BOL: Related items

KOBAS: a web server for gene/protein functional annotation and functional gene set enrichment

Jit — Fri, 19 Oct 2018 09:36:11 -0500

KOBAS 3.0 is a web server for gene/protein functional annotation (Annotate module) and functional gene set enrichment(Enrichment module). For Annotate module, it accepts gene list as input, including IDs or sequences, and generates annotations for each gene based on multiple databases about pathways, diseases, and Gene Ontology. For Enrichment module, it can accept either gene list or gene expression data as input, and generates enriched gene sets, corresponding name, p-value or a probability of enrichment and enrichment score based on results of multiple methods.

Address of the bookmark: http://kobas.cbi.pku.edu.cn/

A comprehensive atlas of human gene activity released !!!

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 02 Sep 2014 14:20:24 -0500

A large international consortium of researchers has produced the first comprehensive, detailed map of the way genes work across the major cells and tissues of the human body. The findings describe the complex networks that govern gene activity, and the new information could play a crucial role in identifying the genes involved with disease.

We are able to pinpoint the regions of the genome that can be active in a disease and in normal activity, whether it’s in a brain cell, the skin, in blood stem cells or in hair follicles. This is a major advance that will greatly increase our ability to understand the causes of disease across the body.

The research is outlined in a series of papers published March 27, 2014, two in the journal Nature and 16 in other scholarly journals. The work is the result of years of concerted effort among 250 experts from more than 20 countries as part of FANTOM 5 (Functional Annotation of the Mammalian Genome). The FANTOM project, led by the Japanese institution RIKEN, is aimed at building a complete library of human genes.

Researchers studied human and mouse cells using a new technology called Cap Analysis of Gene Expression (CAGE), developed at RIKEN, to discover how 95% of all human genes are switched on and off. These “switches” — called “promoters” and “enhancers” — are the regions of DNA that manage gene activity. The researchers mapped the activity of 180,000 promoters and 44,000 enhancers across a wide range of human cell types and tissues and, in most cases, found they were linked with specific cell types.

Referene : www.kurzweilai.net/first-comprehensive-atlas-of-human-gene-activity-released

GeNeCK (Gene Network Construction Kit) is a comprehensive online tool kit that integrate various statistical methods to construct gene networks

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 09:39:30 -0600

GeNeCK (Gene Network Construction Kit) is a comprehensive online tool kit that integrate various statistical methods to construct gene networks based on gene expression data and optional hub gene information.

It efficiently constructs gene networks from expression data. It allows the user to use ten different network construction methods (such as partial correlation-, likelihood-, Bayesian- and mutual information-based methods) and integrates the resulting networks from multiple methods. Hub gene information, if available, can be incorporated to enhance performance.

GeNeCK is an efficient and easy-to-use web application for gene regulatory network construction. It can be accessed at http://lce.biohpc.swmed.edu/geneck

Address of the bookmark: http://lce.biohpc.swmed.edu/geneck/

WEGO : simple but useful tool for visualizing, comparing and plotting GO (Gene Ontology) annotation results

BioStar — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 10:02:22 -0500

WEGO (Web Gene Ontology Annotation Plot) is a simple but useful tool for visualizing, comparing and plotting GO (Gene Ontology) annotation results. As the GO vocabulary became more and more popular, WEGO was widely adopted and used in many researches. Therefore we have updated WEGO 2.0 in 2018. Here are some changes we’ve made:
1. The limit of input file numbers was cancelled. Now the users could upload as many files as they want with one operation.
2. We have added the reference data of 9 species for users selection.
3. Besides the traditional WEGO histogram, WEGO 2.0 outputs an additional type of bar graph showing GO terms with significant gene number differences.

Address of the bookmark: http://wego.genomics.org.cn/

Atlas of ancient inter-ethnic group !!!

Jit — Fri, 14 Feb 2014 13:16:20 -0600

Now a dayz, almost 3% of the world's population lived outside their country of origin. These migration is increasingly being perceived as a force that can contribute to development, and an integral aspect of the global development process. While migrants make important contributions to the economic prosperity of their host countries, the flow of financial, technological, social and human capital back to their countries of origin also is having a significant impact on poverty reduction and economic development.

However, the ancient invasions and migrations to slavery and trade, history is embroidered with events that led to interactions between previously separate populations. Early humans migrated due to many factors such as changing climate and landscape and inadequate food supply. Historical migration of human populations begins with the movement of Homo erectus out of Africa across Eurasia about a million years ago. Homo sapiens appear to have occupied all of Africa about 150,000 years ago, moved out of Africa 70,000 years ago, and had spread across Australia, Asia and Europe by 40,000 years BC. Indo-Aryan migration from the Indus Valley to the plain of the River Ganges in Northern India is presumed to have taken place in the Middle to Late Bronze Age, contemporary to the Late Harappan phase in India (ca. 1700 to 1300 BC). From 180 BC, a series of invasions from Central Asia followed, including those led by the Indo-Greeks, Indo-Scythians, Indo-Parthians and Kushans in the northwestern Indian subcontinent.

Using the recent advance technologies researchers have created a historical atlas of instances of such mixing. They use a sophisticated statistical method for making inferences about human history and infer populations interbredings ( happen over the past 4,000 years) with an ease.

The study published the findings and presented with an interactive map. http://admixturemap.paintmychromosomes.com/

These sort of genomic study have some limilation. It is hard to precisely define sources of mixing when it occurred between genetically similar groups, and scenarios involving multiple waves of mixing over time or between multiple groups can be difficult to tease apart. But it is believed that larger sample sizes will improve resolution. These high resolution will provide a deeper understanding of human history.

