BOL: Related items

The Genes That Travel Together: A Genomic Detective Story

BioStar — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:00:36 -0500

Imagine looking through thousands of microbial genomes and discovering two genes that repeatedly appear together. The obvious conclusion is that they must somehow be connected—that perhaps they work together, participate in the same pathway, or depend on each other. But evolution has a way of leaving misleading clues. What if these two genes are found together simply because they were inherited from the same ancient ancestor? In that case, their apparent association may have little to do with their biological function; it may simply be a reflection of shared evolutionary history. This is the intriguing problem addressed by CORGIAS (https://github.com/ynishimuraLv/corgias), a computational framework developed to distinguish genuine gene associations from correlations created by common ancestry.

Instead of asking only whether two genes occur together across genomes, CORGIAS asks a deeper question: did these genes actually evolve together, repeatedly gaining or losing their presence in concert, or are they merely travelling together because of their inherited history? The framework introduces two complementary approaches, Ancestral State Adjustment (ASA) and the Simultaneous EVolution test (SEV), which incorporate evolutionary information into the search for gene associations. This distinction becomes increasingly important as genome sequencing continues to uncover enormous numbers of microbial genomes, many from organisms that have never been cultured and whose genes remain functionally mysterious. In this growing genomic landscape, simply finding a gene is no longer enough—we need clues about what that gene might be doing. CORGIAS approaches this problem almost like a genomic detective: rather than treating every association as evidence, it reconstructs the evolutionary story behind the association and asks whether the evidence survives that history. By doing so, it offers a way to separate coincidence from biological connection and potentially uncover functional relationships hidden within the vast microbial genomic landscape. The broader message is beautifully simple: genes do not evolve in isolation, and understanding what they do may require us to look beyond where they are today and reconstruct how they arrived there. Sometimes, the most important clue in a genome is not the gene itself, but the evolutionary journey it has taken.

More at https://academic.oup.com/nargab/article/7/4/lqaf182/8377910?

HapCUT2: robust and accurate haplotype assembly for diverse sequencing technologies

Jit — Tue, 15 May 2018 07:35:26 -0500

HapCUT2 is a maximum-likelihood-based tool for assembling haplotypes from DNA sequence reads, designed to "just work" with excellent speed and accuracy. We found that previously described haplotype assembly methods are specialized for specific read technologies or protocols, with slow or inaccurate performance on others. With this in mind, HapCUT2 is designed for speed and accuracy across diverse sequencing technologies, including but not limited to: NGS short reads (Illumina HiSeq) clone-based sequencing (Fosmid or BAC clones) SMRT reads (PacBio) Oxford Nanopore reads 10X Genomics Linked-Reads proximity-ligation (Hi-C) reads high-coverage sequencing (>40x coverage-per-SNP) using above technologies combinations of the above technologies (e.g. scaffold long reads with Hi-C reads) See below for specific examples of command line options and best practices for some of these technologies. NOTE: At this time HapCUT2 is for diploid organisms only. VCF input should contain diploid variants. If you use HapCUT2 in your research, please cite: Edge, P., Bafna, V. & Bansal, V. HapCUT2: robust and accurate haplotype assembly for diverse sequencing technologies. Genome Res. gr.213462.116 (2016). doi:10.1101/gr.213462.116

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/vibansal/HapCUT2

SVEngine: Allele Specific and Haplotype Aware Structural Variants Simulator

Jit — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 05:52:34 -0500

SVEngine (Structural Variants Engine)

SVEngine is a multi-purpose and self-contained simulator for whole genome scale spike-in of thousands of SV events of various types in both single-sample and matched sample scenarios.
SVEngine takes as input reference contigs in FASTA files, variant meta distribution as specified in META files (see Manual) or specific variant information as specified in VAR files (see Manual) and NEWICK files for specifying clonal phylogenetic trees in cancer.
SVEngine outpus alterred contigs in FASTA files, spiked-in variants in VAR files (see Manual), simulated short read in FASTQ files and aligned short reads in BAM files.

