BOL: Related items

Aurora: A New Detective for Bacterial Genomes

BioStar — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:31:00 -0500

Imagine trying to solve a mystery with thousands of clues—but some of the clues are labelled incorrectly.

That is the challenge researchers face when studying how bacteria adapt to different environments. A bacterial gene may appear to be linked to a particular habitat, when the real reason is simply that closely related bacteria happen to live there.

In their 2025 Genome Biology paper, Bujdoš, Walter, and O’Toole introduce aurora, a machine-learning tool designed to tackle this problem.

Aurora identifies potentially mislabeled or unusual bacterial strains before performing genome-wide association studies (GWAS). By cleaning up the dataset and accounting for bacterial evolutionary relationships, it can help researchers find genetic features that are more genuinely connected to habitat adaptation.

The researchers tested aurora using simulated and real bacterial datasets and found that it could recover important genetic associations even when datasets contained misleading labels.

The bigger lesson is simple: better biological discoveries often begin with better data.

Aurora gives researchers a new way to separate real genetic clues from misleading ones—and could help us better understand how bacteria adapt, survive, and evolve in the environments they call home.

Based on Bujdoš et al., “aurora: a machine learning GWAS tool for analyzing microbial habitat adaptation,” Genome Biology (2025).[Read the original paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-025-03524-7?)

Luo Lab | Symbiosis Genomics & Evolution

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 03:30:30 -0500

We study the evolutionary genomics of marine invertebrates to understand their origins and diversity. Our lab combines high-throughput sequencing and single-cell transcriptomics to explore a wide range of non-model systems. We are particularly interested in how evolutionary novelty arises, with a focus on animal development and photosymbiosis.

Research Directions

Stony corals: evolution of novelty and photosymbiosis

Symbiotic acoels: cell type evolution and photosymbiosis

Animal genomes: structural evolution and gene regulation

https://sgel.biodiv.tw/home

NCBI PSI-BLAST Tutorial

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 02:25:02 -0500

http:--www.biotechnology.jhu.edu- Tutorial for PSI-BLAST, an extension of BLAST that uses matrix algebra. BLAST is a cornerstone bioinformatics tool at NCBI. BLAST is the Basic Local Alignment Search tool and will protein and DNA sequences that are related to a sequence that the user provides.

SATSUMA : Highly sensitive whole-genome synteny alignments.

Jit — Fri, 13 May 2016 05:25:26 -0500

Satsuma is a whole-genome synteny alignment program. It takes two genomes, computes alignments, and then keeps only the parts that are orthologous, i.e. following the conserved order and orientation of features, such as protein coding genes, non-coding genes, or neutral sequences. Satsuma does not require any pre-processing, such as repeat masking, since it will automatically detect ambiguous mappings.

Satsuma has parallelization built-in and is designed to run on multi-core architectures. The run-time for aligning two bird-size genomes (~1.2 Gb) is around two days on 24 CPUs.

You can find the manual here.
Download the latest source code from here.
Stable versions can also be downloaded from the Broad Institute's web site.

An incomplete list of questions and answers (yes, these have really been asked by our users! Please feel free to add your own by e-mailing us) is here.

If you use Satsuma in your research, please cite:
Grabherr, M. G., Russell, P., Meyer, M., Mauceli, E., Alföldi, J., Di Palma, F., & Lindblad-Toh, K. (2010). Genome-wide synteny through highly sensitive sequence alignment: Satsuma. Bioinformatics, 26(9), 1145-51.

Tutorial at http://evomics.org/learning/genomics/satsuma/

Address of the bookmark: http://satsuma.sourceforge.net/

Kaiju

Jit — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 11:23:04 -0500

Kaiju is a program for the taxonomic classification of metagenomic high-throughput sequencing reads. Each read is directly assigned to a taxon within the NCBI taxonomy by comparing it to a reference database containing microbial and viral protein sequences.

By default, Kaiju uses either the available complete genomes from NCBI RefSeq or the microbial subset of the non-redundant protein database nr used by NCBI BLAST, optionally also including fungi and microbial eukaryotes.

