BOL: Related items

What is Data Science? — A Bioinformatics Perspective

Abhi — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 01:44:34 -0500

In today’s era of big biology, we’re generating more data than ever before—genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, metabolomes, microbiomes… you name it. But raw biological data doesn’t speak for itself. Making sense of it requires more than traditional biology. This is where data science steps in.

So, What Is Data Science?
At its core, data science is the interdisciplinary field that extracts knowledge and insights from data using programming, statistics, and domain expertise. In bioinformatics, data science enables us to turn gigabytes of sequence data into biological meaning.

Imagine trying to understand gene regulation in cancer by analyzing thousands of RNA-seq samples, or predicting antibiotic resistance from bacterial genomes—these challenges are not solvable through wet lab experiments alone. They require data-driven thinking.

Data Science Meets Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics is inherently a data science domain. From genomics to systems biology, every field in modern biology relies on data science techniques to:

Clean and process massive datasets

Discover patterns in high-dimensional data

Build predictive models (e.g., for disease classification)

Visualize complex biological networks and trends

Integrate diverse data types (e.g., transcriptomic + epigenomic data)

The Bioinformatics Toolkit
Here’s what data science typically looks like in bioinformatics:

Task Data Science Role
Sequence alignment Efficient algorithms, indexing, parallel processing
Gene expression analysis Statistical modeling (e.g., DESeq2, limma)
Variant calling Data filtering, probabilistic models
Clustering of cells in single-cell data Unsupervised learning
Protein structure prediction Deep learning models (e.g., AlphaFold)
Metagenomics Data integration, classification, dimensionality reduction

Common tools include Python, R, Bioconductor, scikit-learn, Pandas, Seurat, and TensorFlow—often working together in reproducible workflows.

It's Not Just About Coding
A common misconception is that bioinformatics is just programming or scripting. But being a data scientist in bioinformatics also means:

Understanding experimental design

Asking biologically meaningful questions

Choosing the right statistical or machine learning models

Communicating findings effectively (e.g., plots, dashboards, papers)

In other words, data science in bioinformatics is where biology, statistics, and computer science converge.

Why It Matters
The real power of data science in bioinformatics is its ability to scale discovery.

Instead of studying one gene, we can study thousands.

Instead of analyzing one species, we can explore entire ecosystems.

Instead of waiting months for lab results, we can generate hypotheses in days.

From personalized medicine and cancer diagnostics to agricultural genomics and pandemic surveillance, data science is at the heart of the bioinformatics revolution.

Final Thoughts
If you’re a biologist who’s curious about code, or a data enthusiast fascinated by life sciences, bioinformatics is your playground—and data science is your toolkit.

In bioinformatics, data science isn’t just useful. It’s essential.

WhatsHap: fast and accurate read-based phasing

Jit — Mon, 28 May 2018 09:52:16 -0500

WhatsHap is a software for phasing genomic variants using DNA sequencing reads, also called read-based phasing or haplotype assembly. It is especially suitable for long reads, but works also well with short reads.

Features

Very accurate results (Martin et al., WhatsHap: fast and accurate read-based phasing)

Works well with Illumina, PacBio, Oxford Nanopore and other types of reads

It phases SNVs, indels and even “complex” variants (such as TCG → AGAA)

Pedigree phasing mode uses reads from related individuals (such as trios) to improve results and to reduce coverage requirements (Garg et al., Read-Based Phasing of Related Individuals).

WhatsHap is easy to install

It is easy to use: Pass in a VCF and one or more BAM files, get out a phased VCF. Supports multi-sample VCFs.

It produces standard-compliant VCF output by default

If desired, get output that is compatible with ReadBackedPhasing

Open Source (MIT license)

Address of the bookmark: https://whatshap.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

RefKA: A fast and efficient long-read genome assembly approach for large and complex genomes

Rahul Nayak — Fri, 01 May 2020 03:00:40 -0500

RefKA, a reference-based approach for long read genome assembly. This approach relies on breaking up a closely related reference genome into bins, aligning k-mers unique to each bin with PacBio reads, and then assembling each bin in parallel followed by a final bin-stitching step.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/AppliedBioinformatics/RefKA

LR_Gapcloser: a tiling path-based gap closer that uses long reads to complete genome assembly

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 14 May 2020 15:09:52 -0500

LR_Gapcloser is a gap closing tool using long reads from studied species. The long reads could be downloaed from public read archive database (for instance, NCBI SRA database ) or be your own data. Then they are fragmented and aligned to scaffolds using BWA mem algorithm in BWA package. In the package, we provided a compiled bwa, so the user needn't to install bwa. LR_Gapcloser uses the alignments to find the bridging that cross the gap, and then fills the long read original sequence into the genomic gaps.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/CAFS-bioinformatics/LR_Gapcloser

