BOL: Related items

Genomic architecture surrounding the fusion site of human chromosome 2

LEGE — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 12:26:29 -0600

The article "Genomic Structure and Evolution of the Ancestral Chromosome Fusion Site in 2q13–2q14.1 and Paralogous Regions on Other Human Chromosomes (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC187548/)" explores the genomic architecture surrounding the fusion site of human chromosome 2. This fusion event is a key evolutionary marker distinguishing humans from other great apes, as humans have 46 chromosomes while chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans possess 48. The fusion occurred through an end-to-end joining of two ancestral chromosomes, which remain separate in nonhuman primates.

Key Findings:

Chromosomal Fusion and Its Molecular Signature:
- The fusion site is located at 2q13–2q14.1 and is characterized by degenerate telomeric sequences appearing interstitially, indicating the historical head-to-head joining of ancestral chromosomes.
- Despite being a signature of a past fusion event, these telomeric repeats are no longer functional and have undergone sequence degradation over time.
Extensive Duplications in the Surrounding Genomic Region:
- The study identifies large-scale segmental duplications flanking the fusion site, with several of these regions duplicated and scattered across multiple chromosomes.
- These duplications are predominantly located in subtelomeric and pericentromeric regions, suggesting their role in genomic instability and chromosomal evolution.
Paralogous Regions and Their Evolutionary Relationships:
- A 168-kilobase (kb) segment near the fusion site has 98%–99% sequence identity with three regions on chromosome 9 (9pter, 9p11.2, and 9q13).
- Another 67-kb region distal to the fusion site shows a high degree of homology to sequences in chromosome 22qter.
- Additionally, a 100-kb segment exhibits 96% sequence identity with a region in chromosome 2q11.2.
Comparative Genomics and Evolutionary Implications:
- By comparing the duplicated sequences and their arrangement in primates, the researchers traced the order of duplication events leading to their present distribution.
- The presence of specific repetitive elements within these duplicated segments serves as evolutionary markers that help infer their historical rearrangements.
- Some of these duplicated regions are associated with chromosomal inversion breakpoints, potentially contributing to evolutionary changes in primates.
- Recurrent structural rearrangements in these regions have been linked to human chromosomal disorders.

Conclusions and Implications:

The findings provide valuable insights into the structural evolution of human chromosome 2, which played a crucial role in human speciation.
Understanding these segmental duplications and their evolutionary trajectories sheds light on genomic instability, which may contribute to human genetic diseases.
The study highlights how large-scale chromosomal rearrangements, such as fusion and duplication, have influenced the evolutionary divergence of humans from other primates.

This research advances our understanding of human genome evolution and offers a foundation for studying the effects of structural variants in genetic disorders.

Doctoral student (m / w / d) - mucosal immunology (Imaging)

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 22:27:25 -0500

Since its founding in 1815, the University Hospital Erlangen has been offering top-quality medicine. In diagnosis and therapy are the latest findings of medical research. More than 7500 employees from around 50 professions are needed to fulfill the manifold tasks of the University Hospital Erlangen.
tasks
The research goal is the analysis of the role of Itk (Tec Kinase) in chronic intestinal inflammation. The focus of the planned work is on immunological work such as cell culture, FACS, ELISA, qPCR analysis of clinical samples. The project is funded by third party funds and already established as part of a SFB project.
qualifications
Doctoral student (m / w / d) in the research field "Immunology of the Gastrointestinal tract".
-Degree in Natural Sciences (MSc or equivalent)
-Excellent Study
Skills -Found knowledge and skills of molecular biological, immunological and microscopy
techniques -Very good knowledge of English
-team
skills -responsibility, self-initiative, motivation and purposefulness would

also be beneficial:
-Experience in imaging
methods -experience desirable in cell culture, FACS, histochemistry
We offer
A safe, interesting job in a motivated open-minded research team. Careful and skilled training and support in the new challenge. A varied and responsible field of activity with individual development opportunities.
Comprehensive offers for health promotion
All services of the civil service incl. Additional provision of the Federal
and Länder pension funds (VBL)
Family-friendly environment and, where applicable, dormitory
places Crediting of professional experience possible
Contact for applications
Applications with curriculum vitae, certificates and letters of recommendation can preferably be sent by mail or postal mail to:

