You might learn a lot about that house—the rooms, the doors, the furniture—but you would miss the bigger story: the streets, the neighborhoods, and all the ways the city changes from one place to another.

Something similar happens when scientists study bacterial genomes one at a time.

Over the past decade, researchers have collected thousands of bacterial genomes. These genomes contain an enormous amount of information about how bacteria survive, adapt, and evolve. But comparing thousands of individual genomes can quickly become a computational maze.

That is where PANORAMA enters the story.

Developed by Jérôme Arnoux and colleagues, PANORAMA is a computational tool designed to explore bacterial pangenomes—the complete collection of genetic possibilities found across a species or group of related organisms. Instead of looking at every genome as an isolated object, the approach represents their shared and variable genetic features as a graph.

Think of this graph as a giant subway map.

Some stations appear on almost every route. These represent genes that are highly conserved. Other stations appear only on certain routes, representing genes that some bacteria possess while others do not. By looking at the entire network, scientists can begin to see not just *what genes exist*, but how they are organized and how biological systems are distributed across populations.

The researchers put PANORAMA to the test using 941 genomes of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium important in human health. They used the tool to investigate biological systems, including bacterial defense mechanisms against viruses known as bacteriophages. They then expanded the analysis to more than 6,000 genomes from four Enterobacteriaceae species.

The result is more than a faster way to process data.

PANORAMA allows researchers to ask a bigger question: What can an entire microbial species do, genetically speaking?

By comparing pangenomes, the researchers could identify systems shared between species as well as distinctive features. They could also find recurring genomic locations where genetic material is inserted—clues that may reveal common evolutionary processes.

And this is perhaps the most exciting part of the story.

Every bacterial genome is like a page in a huge evolutionary book. Until recently, reading thousands of those pages together was difficult. PANORAMA provides a way to turn those pages into a map, allowing scientists to see patterns that might disappear when each genome is studied separately.

The study, published in PLOS Computational Biology in July 2026, presents PANORAMA as a foundation for large-scale comparative pangenomics. The software and accompanying analysis resources are openly available, giving other researchers the opportunity to explore microbial diversity themselves.

So the story is not really about one bacterium or one genome.

It is about changing the way we look at life.

Instead of asking, “What is inside this genome?”, scientists can increasingly ask, “What is the full genetic landscape of this species—and how did it become this way?”

And sometimes, when you stop looking at one house and finally see the whole city, the most interesting discoveries are hiding in the streets between them.

Read more at https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013856

A recent study by Webster and Chapman introduces Buscogeny (https://github.com/Jwebster89/Buscogeny), an open-source bioinformatics pipeline designed to make this process easier. The tool uses BUSCO (Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs), which identifies conserved genes that are expected to occur as single copies in particular groups of organisms. These genes act like evolutionary landmarks, allowing researchers to compare genomes and investigate their relationships.

Buscogeny brings several steps of phylogenomic analysis into one workflow. It identifies BUSCO genes, extracts and aligns their sequences, removes unreliable regions, combines information from multiple genes, and uses the resulting data to construct a phylogenetic tree. It also provides quality-control information, helping researchers identify genomes that may be too incomplete for reliable analysis.

The authors demonstrate the usefulness of Buscogeny with bacterial and fungal genomes, including Alternaria. This is particularly valuable because fungal genomes can vary greatly in quality and annotation. Ultimately, Buscogeny helps transform massive amounts of genomic data into an understandable evolutionary story. Each DNA sequence becomes a clue, each conserved gene becomes a landmark, and together these clues reveal a picture of how life is connected.

More at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10123-025-00752-6?

Seq is a programming language for computational genomics and bioinformatics. With a Python-compatible syntax and a host of domain-specific features and optimizations, Seq makes writing high-performance genomics software as easy as writing Python code, and achieves performance comparable to (and in many cases better than) C/C++.

Learn more by following the tutorial or from the cookbook.

