BOL: Related items

KOALA: KEGG's internal annotation tool for K number assignment of KEGG GENES using SSEARCH computation

Abhimanyu Singh — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 09:16:55 -0600

KOALA (KEGG Orthology And Links Annotation) is KEGG's internal annotation tool for K number assignment of KEGG GENES using SSEARCH computation. BlastKOALA and GhostKOALA assign K numbers to the user's sequence data by BLAST and GHOSTX searches, respectively, against a nonredundant set of KEGG GENES. Annotate Sequence in KEGG Mapper and Pathogen Checker in KEGG Pathogen are special interfaces to the BlastKOALA server and can be executed in an interactive mode. See Step-by-step Instructions.

Reference: Kanehisa, M., Sato, Y., and Morishima, K. (2016) BlastKOALA and GhostKOALA: KEGG tools for functional characterization of genome and metagenome sequences. J. Mol. Biol. 428, 726-731. [pubmed] [pdf]

Address of the bookmark: https://www.kegg.jp/blastkoala/

Mom Knows Best

Jitendra Narayan — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 13:30:43 -0500

We always get instructions to wash our hands, sterilize kitchen stuff and bla bla. However, recent findings suggest something else. Perhaps we can't survive, or will face lots of problems if bacteria’s colonies are absent in mother womb. Please find the detail sources of microbial transmission in humans from mother to child in recently published PLOS paper.

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001631

Greengenes database

Jit — Wed, 29 Jun 2016 10:03:31 -0500

The greengenes web application provides access to the 2011 version of the greengenes 16S rRNA gene sequence alignment for browsing, blasting, probing, and downloading. The data and tools presented by greengenes can assist the researcher in choosing phylogenetically specific probes, interpreting microarray results, and aligning/annotating novel sequences. If you are an ARB user, you can use greengenes to keep your own local database current.

Address of the bookmark: http://greengenes.lbl.gov/cgi-bin/nph-index.cgi

CGView - Circular Genome Viewer

Rahul Nayak — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 10:15:57 -0500

CGView is a Java package for generating high quality, zoomable maps of circular genomes. Its primary purpose is to serve as a component of sequence annotation pipelines, as a means of generating visual output suitable for the web. Feature information and rendering options are supplied to the program using an XML file, a tab delimited file, or an NCBI ptt file. CGView converts the input into a graphical map (PNG, JPG, or Scalable Vector Graphics format), complete with labels, a title, legends, and footnotes. In addition to the default full view map, the program can generate a series of hyperlinked maps showing expanded views. The linked maps can be explored using any web browser, allowing rapid genome browsing, and facilitating data sharing. The feature labels in maps can be hyperlinked to external resources, allowing CGView maps to be integrated with existing web site content or databases. For examples of the various output types, see the CGView gallery. http://wishart.biology.ualberta.ca/cgview/gallery.html http://stothard.afns.ualberta.ca/downloads/CCT/index.html https://www.gview.ca/wiki/GView/WebHome https://server.gview.ca/ http://stothard.afns.ualberta.ca/cgview_server/ Paper https://academic.oup.com/bib/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bib/bbx081/4037458

Address of the bookmark: http://wishart.biology.ualberta.ca/cgview/

Proksee

LEGE — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 11:11:54 -0500

Proksee is an expert system for genome assembly, annotation and visualization. To begin using Proksee, provide a complete genome sequence, sequencing reads or a CGView/Proksee map JSON file.

Please Cite the Following

Grant JR, Enns E, Marinier E, Mandal A, Herman EK, Chen C, Graham M, Van Domselaar G, and Stothard P

Proksee: in-depth characterization and visualization of bacterial genomes

Nucleic Acids Research, 2023, gkad326, https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkad326

Address of the bookmark: https://proksee.ca/

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?)

Snippy: Rapid haploid variant calling and core SNP phylogeny

Neel — Sat, 11 Aug 2018 11:06:56 -0500

Snippy finds SNPs between a haploid reference genome and your NGS sequence reads. It will find both substitutions (snps) and insertions/deletions (indels). It will use as many CPUs as you can give it on a single computer (tested to 64 cores). It is designed with speed in mind, and produces a consistent set of output files in a single folder. It can then take a set of Snippy results using the same reference and generate a core SNP alignment (and ultimately a phylogenomic tree).

snippy --cpus 16 --outdir mysnps --ref Listeria.gbk --R1 FDA_R1.fastq.gz --R2 FDA_R2.fastq.gz

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/tseemann/snippy

BakRep (Denglish blend of Bakterien & Repository) simplifies access to this data

Neel — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 02:31:28 -0500

2,438,386 bacterial genomes at your fingertips consistently processed & characterized, enriched with metadata, accessible via a flexible search engine.

BakRep (Denglish blend of Bakterien & Repository) simplifies access to this data. It integrates enriched genomic information with metadata accessible via a flexible search-engine.

Key features

Assembly statistics: ensure data quality with genome-based key metrics
Taxonomic classification: robust, purely genome-based classifications (GTDB)
MLST: subtyping for deeper insights into genetic variation
Annotation: comprehensive & taxonomy-independent (Bakta)
Metadata: full original submission records

Address of the bookmark: https://bakrep.computational.bio/

KOBAS: a web server for gene/protein functional annotation and functional gene set enrichment

Jit — Fri, 19 Oct 2018 09:36:11 -0500

KOBAS 3.0 is a web server for gene/protein functional annotation (Annotate module) and functional gene set enrichment(Enrichment module). For Annotate module, it accepts gene list as input, including IDs or sequences, and generates annotations for each gene based on multiple databases about pathways, diseases, and Gene Ontology. For Enrichment module, it can accept either gene list or gene expression data as input, and generates enriched gene sets, corresponding name, p-value or a probability of enrichment and enrichment score based on results of multiple methods.

Address of the bookmark: http://kobas.cbi.pku.edu.cn/

Which are the best statistical programming languages to study for a bioinformatician?

Jitendra Narayan — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 14:35:34 -0500

In Bio-informatics based genome sequencing and predicting metabolic pathways research jobs I used Matlab, SAS, SPSS, R and several Bioconductor packages. Matlab had a lot of powerful tools and was easy to use, whereas SPSS is for non-programmers and R need programming skills. I am wondering what other people think is best? or there might not be one specific language but a few that lend themselves best to Bio-informatics work that is math heavy and deals with a large amount of data.