BOL: Related items

What is Data Science? — A Bioinformatics Perspective

Abhi — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 01:44:34 -0500

In today’s era of big biology, we’re generating more data than ever before—genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, metabolomes, microbiomes… you name it. But raw biological data doesn’t speak for itself. Making sense of it requires more than traditional biology. This is where data science steps in.

So, What Is Data Science?
At its core, data science is the interdisciplinary field that extracts knowledge and insights from data using programming, statistics, and domain expertise. In bioinformatics, data science enables us to turn gigabytes of sequence data into biological meaning.

Imagine trying to understand gene regulation in cancer by analyzing thousands of RNA-seq samples, or predicting antibiotic resistance from bacterial genomes—these challenges are not solvable through wet lab experiments alone. They require data-driven thinking.

Data Science Meets Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics is inherently a data science domain. From genomics to systems biology, every field in modern biology relies on data science techniques to:

Clean and process massive datasets

Discover patterns in high-dimensional data

Build predictive models (e.g., for disease classification)

Visualize complex biological networks and trends

Integrate diverse data types (e.g., transcriptomic + epigenomic data)

The Bioinformatics Toolkit
Here’s what data science typically looks like in bioinformatics:

Task Data Science Role
Sequence alignment Efficient algorithms, indexing, parallel processing
Gene expression analysis Statistical modeling (e.g., DESeq2, limma)
Variant calling Data filtering, probabilistic models
Clustering of cells in single-cell data Unsupervised learning
Protein structure prediction Deep learning models (e.g., AlphaFold)
Metagenomics Data integration, classification, dimensionality reduction

Common tools include Python, R, Bioconductor, scikit-learn, Pandas, Seurat, and TensorFlow—often working together in reproducible workflows.

It's Not Just About Coding
A common misconception is that bioinformatics is just programming or scripting. But being a data scientist in bioinformatics also means:

Understanding experimental design

Asking biologically meaningful questions

Choosing the right statistical or machine learning models

Communicating findings effectively (e.g., plots, dashboards, papers)

In other words, data science in bioinformatics is where biology, statistics, and computer science converge.

Why It Matters
The real power of data science in bioinformatics is its ability to scale discovery.

Instead of studying one gene, we can study thousands.

Instead of analyzing one species, we can explore entire ecosystems.

Instead of waiting months for lab results, we can generate hypotheses in days.

From personalized medicine and cancer diagnostics to agricultural genomics and pandemic surveillance, data science is at the heart of the bioinformatics revolution.

Final Thoughts
If you’re a biologist who’s curious about code, or a data enthusiast fascinated by life sciences, bioinformatics is your playground—and data science is your toolkit.

In bioinformatics, data science isn’t just useful. It’s essential.

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

Will MinION Nanopore sequencing increase the number of Next Generation Sequencing projects?

Strand — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 05:14:07 -0500

Will MinION Nanopore sequencing increase the number of Next Generation Sequencing projects?

Bioinformatics tools developed for Oxford Nanopore data analysis !

biogeek — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 20:47:30 -0600

MinION is the only portable real-time device for DNA and RNA sequencing. Each consumable flow cell can now generate 10–20 Gb of DNA sequence data. Ultra-long read lengths are possible (hundreds of kb) as you can choose your fragment length. One of the technical advantages of ONT data is the read length, which offers great prospects for genome assembly. Generally, assemblers are based on several different types of algorithms, such as greedy, overlap-layout-consensus (OLC), de Bruijn graph (DBG), and string graph.

List of analysis tools developed for Oxford Nanopore data

BWA
Fast nanopore data tuned alignment tool
https://github.com/lh3/bwa

GraphMap
Mapper for long and error-prone reads
https://github.com/isovic/graphmap

LAST
Nanopore tuned alignment tool
http://last.cbrc.jp/

LINKS
Software tool for long read scaffolding
https://github.com/warrenlr/LINKS/

marginAlign
Tools to align nanopore reads to a reference
https://github.com/benedictpaten/marginAlign

minoTour
Real time analysis tools
http://minotour.nottingham.ac.uk/

nanoCORR
Error-correction tool for nanopore sequence data
https://github.com/jgurtowski/nanocorr

NanoOK
Software for nanopore data, quality and error profiles
https://documentation.tgac.ac.uk/display/NANOOK/NanoOK

Nanopolish
Nanopore analysis and genome assembly software
https://github.com/jts/nanopolish

nanopore
Variant-detection tool for nanopore sequence data
https://github.com/mitenjain/nanopore

Nanocorrect
Error-correction tool for nanopore sequence data
https://github.com/jts/nanocorrect/

npReader
Real-time conversion and analysis of nanopore reads
https://github.com/mdcao/npReader

poRe
Tool for analyzing and visualizing nanopore data
https://sourceforge.net/p/rpore/wiki/Home/

