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?

RGFA: powerful and convenient handling of assembly graphs

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 05:47:53 -0600

RGFA, an implementation of the proposed GFA specification in Ruby. It allows the user to conveniently parse, edit and write GFA files. Complex operations such as the separation of the implicit instances of repeats and the merging of linear paths can be performed. A typical application of RGFA is the editing of a graph, to finish the assembly of a sequence, using information not available to the assembler. We illustrate a use case, in which the assembly of a repetitive metagenomic fosmid insert was completed using a script based on RGFA.

https://github.com/ggonnella/rgfa

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5103826/

GFAffix : Identifies walk-preserving shared affixes in variation graphs and collapses them into a non-redundant graph structure.

BioStar — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 03:11:25 -0500

GFAffix identifies walk-preserving shared affixes in variation graphs and collapses them into a non-redundant graph structure.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/codialab/GFAffix

npScarf: Scaffolding and Completing Assemblies in Real-time Fashion

Jit — Tue, 23 May 2017 04:53:29 -0500

npScarf (jsa.np.npscarf) is a program that scaffolds and completes draft genomes assemblies in real-time with Oxford Nanopore sequencing. The pipeline can run on a computing cluster as well as on a laptop computer for microbial datasets. It also facilitates the real-time analysis of positional information such as gene ordering and the detection of genes from mobile elements (plasmids and genomic islands).

Complete paper at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5321748/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/mdcao/npScarf

WAAFLE: a Workflow to Annotate Assemblies and Find LGT Events.

Neel — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 14:31:06 -0500

Lateral gene transfer (LGT) is an important mechanism for genome diversification in microbial communities, including the human microbiome. While methods exist to identify LGTs from sequenced isolate genomes, identifying LGTs from community metagenomes remains an open problem. To address this, we developed WAAFLE: a Workflow to Annotate Assemblies and Find LGT Events.

Address of the bookmark: http://huttenhower.sph.harvard.edu/waafle

MIX: Combining multiple assemblies from NGS data

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 08 May 2018 04:58:05 -0500

Mix is a tool that combines two or more draft assemblies, without relying on a reference genome and has the goal to reduce contig fragmentation and thus speed-up genome finishing. The proposed algorithm builds an extension graph where vertices represent extremities of contigs and edges represent existing alignments between these extremities. These alignment edges are used for contig extension. The resulting output assembly corresponds to a path in the extension graph that maximizes the cumulative contig length.

The Mix algorithm, approach and results were published in BMC bioinformatics : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/14/S15/S16.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/cbib/MIX

Want to Know which genome assembler rule the world ?

Rahul Agarwal — Sun, 11 Aug 2013 11:42:32 -0500

Assemblathon 2: evaluating de novo methods of genome assembly

http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/content/2/1/10/abstract

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/07/genome-assembly-contest-prompts-soul-searching.html

http://assemblathon.org/post/44431915644/feedback-and-analysis-of-the-assemblathon-2-p

Ra assembler - a de novo DNA assembler for third generation sequencing data

biogeek — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 20:36:54 -0600

Integration of the Ra assembler - a de novo DNA assembler for third generation sequencing data developed on Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), Ruder Boskovic Institute (RBI) and Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS).

Ra is in development since 2014 in the form of several separate components that used to be run individually.
This project aims to ease the usage of Ra by integrating it into a complete de novo assembly tool.

Unlike other state-of-the-art assemblers, Ra does not have an error correction step. Instead, it relies on detecting overlaps using a very sensitive and specific overlapper ("graphmap -w owler", https://github.com/isovic/graphmap) and constructing and reducing an overlap graph (Ra layout, https://github.com/mariokostelac/ra).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/mariokostelac/ra-integrate/

FinisherSC:a repeat-aware tool for upgrading de novo assembly using long reads

Jit — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 04:08:50 -0500

Here is the command to run the tool:

python finisherSC.py destinedFolder mummerPath

If you are running on server computer and would like to use multiple threads, then the following commands can generate 20 threads to run FinisherSC.

python finisherSC.py -par 20 destinedFolder mummerPath

Sometimes, if the names of raw reads and contigs consists of special characters/formats, FinisherSC/MUMmer may not parse them correctly. In that case, you want to have a quick renaming of the names of contigs/reads in contigs.fasta or raw_reads.fasta using the following command.

    perl -pe 's/>[^\$]*$/">Seg" . ++$n ."\n"/ge' raw_reads.fasta > newRaw_reads.fasta
    cp newRaw_reads.fasta raw_reads.fasta
    perl -pe 's/>[^\$]*$/">Seg" . ++$n ."\n"/ge' contigs.fasta > newContigs.fasta
    cp newContigs.fasta contigs.fasta

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/kakitone/finishingTool

NextDenovo: string graph-based de novo assembler for TGS long reads

Jit — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 04:08:29 -0600

NextDenovo is a string graph-based de novo assembler for TGS long reads. It uses a "correct-then-assemble" strategy similar to canu, but requires significantly less computing resources and storages. After assembly, the per-base error rate is about 97-98%, to further improve single base accuracy, please use NextPolish.

NextDenovo contains two core modules: NextCorrect and NextGraph. NextCorrect can be used to correct TGS long reads with approximately 15% sequencing errors, and NextGraph can be used to construct a string graph with corrected reads. It also contains a modified version of minimap2 for adapting input and output and producing more sensitive and accurate dovetail overlaps, and some useful utilities (see here for more details).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/Nextomics/NextDenovo