BOL: Related items

Early Genome Screening: The New Health Horoscope!

LEGE — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 19:44:36 -0600

In an era where precision medicine is reshaping healthcare, genome screening is emerging as the modern equivalent of a health horoscope. It offers insights into our biological "stars," unraveling predispositions to various conditions and empowering individuals with knowledge to navigate their health journeys proactively. But how reliable is this "horoscope," and how does it impact our lives?

Understanding Genome Screening

Genome screening involves analyzing an individual's DNA to identify genetic variations that may influence health and disease susceptibility. This can range from simple single-gene tests to comprehensive whole-genome sequencing. By peering into our genetic blueprint, we can uncover risks for conditions like cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and even rare genetic disorders.

The process is straightforward: a saliva or blood sample is collected, and advanced sequencing technologies decipher the genetic code. The results provide a personalized health map, guiding lifestyle modifications, preventive measures, or medical interventions.

A Shift from Reactive to Proactive Healthcare

Traditional healthcare often focuses on treating diseases after they manifest. Genome screening flips this model on its head, enabling a shift toward prevention and early intervention. For instance:

Cancer Risk Management: Individuals with BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutations can opt for enhanced screening programs or preventive surgeries to mitigate their risk of breast and ovarian cancers.
Cardiovascular Health: Genetic predispositions to conditions like familial hypercholesterolemia can prompt early cholesterol monitoring and lifestyle adjustments.
Rare Diseases: Identifying carriers of genetic disorders can aid in family planning and reduce the incidence of inherited conditions.

The Ethical and Practical Concerns

While genome screening offers incredible promise, it is not without challenges:

Accuracy and Interpretation: Genetic predisposition does not guarantee disease. Misinterpretation of results can lead to unnecessary anxiety or unwarranted medical interventions.
Privacy and Data Security: Genetic data is highly sensitive. Ensuring robust data protection measures is crucial to prevent misuse.
Accessibility and Equity: High costs and limited availability may restrict access to genome screening, exacerbating health disparities.

Balancing Science and Pseudoscience

The comparison of genome screening to horoscopes isn’t entirely unfounded. Both offer predictive insights, but the scientific foundation of genome screening distinguishes it from astrology. Unlike the alignment of celestial bodies, genetic predictions are based on rigorous data and evidence. However, the probabilistic nature of genetic predispositions underscores the importance of interpreting results in conjunction with clinical and lifestyle factors.

The Road Ahead

As genome screening becomes more affordable and integrated into routine healthcare, its potential to transform lives is immense. Policymakers, healthcare providers, and genetic counselors must collaborate to ensure ethical implementation, public awareness, and equitable access.

Imagine a future where your genetic "horoscope" is a trusted guide, not just a prediction. Early genome screening could help chart a healthier path for generations, making it a cornerstone of personalized medicine. After all, our genes might just hold the key to unlocking a future of better health and well-being.

NGMLR: long-read mapper designed to align PacBio or Oxford Nanopore

Jit — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 07:30:54 -0500

CoNvex Gap-cost alignMents for Long Reads (ngmlr) is a long-read mapper designed to sensitively align PacBilo or Oxford Nanopore to (large) reference genomes. It was designed to quickly and correctly align the reads, including those spanning (complex) structural variations. Ngmlr uses an SV aware k-mer search to find approximate mapping locations for a read and then a banded Smith-Waterman alignment algorithm to compute the final alignment. Ngmlr uses a convex gap cost model that penalizes gap extensions for longer gaps less than for shorter ones to compute precise alignments. The gap model allows ngmlr to account for both the sequencing error and real genomic variations at the same time and makes it especially effective at more precisely identifying the position of breakpoints stemming from structural variations. The k-mer search helps to detect and split reads that cannot be aligned linearly, enabling ngmlr to reliably align reads to a wide range of different structural variations including nested SVs (e.g. inversions flanked by deletions).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/philres/ngmlr

NanoPack: visualizing and processing long-read sequencing data

Jit — Tue, 25 Dec 2018 21:20:50 -0600

The NanoPack tools are written in Python3 and released under the GNU GPL3.0 License. The source code can be found at https://github.com/wdecoster/nanopack, together with links to separate scripts and their documentation. The scripts are compatible with Linux, Mac OS and the MS Windows 10 subsystem for Linux and are available as a graphical user interface, a web service at http://nanoplot.bioinf.be and command line tools.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/wdecoster/nanopack