Address of the bookmark: https://seq-lang.org

Address of the bookmark: http://msaprobs.sourceforge.net/homepage.htm#latest

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/skoren/PilonGrid

• Freyman, W.A., Johnson, M.G., and C.J. Rothfels. 2022. Homologizer: phylogenetic phasing of gene copies into polyploid subgenomes. bioRxiv 2020.10.22.351486v4

homologizer is implemented in RevBayes. Please see http://revbayes.com to download and install RevBayes. For users without previous RevBayes experience, we recommend the tutorials at http://revbayes.com.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/wf8/homologizer

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_assembly 

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-0951-y

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/operasf/

Again, running spades.py will show you the options:

spades.py

This produces:

SPAdes genome assembler v3.10.1

Usage: /usr/local/SPAdes-3.10.1-Linux/bin/spades.py [options] -o <output_dir>

Basic options:
-o      <output_dir>    directory to store all the resulting files (required)
--sc                    this flag is required for MDA (single-cell) data
--meta                  this flag is required for metagenomic sample data
--rna                   this flag is required for RNA-Seq data
--plasmid               runs plasmidSPAdes pipeline for plasmid detection
--iontorrent            this flag is required for IonTorrent data
--test                  runs SPAdes on toy dataset
-h/--help               prints this usage message
-v/--version            prints version

Input data:
--12    <filename>      file with interlaced forward and reverse paired-end reads
-1      <filename>      file with forward paired-end reads
-2      <filename>      file with reverse paired-end reads
-s      <filename>      file with unpaired reads
--pe<#>-12      <filename>      file with interlaced reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-1       <filename>      file with forward reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-2       <filename>      file with reverse reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-s       <filename>      file with unpaired reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-<or>    orientation of reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9; <or> = fr, rf, ff)
--s<#>          <filename>      file with unpaired reads for single reads library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-12      <filename>      file with interlaced reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-1       <filename>      file with forward reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-2       <filename>      file with reverse reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-s       <filename>      file with unpaired reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-<or>    orientation of reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9; <or> = fr, rf, ff)
--hqmp<#>-12    <filename>      file with interlaced reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-1     <filename>      file with forward reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-2     <filename>      file with reverse reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-s     <filename>      file with unpaired reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-<or>  orientation of reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9; <or> = fr, rf, ff)
--nxmate<#>-1   <filename>      file with forward reads for Lucigen NxMate library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--nxmate<#>-2   <filename>      file with reverse reads for Lucigen NxMate library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--sanger        <filename>      file with Sanger reads
--pacbio        <filename>      file with PacBio reads
--nanopore      <filename>      file with Nanopore reads
--tslr  <filename>      file with TSLR-contigs
--trusted-contigs       <filename>      file with trusted contigs
--untrusted-contigs     <filename>      file with untrusted contigs

Pipeline options:
--only-error-correction runs only read error correction (without assembling)
--only-assembler        runs only assembling (without read error correction)
--careful               tries to reduce number of mismatches and short indels
--continue              continue run from the last available check-point
--restart-from  <cp>    restart run with updated options and from the specified check-point ('ec', 'as', 'k<int>', 'mc')
--disable-gzip-output   forces error correction not to compress the corrected reads
--disable-rr            disables repeat resolution stage of assembling

Advanced options:
--dataset       <filename>      file with dataset description in YAML format
-t/--threads    <int>           number of threads
                                [default: 16]
-m/--memory     <int>           RAM limit for SPAdes in Gb (terminates if exceeded)
                                [default: 250]
--tmp-dir       <dirname>       directory for temporary files
                                [default: <output_dir>/tmp]
-k              <int,int,...>   comma-separated list of k-mer sizes (must be odd and
                                less than 128) [default: 'auto']
--cov-cutoff    <float>         coverage cutoff value (a positive float number, or 'auto', or 'off') [default: 'off']
--phred-offset  <33 or 64>      PHRED quality offset in the input reads (33 or 64)
                                [default: auto-detect]

As you can see this is also a “pipeline” of tools that can be switched on or off. SPAdes takes quite a long time, so for the purposes of this practical, something like this may suffice:

spades.py -t 4 \
          -m 32 \
          -k 31,51,71 \
          --only-assembler \
          -1 miseq.1.fastq -2 miseq.2.fastq \
          --nanopore minion.fastq \
          -o hybrid_assembly

In turn, these parameters mean

• use 4 threads
• max memory is 32Gb
• use 3 kmer values to build the de bruijn graph(s) - 31, 51 and 71
• only run the assembler, not the correction algorithm (for speed)
• read 1 and read 2 of the MiSeq data
• the nanopore data
• put the output in folder “hybrid_assembly”