Reference:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2014/01/28/science.1245938

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21390129?dopt=Abstract&holding=npg

http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/paper-ethnicity.html

Image: Wikipedia

CroCo: A program to detect potential cross contaminations in HTS assembled transcriptomes using expression level quantification

Jit — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 18:17:44 -0600

CroCo is a program to detect cross contamination events in assembled transcriptomes using sequencing reads to determine the true origin of every transcripts.
Such cross contaminations can be expected if several RNA-Seq experiments were prepared during the same period at the same lab, or by the same people, or if they were processed or sequenced by the same sequencing service facility.
Our approach first determines a subset of transcripts that are suspiciously similar across samples using a pairwise BLAST procedure. CroCo then combine all transcriptomes into a metatranscriptome and quantifies the "expression level" of all transcripts successively using every sample read data (e.g. several species sequenced by the same lab for a particular study) while allowing read multi-mappings.
Several mapping tools implemented in CroCo can be used to estimate expression level (default is RapMap).
This information is then used to categorize each transcript in the following 5 categories :

clean: the transcript origin is from the focal sample.

cross contamination: the transcript origin is from an alien sample of the same experiment.

dubious: expression levels are too close between focal and alien samples to determine the true origin of the transcript.

low coverage: expression levels are too low in all samples, thus hampering our procedure (which relies on differential expression) to confidently assign it to any category.

over expressed: expression levels are very high in at least 3 samples and CroCo will not try to categorize it. Indeed, such a pattern does not correspond to expectations for cross contaminations, but often reflect highly conserved genes such as ribosomal gene, or external contamination shared by several samples (e.g. Escherichia coli contaminations).

Address of the bookmark: https://gitlab.mbb.univ-montp2.fr/mbb/CroCo

Tools for Differential expression analysis

Abhi — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 03:40:33 -0600

apeglm - https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/apeglm.html

ashr - https://github.com/stephens999/ashr, https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ashr/index.html

consensusDE - https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/consensusDE.html

DESeq2 - https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/DESeq2.html

edgeR - https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/edgeR.html

limma - https://kasperdanielhansen.github.io/genbioconductor/html/limma.html https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/limma.html

MetaCycle - https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/MetaCycle/index.html, https://github.com/gangwug/MetaCycle

RUVSeq - https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/RUVSeq.html

SARTools - https://github.com/PF2-pasteur-fr/SARTools

tximport - https://github.com/mikelove/tximport

EMBL Postdoc position in Bacterial Gene Gain Loss

Thu, 20 Aug 2015 14:09:21 -0500

A post-doctoral fellowship is available in the research groups of Nick Goldman (EBI) and John Welch (Genetics Department, Cambridge University) under the EMBL-EBI / Cambridge Computational Biomedical Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme.

The project is on bacterial gene gain and loss and emerging pathogenicity, and is described in full here: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/research/postdocs/ebpods/projects/goldman-welch-2015 . The EMBL-EBI / Cambridge Computational Biomedical Postdoctoral (“EBPOD”)

The closing date for applications is 3 September 2015. Nick Goldman EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute Nick Goldman

More at https://www.ebi.ac.uk/research/postdocs/ebpods/projects/goldman-welch-2015

Research fellow (PhD candidate) in computational biology – 2 positions

Fri, 25 Apr 2014 20:19:58 -0500

At the Department of Informatics two 4-year positions as research fellow are available in the field of computational biology connected to the Computational Biology Unit. The positions are linked to the project “Integrated genomics - linking transcriptional and translational regulation over developmental time” supported by the Bergen Research Foundation

The fate of a cell is ultimately the product of the regulation of its genes. Gene regulation is a coordinated process acting at multiple levels of which transcription and translation are the most prominent. The Valen group is dedicated to the fundamental question of how transcription and translation is integrated to obtain the desired protein abundance. The recent development of high-throughput next generation sequencing techniques to monitor both active translation and transcription has made it possible to study this connection at the genome scale.

This project aims to elucidate the links between regulation of translation and transcription. The applicant will analyze next generation sequencing data and model gene regulation on a genome-wide level to identify the features that affect the translational output of transcripts. The work will be done in close collaboration with experimental scientists who will test the predictions of the computational models.

Additional information on the position can be obtained by contacting Eivind Valen (eivind.valen@ii.uib.no).

The research fellow must take part in the University’s approved PhD program leading to the degree within a time limit of 3 years. Application for admission to the PhD program, including a project plan outline for the training module, will be worked out in collaboration with the research group in question.

In total, the fellowship period is 4 years, 25 % of this will be allocated to teaching and/or administrative duties. The fellowship period may be reduced if the successful applicant has held previous employment as a research fellow or similar.

http://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/102235/research-fellow-phd-candidate-in-computational-biology-2-positions

The 8000 years old Tibetian gene mutation !!!

Neel — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 21:57:44 -0500

A new study has provided insight into how gene mutation around 8,000 years ago helped Tibetans' to survive in the thin air on the Tibetan Plateau, where an average elevation is of 14,800 feet.

A study led by University of Utah scientists is the first to find a genetic cause for the adaptation, a single DNA base pair change that dates back 8,000 years and demonstrate how it contributes to the Tibetans' ability to live in low oxygen conditions.

About 8,000 years ago, the gene EGLN1 changed by a single DNA base pair. Today, a relatively short time later on the scale of human history, 88 percent of Tibetans have the genetic variation, and it was virtually absent from closely related lowland Asians. The findings indicate the genetic variation endows its carriers with an advantage.

In those without the adaptation, low oxygen caused their blood to become thick with oxygen-carrying red blood cells, an attempt to feed starved tissues, which could cause long-term complications such as heart failure. The researchers found that the newly identified genetic variation protected Tibetans by decreasing the over-response to low oxygen.

Reference: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7513/abs/nature13408.html