Kaiju translates reads into amino acid sequences, which are then searched in the database using a modified backward search on a memory-efficient implementation of the Burrows-Wheeler transform, which finds maximum exact matches (MEMs), optionally allowing mismatches in the protein alignment. The search can process up to millions of reads per minute using, for example, only 10 GB RAM with a protein database comprising 4821 microbial genomes. Kaiju can also be used for querying any other protein database without taxonomic classification, using either protein or nucleotide queries.

Kaiju is described in Menzel, P. et al. (2016) Fast and sensitive taxonomic classification for metagenomics with Kaiju. Nat. Commun. 7:11257 (open access).

Address of the bookmark: http://kaiju.binf.ku.dk/

Sequence - Evolution - Function; Computational Approaches in Comparative Genomics

Jit — Sun, 06 Aug 2017 06:58:12 -0500

Sequence - Evolution - Function is an introduction to the computational approaches that play a critical role in the emerging new branch of biology known as functional genomics. The book provides the reader with an understanding of the principles and approaches of functional genomics and of the potential and limitations of computational and experimental approaches to genome analysis.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK20260/

Consed--A Finishing Package (BAM File Viewer, Assembly Editor, Autofinish, Autoreport, Autoedit, and Align Reads To Reference Sequence)

Neel — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 07:16:22 -0600

Supports Illumina, 454, other Next-Gen and Sanger Reads and allows mixtures of these read types
Consed includes BamScape which can view bam files with unlimited numbers of reads. BamScape can bring up consed to edit reads and the reference sequence in targeted regions.
Consed is compatible with Newbler, Cross_match, Phrap, MIRA, Velvet and PCAP output.
Quickly takes the user to each variant site for viewing (also available as an automated report)
Overview of assembly can help detect and fix misassemblies
Editing time reduced by the program's ability to pin-point problem areas
Editing is guided by error probabilities

Address of the bookmark: http://www.phrap.org/consed/consed.html

SeqFu: A Suite of Utilities for the Robust and Reproducible Manipulation of Sequence Files

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 03:13:33 -0600

A general-purpose program to manipulate and parse information from FASTA/FASTQ files, supporting gzipped input files. Includes functions to interleave and de-interleave FASTQ files, to rename sequences and to count and print statistics on sequence lengths. SeqFu is available for Linux and MacOS.

A compiled program delivering high performance analyses
Supports FASTA/FASTQ files, also Gzip compressed
A growing collection of handy utilities, also for quick inspection of the datasets

Can be easily installed via conda:

conda install -c bioconda seqfu

Address of the bookmark: https://telatin.github.io/seqfu2/

SeqCAT: Sequence Conversion and Analysis Toolbox

Neel — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 14:36:53 -0500

Your all-in-one solution for smooth conversion of sequence coordinates.

Designed for bioinformatics data analysis and daily laboratory work, SeqCAT simplifies sequence coordinate conversion. Extract gene and transcript information, manipulate sequences, and easily validate complex genetic events such as fusions with SeqCAT.

More at https://academic.oup.com/nar/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nar/gkae422/7683049?login=false

Address of the bookmark: https://mtb.bioinf.med.uni-goettingen.de/SeqCAT/home

CrocoBLAST: Optimized parallel implementation of local sequence alignment algorithms

Jit — Tue, 25 Jul 2017 05:03:10 -0500

Local sequence alignment is a cornerstone of bioinformatics, allowing to compare the amino-acid sequences of different proteins, or the nucleotide sequences of different pieces of DNA. The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) has revolutionized the field of bioinformatics, and is currently implemented in all free and commercial bioinformatics packages. However, with the advent of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and the development of new sequencing techniques, the utility of traditional BLAST implementations is limited. CrocoBLAST combines the accuracy and general applicability of BLAST with computational efficiency, accessibility, and user experience, so that NGS data can be analyzed efficiently even when only modest computational resources are available.

https://webchem.ncbr.muni.cz/Platform/App/CrocoBLAST

Address of the bookmark: https://webchem.ncbr.muni.cz/Platform/App/CrocoBLAST