Radka Reifová Lab

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 06:00:48 -0600

We are generally interested in the mechanisms of species origin from a molecular and ecological perspective. Particularly, we are interested in the role of sex chromosomes in speciation. Most of our research is done on birds and mammals. Currently, we focus our research on two hybridizing song birds, the Common nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos) and the Thrush Nightingale (L. luscinia). Combining population genomic and ecological approaches we try to elucidate the genetic architecture of reproductive isolation and understand the role of interspecific competition and song convergence in the evolution of reproductive isolation between the species.

More at http://web.natur.cuni.cz/~radkas/index.php?page=research

Kraken: ultrafast metagenomic sequence classification using exact alignments

Jit — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 11:01:44 -0500

Kraken is an ultrafast and highly accurate program for assigning taxonomic labels to metagenomic DNA sequences. Previous programs designed for this task have been relatively slow and computationally expensive, forcing researchers to use faster abundance estimation programs, which only classify small subsets of metagenomic data. Using exact alignment of k-mers, Kraken achieves classification accuracy comparable to the fastest BLAST program. In its fastest mode, Kraken classifies 100 base pair reads at a rate of over 4.1 million reads per minute, 909 times faster than Megablast and 11 times faster than the abundance estimation program MetaPhlAn. Kraken is available at http://ccb.jhu.edu/software/kraken/.

Krona

https://sourceforge.net/p/krona/home/krona/

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4053813/

CRBHits: From Conditional Reciprocal Best Hits to Codon Alignments and Ka/Ks in R

Shruti Paniwala — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 23:06:03 -0600

CRBHits is a coding sequence (CDS) analysis pipeline in R (R Core Team, 2019). It reimplements the Conditional Reciprocal Best Hit (CRBH) algorithm crb-blast and covers all necessary steps from sequence similarity searches, codon alignments to Ka/Ks calculations and synteny. The new R package targets ecology, population and evolutionary biologists working in the field of comparative genomics.

Address of the bookmark: https://gitlab.gwdg.de/mpievolbio-it/crbhits

pbalign: maps PacBio reads to reference sequences and saves alignments to a BAM file

Jit — Thu, 24 May 2018 10:06:52 -0500

pbalign aligns PacBio reads to reference sequences, filters aligned reads according to user-specific filtering criteria, and converts the output to either the SAM format or PacBio Compare HDF5 (e.g., .cmp.h5) format. The output Compare HDF5 file will be compatible with Quiver if --forQuiver option is specified.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/pbalign

dotPlotly: Generate an interactive dot plot from mummer or minimap alignments

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 10:22:17 -0600

Create an interactive dot plot from mummer output OR PAF format

R script that makes a plotly interactive and/or static (png/pdf) dot plot.

Shiny app available for testing

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/tpoorten/dotPlotly

GAM-NGS: genomic assemblies merger for next generation sequencing

Jit — Fri, 19 May 2017 07:44:14 -0500

GAM-NGS is a tool able to merge two or more assemblies in order to improve contiguity and correctness. It can be used on all NGS-based assembly projects and it shows its full potential with multi-library Illumina-based projects. With more than 20 available assemblers it is hard to select the best tool. In this context we propose a tool that improves assemblies (and, as a by-product, perhaps even assemblers) by merging them and selecting the generating that is most likely to be correct.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/vice87/gam-ngs

CAMSA :: a tool for Comparative Analysis and Merging of Scaffold Assemblies

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 28 Dec 2017 09:10:26 -0600

CAMSA – is a tool for Comparative Analysis and Merging of Scaffold Assemblies, distributed both as a standalone software package and as Python library under the MIT license.

Main features:

works with any number of scaffold assemblies in de-novo non-progressive fashion
allows to simultaneously work with scaffold assemblies obtained from any in silico and in vitro techniques, supporting multiple existing formats via built-in converters
creates an extensive report with several comparative quality metrics (both on assembly level and on the level of individual assembly points)
constructs a merged combined scaffold assembly
provides an interactive framework for a visual comparative analysis of the given assemblies

Address of the bookmark: https://cblab.org/camsa/