PoreSeq
Error-correction and variant-calling software
https://github.com/tszalay/poreseq

Poretools
Nanopore sequence analysis and visualization software
https://github.com/arq5x/poretools

SSPACE-LongRead
Genome scaffolding tool
http://www.baseclear.com/genomics/bioinformatics/basetools/SSPACE-longread

SMIS
Genome scaffolding tool
https://sourceforge.net/projects/phusion2/files/smis/

List of assemblers for Oxford Nanopore MinION long reads

LQS
DALIGNER, Celera OLC Nanocorrect,
Nanopolish corrector
https://github.com/jts/nanopolish

PBcR
HGAP or BLASR, Celera OLC
PBcR corrector
http://wgs-assembler.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/PBcR
–
Canu
MHAP, Celera OLC
Canu corrector
https://github.com/marbl/canu

Falcon
String graph, Celera OLC
Falcon corrector
https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/falcon

Miniasm
OLC
https://github.com/lh3/miniasm

ra-integrate
OLC
https://github.com/mariokostelac/ra-integrate/

ALLPATHS-LG
de Bruijn graph
ALLPATHS-L corrector
https://www.broadinstitute.org/software/allpaths-lg/blog/?page_id=12

SPAdes
de Bruijn graph
SPAdes corrector
http://bioinf.spbau.ru/spades

Porechop: tool for finding and removing adapters from Oxford Nanopore reads

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 29 May 2018 07:33:44 -0500

Porechop is a tool for finding and removing adapters from Oxford Nanopore reads. Adapters on the ends of reads are trimmed off, and when a read has an adapter in its middle, it is treated as chimeric and chopped into separate reads. Porechop performs thorough alignments to effectively find adapters, even at low sequence identity.

Porechop also supports demultiplexing of Nanopore reads that were barcoded with the Native Barcoding Kit, PCR Barcoding Kit or Rapid Barcoding Kit.

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

Pacasus: Correction of palindromes in long reads from PacBio and Nanopore

BioStar — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 05:26:48 -0600

Tool for detecting and cleaning PacBio / Nanopore long reads after whole genome amplification. Check the poster from the Revolutionizing Next-Generation Sequencing (2nd edition) conference in the source folder: https://github.com/swarris/Pacasus/blob/master/vib2017.pdf.

The prepint version is found on http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/08/09/173872

It uses the pyPaSWAS framework for sequence alignment (https://github.com/swarris/pyPaSWAS)

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/swarris/Pacasus

Now time is come to revolutionize amino acid sequencing by Nanopore technology

Rahul Agarwal — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 08:01:11 -0500

Amino acid sequencing by Nanopore recognition tunneling method

Address of the bookmark: http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/71198.php

LRCstats: Long Read Correction Statistics

Jit — Fri, 05 Jan 2018 04:04:20 -0600

LRCstats is an open-source pipeline for benchmarking DNA long read correction algorithms for long reads outputted by third generation sequencing technology such as machines produced by Pacific Biosciences. The reads produced by third generation sequencing technology, as the name suggests, are longer in length than reads produced by next generation sequencing technologies, such as those produced by Illumina. However, long reads are plagued by high error rates, which can cause issues in downstream analysis. Long read correction algorithms reduce the error rate of long reads either through self-correcting methods or using accurate, short reads outputted by next generation sequencing technologies to correct long reads.

Of course, some long read correction algorithms are better than others, and developers of long read correction algorithms will wish to compare their algorithm with others currently available. LRCstats benchmarks long read correction algorithms using long reads produced by simulators (such as SimLoRD or PBSim) where the two-way alignments between the uncorrected long reads (uLR) and the corresponding sequences in the reference genome (Ref) are given in some sort of alignment file and then aligning the corrected long reads (cLR) to the Ref-uLR two-way alignments to create three-way alignments using a dynamic programming algorithm. Statistics on these three-way alignments are then collected, such as the overall error rates of the corrected long reads.

https://www.healthcare.uiowa.edu/labs/au/LSC/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/cchauve/lrcstats

medaka: Sequence correction provided by ONT Research

BioStar — Mon, 18 May 2020 16:28:00 -0500

medaka is a tool to create a consensus sequence from nanopore sequencing data. This task is performed using neural networks applied from a pileup of individual sequencing reads against a draft assembly. It outperforms graph-based methods operating on basecalled data, and can be competitive with state-of-the-art signal-based methods, whilst being much faster.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/nanoporetech/medaka

World of Omics

Rahul Agarwal — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 17:11:48 -0500

How many variants of "omics" techniques presently in use ?