Address of the bookmark: https://bitbucket.org/charade/svengine/src/master/

GWASpro: A High-Performance Genome-Wide Association Analysis Server

Rahul Nayak — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 08:04:57 -0600

GWASpro supports building complex design matrices, by which complex experimental designs that may include replications, treatments, locations and times, can be accounted for in the linear mixed model (LMM). GWASpro is optimized to handle GWAS data that may consist of up to 10 million markers and 10,000 samples from replicable lines or hybrids. GWASpro provides an interface that significantly reduces the learning curve for new GWAS investigators.

Address of the bookmark: https://bioinfo.noble.org/GWASPRO/

Π-cyc: A Reference-free SNP Discovery Application using Parallel Graph Search

Jit — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 03:34:23 -0600

Reference free SNP search for comparative population genomics: multiple samples run simultanously. **experimental phase, compiles and runs with OpenMPI-1.8.8 with Intel Compiler only

Cycles enumeration (aka Bubbles) as part of de novo de bruijn graphs assembly using colours can be unpractical for large error prone genomes which makes the assembly process produce an excessive number of false positive cycles. Our solution is to search the graph in multicores shared memory parallel mode using graph decomposition then use filtering method to generate good quality SNPs.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06700

https://github.com/redayounsi/2KP2P

/2kp2omp/bin/main_2kp2_K63_C2 -i fastq_files.txt -o fungus_bub.fasta -r stat_fungus.txt -c cov_fungus_hash.txt -k 63 -h 20 -b 100 -g 600 -l 100 -f 16 -t 5.0 -x 1 -v 0 -p 1 -y 1 -u 1

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/redayounsi/2KP2P

VirtualFlow: a versatile, parallel workflow platform for carrying out virtual screening

BioStar — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 13:03:09 -0500

related tasks on Linux-based computer clusters of any type and size which are managed by a batchsystem (such as SLURM).

Currently, there exist two versions of VirtualFlow, which are tailored to different types of tasks:

They use the same core technology regarding the workflow management and parallelization, and they can be used individually or in concert with each other. Additional versions are expected to arrive in the future.

https://github.com/VirtualFlow

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2117-z?

Address of the bookmark: https://virtual-flow.org/

Public Databases for Bioinformatics !

Jit — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 05:32:15 -0500

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17155-y

Server Infrastructure:

File Server:

dhara: Synology 3614 Storage Appliance
4 Core Xeon
108TB disk storage
10Gb ethernet to SCG3
Access atx: dhara:5000
Has btsync server (try it - its much better than dropbox)

Compute Servers:

nandi: Kundaje and Phi Server
24 intel cores
256GB RAM
500GB of SSD storage 
36TB RAID6 local storage
4 Intel Phi's (space for 4 more GPU's)


durga: Montgomery and sensitive data
24 intel cores
256GB RAM
500GB of SSD RAID0 storage 
60TB RAID6 local storage

mitra: Bassik and Web/DB Server
24 core
256GB RAM 
500GB of SSD RAID0 storage 
36TB RAID6 local storage

vayu: Kundaje GPU server
4 core
64GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
8TB RAID10 local storage
4 Nvidia GTX 970 4GB GPUs

amold: Bickel and SGE server
32 AMD core
128GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
12TB RAID5 local storage

wotan: Bickel and SGE server
64 AMD core
256GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
12TB RAID5 local storage

Filesystem:

/users/$USER
default home directory
full backups nightly 
nfs mount to dhara
should store code, papers, and other highly processed data here

/mnt/data/
globally accessible data
should store common data here
e.g. genomes and indexes, annotations, ENCODE data  
if you dont want this to count towards your quote you must chown

/mnt/lab_data/$LAB/
lab accessible data
should store lab project data here 
e.g. ATAC-seq prediction data, enhancer prediction, motif calls

/srv/scratch/$USER
fast local storage
not backed up, but on raid and data will never be deleted
most analysis should be performed here

/srv/persistent/$USER
fast local storage
synced nightly, but not backed up
       ie if the hard drives fail or you delete something and notice 
       within 24 hours we can recover. Otherwise not. (vs home which is 
       properly backed up )  
intermediate analysis products that would be hard to recover should be stored here 
       e.g. stochastic analysis results that need to be kept so that paper 
       results can be reproduced

/srv/www/$LABNAME/
web accessible from mitra.stanford.edu
*NOT BACKED UP*

Some parallel programming patterns:

