, a vast map, and maybe among them therWith nine billion possibilities and a huge map to explore, there may be clues hidden here to some of medicine’s toughest mysteries.

More at https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/DeepMind.com/Blog/alphagenome-atlas-a-predictive-map-of-every-possible-dna-letter-change-in-the-human-genome/alphagenome-atlas.pdf

This is where KiNext comes into the picture. Introduced in a 2024 study published in BMC Bioinformatics, KiNext is a computational workflow designed to identify and classify protein kinases from predicted protein sequences. Instead of relying on a single search method, it brings together several approaches, including Hidden Markov Models, sequence alignment, phylogenetic analysis, and structural comparison.

The search begins with a simple question: does a protein contain the characteristics of a kinase? Protein kinases can change considerably during evolution, but important regions of their sequences often retain recognizable patterns. KiNext uses Hidden Markov Models, or HMMs, to detect these patterns. An HMM does not require a protein to be an exact match to a known kinase. Instead, it looks for a statistical sequence signature associated with kinase proteins, making it possible to detect more distant candidates.

Once potential kinases are identified, KiNext takes the analysis further. It distinguishes conventional eukaryotic protein kinases from atypical protein kinases and then attempts to classify them into different kinase groups and families. This distinction is important because simply identifying a protein as a kinase does not tell the complete story. Different kinase families can have very different evolutionary histories and biological functions.

The next stage brings evolution into the picture. KiNext can align kinase sequences and construct phylogenetic trees, allowing researchers to examine how newly identified proteins are related to previously characterized kinases. When sequence evidence alone is difficult to interpret, structural information can provide another clue. The workflow can incorporate AlphaFold-predicted structures and Foldseek-based structural comparisons to investigate whether an unusual protein resembles known kinase structures.

The researchers tested KiNext using two very different organisms: the Pacific oyster, Crassostrea gigas, and the green alga Ostreococcus tauri. In C. gigas, KiNext recovered previously reported kinases while identifying additional candidates. Structural analysis provided further evidence for many of the newly detected proteins. In O. tauri, the workflow similarly recovered most previously reported kinases and identified additional candidates while refining some of their classifications.

What makes KiNext particularly interesting is not just its ability to find kinases, but how the entire analysis is organized. The workflow uses Nextflow, allowing the different computational steps to be connected into a reproducible pipeline. Containers can also help manage software dependencies, making it easier to run the workflow across different computing environments.

This reproducibility becomes increasingly important as the number of available genomes continues to grow. A researcher studying one organism may be able to perform an analysis manually, but repeating the same process across hundreds or thousands of genomes quickly becomes impractical. A standardized workflow provides a way to perform the analysis consistently while keeping track of how the results were generated.

At its core, KiNext demonstrates a broader change taking place in modern genomics. Sequencing a genome provides an enormous amount of information, but the real scientific challenge begins afterward: understanding what all those sequences mean. Protein kinases are only one part of this larger puzzle, yet they are particularly important because they act as molecular switches throughout the cell.

By combining sequence profiles, evolutionary analysis, and structural evidence within a reproducible computational framework, KiNext provides researchers with a systematic way to uncover these molecular switches. Its real value lies not only in finding more kinases, but in making the process scalable, repeatable, and easier to apply to new genomes.

As genome sequencing continues to expand across the tree of life, tools such as KiNext can help turn enormous collections of protein sequences into meaningful biological stories—one kinase at a time.

Read more about it @

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12859-024-05953-w

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/holtjma/fmlrc

Natural selection and other evolutionary forces lead to particular patterns of evolutionary dynamics, and they leave characteristic signatures on the genetic variation within populations. We use a combination of theory and experiments to study the dynamics and population genetics of natural selection in asexual populations such as microbes and viruses.

We use both theory and experiments to study evolutionary dynamics and population genetics, particularly in situations where natural selection is pervasive.

http://desailab.oeb.harvard.edu/home

Chimeric Alignment: An alignment of a read that cannot be represented as a linear alignment. Typically, one of the linear alignments in a chimeric alignment is considered the “representative” alignment, and the others are called “supplementary” and are distinguished by the supplementary alignment flag.

Chimeric reads are indicative of structural variation in DNA-seq and it may indicate the presence of chimeric genes in RNA-seq.

In short, chimeric reads can be split in to two or more parts, each part would be mapped to reference(it’s not hard-clipped), the total length of the mapped part is longger than read length.

Representative alignment: A chimeric alignment that is represented as a set of linear alignments that do not have large overlaps typically has one linear alignment that is considered the representative alignment.

One read can align to multiple positions, we can find one alignmnet position which sequence do not have large overlaps, it called representative alighment, for other alignment positions, we called them supplementary alignment.

It seems that GATK can realignment those representative reads to the correctly position via RealignerTargetCreator and IndelRealigner. (WARNING: I am not quite sure if I understand this correctly. If someone could help me, please leave me a message below, thanks, thanks.)

Supplementary Alignment: A chimeric reads but not a representative reads.

Primary Alignment and Secondary Alignment: A read may map ambiguously to multiple locations, e.g. due to repeats. Only one of the multiple read alignments is considered primary, and this decision may be arbitrary. All other alignments have the secondary alignment flag.

A fairly complete on-line guide to BLAST searching can be found at the NCBI BLAST Help Manual. For a theoretical overview of BLAST, see the NCBI BLAST Course. Additional information can be found in the BLAST 2.0 Release Notes

Supported and Suggested Values for Gap Open and Extension in BLASTP, BLASTX, TBLASTN, and TBLASTX

Address of the bookmark: https://www.arabidopsis.org/Blast/BLASToptions.jsp

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformaticsadvances/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bioadv/vbaf208/8257678?login=true

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/sib-swiss/termal

https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-015-0644-7

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/surankco/

I made Rebaler for bacterial genomes (specifically for the task of testing basecallers). It should in principle work for non-bacterial genomes as well, but I haven't tested it.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/rrwick/Rebaler