HairSplitter: assembling long reads in an unknown number of haplotypes

BioStar — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:13:40 -0600

Pros and cons of HairSplitter Limitations of HairSplitter:

Not very fast: it re-polishes the whole assembly

Limited in the number of haplotypes

Strengths of HairSplitter:

Very modular, can be used with any assembler

Naive: makes no assumption on ploidy, parameter-free

Safe: won’t artificially duplicate contigs

HairSplitter splits collapsed assemblies from “draft” assemblies obtained by any means

HairSplitter can recover haplotypes and distinguish repeated elements

Only needs sequencing reads, potentially error-prone

HairSplitter splits collapsed assemblies from “draft” assemblies obtained by any means

HairSplitter can recover haplotypes and distinguish repeated elements

Only needs sequencing reads, potentially error-prone

Not really available yet (github.com/RolandFaure/HairSplitter)

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03864075/file/RolandFaure_presentation_SeqBIM_2022.pdf

Address of the bookmark: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03817928/document

LoRDEC: a hybrid error correction program for long, PacBio reads

Jit — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 04:16:09 -0500

LoRDEC is a program to correct sequencing errors in long reads from 3rd generation sequencing with high error rate, and is especially intended for PacBio reads. It uses a hybrid strategy, meaning that it uses two sets of reads: the reference read set, whose error rate is assumed to be small, and the PacBio read set, which is then corrected using the reference set. Typically, the reference set contains Illumina reads.

Usually, errors in PacBio reads include many insertions and deletions, and comparatively less substitutions. LoRDEC can correct errors of all these types.
After correction, a larger portion of the sequence of PacBio reads is usable for detection of region of similarity with other sequences, for aligning them to the contigs of an assembly, etc.

Why is LoRDEC different?

It is efficient and can process large read data sets, included from eukaryotic or vertebrate species, on a usual computing server, and even works on desktop/laptop computers.
It adopts a novel graph based approach: it builds a succinct De Bruijn Graph (DBG) representing the short reads, and seeks a corrective sequence for each erroneous region of a long read by traversing chosen paths in the graph.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.atgc-montpellier.fr/lordec/

SISRS: Site Identification from Short Read Sequences

Abhimanyu Singh — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 08:56:03 -0600

Next-gen sequence data such as Illumina HiSeq reads. Data must be sorted into folders by taxon (e.g. species or genus). Paired reads in fastq format must be specified by _R1 and _R2 in the (otherwise identical) filenames. Paired and unpaired reads must have a fastq file extension.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/rachelss/SISRS

NanoSim: nanopore sequence read simulator based on statistical characterization.

Jit — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 04:16:31 -0600

NanoSim, a fast and scalable read simulator that captures the technology-specific features of ONT data and allows for adjustments upon improvement of nanopore sequencing technology. The first step of NanoSim is read characterization, which provides a comprehensive alignment-based analysis and generates a set of read profiles serving as the input to the next step, the simulation stage. The simulation stage uses the model built in the previous step to produce in silico reads for a given reference genome. NanoSim is written in Python and R. The source files and manual are available at the Genome Sciences Centre website: http://www.bcgsc.ca/platform/bioinfo/software/nanosim

https://github.com/bcgsc/NanoSim

Address of the bookmark: http://www.bcgsc.ca/platform/bioinfo/software/nanosim

ChIPulate: A Python3 framework to simulate read counts in a ChIP-seq experiment

Abhimanyu Singh — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 12:46:47 -0500

ChIP-seq simulation pipeline, ChIPulate, we assess the impact of various biological and experimental sources of variation on several outcomes of a ChIP-seq experiment, viz., the recoverability of the TF binding motif, accuracy of TF-DNA binding detection, the sensitivity of inferred TF-DNA binding strength, and number of replicates needed to confidently infer binding strength.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/vishakad/chipulate

Bioinformatics Codes Search

Jitendra Narayan — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 11:08:52 -0500

I bet, this website will be your best friend in near future. This helps us to explore the existing open source codes and learn from it.

You can find some useful open source bioinformatics codes for your analysis work. You can use the left bar options to filtere out or narrow down your search result. This webpage can be an useful resource for a beginners bioinformatician as it contain several bioinformatics basics script that are commonly used by biological programmers and biologist.

Stand on the slumped, dandruff-covered shoulders of millions of computer nerds. _/\_

Enjoy the code and research work.

http://code.ohloh.net/search?s=bioinformatics

Address of the bookmark: http://code.ohloh.net/search?s=bioinformatics