BOL: Related items

Spines

Jit — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 05:33:26 -0600

Spines is a collection of software tools, developed and used by the Vertebrate Genome Biology Group at the Broad Institute. It provides basic data structures for efficient data manipulation (mostly genomic sequences, alignments, variation etc.), as well as specialized tool sets for various analyses. It also features three sequence alignment packages: Satsuma, a highly parallelized program for high-sensitivity, genome-wide synteny; Papaya, an all-purpose alignment tool for less diverged sequences; and SLAP, a context-sensitive local aligner for diverged sequences with large gaps.

Access Spines here.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.broadinstitute.org/genome-sequencing-and-analysis/spines

orthodotter: Synteny plots (oxford grid)

Jit — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 07:16:16 -0500

orthodotter -h
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orthodotter - Plot orthologous genes on an oxford grid.
       -f      : input file, containing orthologous genes, default is stdin
                       species chr-name start end species chr-name start end
       -toPlot  : give the x and y sets and the color separated by double-dots,
                       for example set1:set2:red will plot set1 on x, set2 on y with
                       red points. Could give several -toPlot arguments.
                       To launch the clustering of dots, use extra-option 1=dist,min_nb_genes
                       where dist is the minimal distance (euclidian) between two points and min_nb_genes the minimal
                       number of genes in a cluster to be valid.
       -o      : output file, default is stdout
       -x       : resolution of x axis, default is 600
       -y       : resolution on y axis, default is 600
       -r       : radius of circle representing orthologous genes
       -format       : could be png, gif, jpg, pdf or ps. Default is png.
       -fg           : foreground color, default is black
       -bg           : background color, default is transparent
       -fSize   : fontSize, default is 1
       -filter       : check chromosome names
       -h            : help
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orthodotter -f Vigne_Banane.ortho -toPlot Vigne:Banane:black:1=10,5 -x 1200 -y 1200 -bg white -o Vigne_vs_Banane.png > Vigne_vs_Banane.clusters
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Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/institut-de-genomique/orthodotter

Quota synteny alignment

Jit — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 04:11:57 -0500

Typically in comparative genomics, we can identify anchors, chain them into syntenic blocks and interpret these blocks as derived from a common descent. However, when comparing two genomes undergone ancient genome duplications (plant genomes in particular), we have large number of blocks that are not orthologous, but are paralogous. This has forced us sometimes to use ad-hoc rules to screen these blocks. So the question is: given the expected depth (quota) along both x- and y-axis, select a subset of the anchors with maximized total score.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/tanghaibao/quota-alignment

flexidot: Highly customizable, ambiguity-aware dotplots for visual sequence analyses

Jit — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 08:39:28 -0500

FlexiDot is a cross-platform dotplot suite generating high quality self, pairwise and all-against-all visualizations. To improve dotplot suitability for comparison of consensus and error-prone sequences, FlexiDot harbors routines for strict and relaxed handling of mismatches and ambiguous residues. The custom shading modules facilitate dotplot interpretation and motif identification by adding information on sequence annotations and sequence similarities to the images. Combined with collage-like outputs, FlexiDot supports simultaneous visual screening of a large sequence sets, allowing dotplot use for routine screening.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/molbio-dresden/flexidot

Syri compares alignments between two chromosome-level assemblies and identifies synteny and structural rearrangements.

Shruti Paniwala — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 02:01:13 -0500

Syri compares alignments between two chromosome-level assemblies and identifies synteny and structural rearrangements.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/schneebergerlab/syri

ALPHA: A Toolkit for Automated Local Phylogenomic Analyses

Jit — Wed, 21 Mar 2018 18:12:06 -0500

Automated Local Phylogenomic Analyses, or ALPHA, is a python-based application that provides an intuitive user interface for phylogenetic analyses and data visualization. It has four distinct modes that are useful for different types of phylogenetic analysis: RAxML, File Converter, MS Comparison, and D-statistic.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/chilleo/ALPHA

Environment for Tree Exploration (ETE) is a Python programming toolkit that assists in the recontruction, manipulation, analysis and visualization of phylogenetic trees

Rahul Nayak — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 05:32:33 -0600

The Environment for Tree Exploration (ETE) is a Python programming toolkit that assists in the recontruction, manipulation, analysis and visualization of phylogenetic trees (although clustering trees or any other tree-like data structure are also supported).

Other tools

https://github.com/shenwei356/taxonkit

ETE, version: 3.1.1
BioPython, version: 1.73
taxadb, version: 0.10.1
TaxonKit, version: 0.5.0

Address of the bookmark: https://pypi.org/project/ete3/3.1.1/

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?

Clustergrammer is a web-based tool for visualizing high-dimensional data as an interactive and shareable hierarchically clustered heatmap

BioStar — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 19:30:17 -0500

Clustergrammer is a web-based tool for visualizing high-dimensional data (e.g. a matrix) as an interactive and shareable hierarchically clustered heatmap. Clustergrammer's front end (Clustergrammer-JS) is built using D3.js and its back-end (Clustergrammer-PY) is built using Python. Clustergrammer produces highly interactive visualizations that enable intuitive exploration of high-dimensional data and has several biology-specific features (e.g. enrichment analysis, see Biology-Specific Features) to facilitate the exploration of gene-level biological data.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/MaayanLab/clustergrammer

Tigers genome sequenced

Rahul Agarwal — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 16:48:24 -0500

Fifteen scientists led by Dr Jong Bhak of Genome Research Foundation, South Korea, decoded as many as 3 billion nucleotides (organic molecules that form the basic building blocks of nucleic acids, such as DNA). They identified 20,000 genes related to various functions of the tiger.

The biggest and perhaps most fearsome of the world's big cats, the tiger, shares 95.6 percent of its DNA with humans' cute and furry companions, domestic cats.

The new research showed that big cats have genetic mutations that enabled them to be carnivores. The team also identified mutations that allow snow leopards to thrive at high altitudes.

Reference:

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/your-cat-ferocious-tigers-share-lot-95-6-percent-their-4B11182690

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/flora-fauna/Gene-mapping-of-tiger-completed/articleshow/22671681.cms

Paper:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130917/ncomms3433/full/ncomms3433.html