PD Dr. med. rer. nat. Dr. habil. med. Weigmann, Benno
University Hospital Erlangen
Medical Clinic 1 - Research
Hartmannstraße 14
91054 Erlangen
09131-8535885

https://www.jobvector.de/en/jobs/biology-life-sciences/research-education/naturwissenschaftlicher-doktorand-mukosale-immunologie-120008.html?suid=62e3e74c0250f5577074cb7c9fa0c2e655323ac8

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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/institut-de-genomique/orthodotter

xmatchview: smith-waterman alignment visualization

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 28 Dec 2017 09:00:58 -0600

xmatchview and xmatchview-conifer are imaging tools for comparing the synteny between DNA sequences. It allows users to align 2 DNA sequences in fasta format using cross_match and displays the alignment in a variety of image formats. xmatchview and xmatchview-conifer are written in python and run on linux and windows. They serve as visual tools for analyzing cross_match alignments. Cross_match (Green, P. (1994) http://www.phrap.org) uses an implementation of the Smith-Waterman algorithm for comparing DNA sequences that is sensitive.

http://www.bcgsc.ca/platform/bioinfo/software/xmatchview

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/warrenlr/xmatchview

Scalpel

Shruti Paniwala — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 02:07:58 -0500

A team from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has released an algorithm, called Scalpel, for finding insertions and deletions in next generation sequencing data sets. Scalpel, which is open source and available for download on SourceForge, outperformed the popular tools GATK HaplotypeCaller and SOAPindel in test runs on both simulated and real whole human exomes.

Like other indel callers, Scalpel works by performing de novo assembly of regions of interest, so that misalignment to the reference genome cannot obscure the presence of an insertion or deletion. Scalpel's innovation is to repeatedly check its assembly before comparing to the reference genome, to account for simple sequence repeats that are a regular source of error in indel calling. When Scalpel assembles an exon, it collects reads that map to that exon (including partial matches), splits them into k-mers, and creates a de Bruijn graph to span the exon; however, if it detects repeats in the map, it iteratively increases the size of the k-mers by one base until the repeats are eliminated. This ensures that the final assembly of the exon is highly accurate while minimizing compute time.

The Cold Spring Harbor team's validation of Scalpel, published over the weekend in Nature Methods, compares Scalpel's performance on a live whole exome against HaplotypeCaller and SOAPindel. The donor is an individual with serious neurological disorders, which may be linked to a high incidence of indels. One thousand indels from this individual's exome, called by one or more of the informatics pipelines, were selected for focused resequencing. This resequencing revealed a 77% true positive rate for Scalpel calls, dramatically better than the rates for either of the competing tools; Scalpel performed especially well with indels longer than five base pairs, a traditional weak point for indel callers.

Finally, the authors demonstrate Scalpel's use on a large set of genetic data from nearly 600 families who donated samples to the Simons Simplex Collection, a project of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. Scalpel found a very high enrichment for indels in children affected by autism, compared with their unaffected siblings, a pattern that persisted even after excluding common variants.

Picard

Neel — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 08:21:54 -0500

Picard is a set of command line tools for manipulating high-throughput sequencing (HTS) data and formats such as SAM/BAM/CRAM and VCF. These file formats are defined in the Hts-specs repository. See especially the SAM specification and the VCF specification.

Note that the information on this page is targeted at end-users. For developers, the source code, building instructions and implementation/development resources are available on GitHub.

The Picard toolkit is open-source under the MIT license and free for all uses.

Enjoy!

Address of the bookmark: http://broadinstitute.github.io/picard/

ORFfinder with smart BLAST

Jit — Tue, 17 May 2016 01:43:15 -0500

ORF Finder

ORFfinder is a graphical analysis tool for finding open reading frames (ORFs). We’ve been working on a few updates, and we’d like to find out what you think about them. Read on to find out what you can do with the new ORFfinder.

Smart BLAST (https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2015/07/29/smartblast/)

Select one or a group of ORFs and BLAST several databases at once, and use the newly developed SmartBLAST to verify protein names. Looking for the traditional results from BLAST? They’re there too.

BBMap/BBTools package: Multipurpose tool designed for converting reads or other nucleotide data between different formats.