# gzip a bunch of files
parallel gzip -- *.FILESTOGZIP

# fork example in python:
(for more detailed examples look at 
 https://github.com/nboley/grit/ grit/lib/multiprocessing_utils.py)

import os
import time
import random

import multiprocessing

class ProcessSafeOPStream( object ):
    def __init__( self, writeable_obj ):
        self.writeable_obj = writeable_obj
        self.lock = multiprocessing.Lock()
        self.name = self.writeable_obj.name
        return
    
    def write( self, data ):
        self.lock.acquire()
        self.writeable_obj.write( data )
        self.writeable_obj.flush()
        self.lock.release()
        return
    
    def close( self ):
        self.writeable_obj.close()

def worker(queue, ofp):
    # Try without this
    random.seed()
    while True:
        i = queue.get()
        if i == 'FINISHED': return
        # simulate an expensive function
        x = random.random()
        time.sleep(x/10)
        print i, x
        ofp.write("%i\t%s\n" % (i, x))

NSIMS = 10000
NPROC = 25

# populate queue
todo = multiprocessing.Queue()
for i in xrange(NSIMS): todo.put(i)
for i in xrange(NPROC): todo.put('FINISHED')

ofp = ProcessSafeOPStream( open("output.txt", "w") )

pids = []
for i in xrange(NPROC):
    pid = os.fork()
    if pid == 0:
       worker(todo, ofp)
       os._exit(0)
    else:
       pids.append(pid)  

for pid in pids:
    os.waitpid(pid, 0)

ofp.close()

print "FINISHED"

For use case 1 we obtained the following ENCODE and ROADMAP datasets https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF446WOD/@@download/ENCFF446WOD.bed.gz, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF546PJU/@@download/ENCFF546PJU.bam, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF059BEU/@@download/ENCFF059BEU.bam. Blacklisted regions were obtained from http://mitra.stanford.edu/kundaje/akundaje/release/blacklists/hg38-human/hg38.blacklist.bed.gz. The human genome version hg38 was obtained from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg38/bigZips/hg38.fa.gz.

For use case 2 we used the set of narrowPeak files summarized in https://github.com/wkopp/janggu_usecases/tree/master/extra/urls.txt (archived version v1.0.1). The human genome version hg19 was obtained from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg19/bigZips/hg19.fa.gz

For use case 3 we used the ENCODE datasets https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF591XCX/@@download/ENCFF591XCX.bam, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF736LHE/@@download/ENCFF736LHE.bigWig, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF177HHM/@@download/ENCFF177HHM.bam as we as the GENCODE annotation v29 from ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/gencode/Gencode_human/release_29/gencode.v29.annotation.gtf.gz.

Address of the bookmark: http://mitra.stanford.edu/

Ribbon: Visualizing complex genome alignments and structural variation:

Jit — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 07:40:22 -0600

Ribbon can be used for long reads, short reads, paired-end reads, and assembly/genome alignments. Instructions for each data format are available by clicking on "instructions" in each tab on the right.

Local installation:

You can install Ribbon locally from Github by following the instructions here: https://github.com/MariaNattestad/Ribbon

Address of the bookmark: http://genomeribbon.com/

jobTree based python wrapper to run the genome simulation tool suite Evolver

Jit — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 16:26:32 -0600

evolverSimControl (eSC) can be used to simulate multi-chromosome genome evolution on an arbitrary phylogeny (Newick format). In addition to simply running evolver, eSC also automatically creates statistical summaries of the simulation as it runs including text and image files. Also included are convenience scripts to: check on a running simulation and see detailed status and logging information; extract fasta sequence files from the leaf nodes of a completed simulation; extract pairwise multiple alignment files (.maf) from leaf and branch nodes from a completed simulation and with the help of mafJoin, join them together into a single maf covering the entire simulation.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/dentearl/evolverSimControl

Mash: fast genome and metagenome distance estimation using MinHash

Jit — Tue, 12 Dec 2017 17:30:12 -0600

Mash is normally distributed as a dependency-free binary for Linux or OSX (see https://github.com/marbl/Mash/releases). This source distribution is intended for other operating systems or for development. Mash requires c++11 to build, which is available in and GCC >= 4.8 and OSX >= 10.7.

See http://mash.readthedocs.org for more information.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/marbl/Mash/releases