Jit — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 05:47:21 -0500

Reformatis a member of the BBMap/BBTools package. It is a multipurpose tool designed for converting reads or other nucleotide data between different formats. It supports, and can inter-convert:

fastq
fasta
fasta+qual
sam
scarf (an old Illumina format)
bam (if samtools is installed)
gzip
zip
ascii-33 (sanger)
ascii-64 (old Illumina)
paired files
interleaved files

It is multithreaded and can process data at over 500 megabytes per second, and can accept streams from standard in and write to standard out, allowing it to be easily dropped into the middle of a pipeline for format conversion. Reformat autodetects formats based on file extensions and content, making it very easy to use; and the autodetection can be overridden, allowing flexibility for people who don't like to follow naming conventions, or out-of-spec fastq files with qualities values like -17 or 120.

The program has been gradually expanded, and can now perform various other functions. None of these will break pairing, if the input is paired.

Quality trimming (either or both ends)
Quality filtering
Fixed-length trimming
Generation of histograms (base composition, quality, etc)
Subsampling (to a fraction of input reads, or an exact number of reads or bases)
Changing fasta line-wrapping length
Reverse-complementing (all reads or only read 2)
Adding /1 and /2 suffix to read names
GC-content filtering
Length-filtering
Testing for corrupted interleaved files

Reformat is compatible with any platform that supports Java 1.7 or higher. It also has a bash shellscript for simpler invocation. Typical usage examples:

Reformat fastq into fasta:
reformat.sh in=x.fq out=y.fa

Interleave paired reads:
reformat.sh in1=x1.fq in2=x2.fq out=y.fq

Note - you can actually use a shortcut if paired read files have the same name with a 1 and a 2. This is equivalent to the above command:
reformat.sh in=x#.fq out=y.fq

De-interleave reads:
reformat.sh in=x.fq out1=y1.fq out2=y2.fq

Verify that interleaving appears correct, assuming Illumina namimg conventions:
reformat.sh in=x.fq vint

Convert ASCII-33 to ASCII-64:
reformat.sh in=x.fq out=y.fq qin=33 qout=64

Quality-trim paired reads to Q10 on the left and right ends and discard reads shorter than 50bp after trimming:
reformat.sh in1=x1.fq in2=x2.fq out1=y1.fq out2=y2.fq outsingle=singletons.fq qtrim=rl trimq=10 minlength=50

Subsample 10% of the first 20000 pairs in an interleaved file:
reformat.sh in=x.fq out=y.fq reads=20000 samplerate=0.1 int=t
(in this case "int=t" overrides interleaving autodetection, to ensure reads are treated as pairs)

Pipe in a gzipped sam file and pipe out fasta:
reformat.sh in=stdin.sam.gz out=stdout.fa

Reverse-complement reads:
reformat.sh in=x.fq out=y.fq rcomp

For reformatting a file with very long sequences, Reformat will need more memory; just add the additional flag "-Xmx2g". For example, to change the line-wrapping length on the human genome (which has individual sequences over 200Mbp long) to 70 characters:
reformat.sh -Xmx2g in=HG19.fa.gz out=HG19_wrapped.fa.gz fastawrap=70

For additional functions, please run the shellscript with no arguments, or just read it with a text editor. If you have any questions, please post them in this thread.

For people using a non-bash terminal, you may need to type "bash reformat.sh" instead of just "reformat.sh".
For users of Windows or other platforms that do not support bash shellscripts, replace "reformat.sh" with "java -ea -Xmx200m /path/to/bbmap/current/ jgi.ReformatReads"
for example,
java -ea -Xmx200m C:\bbmap\current\ jgi.ReformatReads in=x.fq out=y.fa

Reformat can be downloaded with BBTools here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/bbmap/

Mauve: a system for constructing multiple genome alignments in the presence of large-scale evolutionary events such as rearrangement and inversion

Jit — Sat, 24 Dec 2016 09:20:53 -0600

Mauve is a system for constructing multiple genome alignments in the presence of large-scale evolutionary events such as rearrangement and inversion. Multiple genome alignments provide a basis for research into comparative genomics and the study of genome-wide evolutionary dynamics.

Mauve has been developed with the idea that a multiple genome aligner should require only modest computational resources. It employs algorithmic techniques that scale well in the lengths of sequences being aligned. For example, a pair of Y. pestis genomes can be aligned in under a minute, while a group of 9 divergent Enterobacterial genomes can be aligned in a few hours. However, the current algorithm’s compute time (progressiveMauve) scales cubically in the number of genomes to align, making it unsuitable for datasets containing more than 50-100 bacterial genomes.

Address of the bookmark: http://darlinglab.org/mauve/mauve.html