BOL: Related items

The Gene Detectives: How a New Computational Tool Is Helping Us Read the History Written in Our Genes

BioStar — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:23:42 -0500

Imagine opening an ancient family album with no names, dates, or captions. Some photographs are missing, others have been copied, and a few show people who look almost identical. Your challenge is to discover who is related to whom and reconstruct the family story. In evolutionary biology, scientists face a similar mystery when they study genes. Every genome contains clues about its past, but genes can be duplicated, lost, and changed over millions of years, making their history difficult to trace.

A recent study published in PLOS Computational Biology introduces REvolutionH-tl 2.0 (https://pypi.org/project/revolutionhtl/), a computational tool designed to help solve this mystery. The software analyzes protein sequences and identifies evolutionary relationships between genes. It can help researchers detect important events such as gene duplication, gene loss, and speciation, allowing them to reconstruct how genes evolved across different organisms.

What makes the tool especially interesting is its focus on both speed and interpretation. The researchers compared REvolutionH-tl 2.0 with several existing computational tools and reported that it achieved competitive accuracy while requiring less computational time in their tests. The tool also includes visualization features, helping researchers turn complicated genetic data into evolutionary stories that are easier to explore.

Genes are more than simple sequences of DNA; they are records of life’s long history. Each surviving gene carries traces of the changes that shaped it. By bringing together computational analysis and visualization, REvolutionH-tl 2.0 acts like a detective, helping scientists uncover these hidden stories. Ultimately, tools like this can improve our understanding of how genomes evolved and how genes acquired the roles they perform today.

More at https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013017

DarkHorse: a method for genome-wide prediction of horizontal gene transfer

Jit — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 07:58:35 -0500

A new approach to rapid, genome-wide identification and ranking of horizontal transfer candidate proteins is presented. The method is quantitative, reproducible, and computationally undemanding. It can be combined with genomic signature and/or phylogenetic tree-building procedures to improve accuracy and efficiency. The method is also useful for retrospective assessments of horizontal transfer prediction reliability, recognizing orthologous sequences that may have been previously overlooked or unavailable. These features are demonstrated in bacterial, archaeal, and eukaryotic examples.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1852411/

HGTector: an automated method facilitating genome-wide discovery of putative horizontal gene transfers

Jit — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 06:50:05 -0600

A computational pipeline for genome-wide detection of putative horizontal gene transfer (HGT) events based on sequence homology search hit distribution statistics

Authors: Qiyun Zhu (qiyunzhu@gmail.com), Katharina Dittmar (katharinad@gmail.com)

Affiliation: Department of Biological Sciences, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, USA

Zhu Q, Kosoy M, Dittmar K. HGTector: an automated method facilitating genome-wide discovery of putative horizontal gene transfers. BMC Genomics. 2014. 15:717.

Usage: Simply execute perl HGTector.pl, or, open GUI.html in a web browser to see a step-by-step wizard.

Download HGTector 0.2.2.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/DittmarLab/HGTector

MAGIC: A tool for predicting transcription factors and cofactors driving gene sets using ENCODE data

BioStar — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 11:05:04 -0600

The algorithm presented herein, Mining Algorithm for GenetIc Controllers (MAGIC), uses ENCODE ChIP-seq data to look for statistical enrichment of TFs and cofactors in gene bodies and flanking regions in gene lists without an a priori binary classification of genes as targets or non-targets. When compared to other TF mining resources, MAGIC displayed favourable performance in predicting TFs and cofactors that drive gene changes in 4 settings:

1) A cell line expressing or lacking single TF,

2) Breast tumors divided along PAM50 designations

3) Whole brain samples from WT mice or mice lacking a single TF in a particular neuronal subtype

4) Single cell RNAseq analysis of neurons divided by Immediate Early Gene expression levels.

In summary, MAGIC is a standalone application that produces meaningful predictions of TFs and cofactors in transcriptomic experiments.

More at https://uwmadison.app.box.com/s/8j90e5h2rjrsz3bacaxnq8kor2o64vyg

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/asroopra/MAGIC

OMArk: software for proteome (protein-coding gene repertoire) quality assessment

LEGE — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 15:01:20 -0600

OMArk is a software for proteome (protein-coding gene repertoire) quality assessment. It provides measures of proteome completeness, characterizes the consistency of all protein coding genes with regard to their homologs, and identifies the presence of contamination from other species. OMArk relies on the OMA orthology database, from which it exploits orthology relationships, and on the OMAmer software for fast placement of all proteins into gene families.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/DessimozLab/OMArk

SOAP2 : Short Oligonucleotide Analysis Package 2

Poonam Mahapatra — Wed, 23 May 2018 10:09:22 -0500

SOAPaligner/soap2 is a member of the SOAP (Short Oligonucleotide Analysis Package). It is an updated version of SOAP software for short oligonucleotide alignment. The new program features in super fast and accurate alignment for huge amounts of short reads generated by Illumina/Solexa Genome Analyzer. Compared to soap v1, it is one order of magnitude faster. It require only 2 minutes aligning one million single-end reads onto the human reference genome. Another remarkable improvement of SOAPaligner is that it now supports a wide range of the read length. SOAPaligner benefitted in time and space efficiency by a revolution in the basic data structures and algorithms used.The core algorithms and the indexing data structures (2way-BWT) are developed by the algorithms research group of the Department of Computer Science, the University of Hong Kong (T.W. Lam, Alan Tam, Simon Wong, Edward Wu and S.M. Yiu).

Address of the bookmark: http://soap.genomics.org.cn/soapaligner.html

Genobuntu: Package for Next Generation Sequencing and Genome Assembly

BioStar — Mon, 18 May 2020 16:47:56 -0500

Genobuntu is a software package containing more than 70 software and packages oriented towards NGS. In its current version, Genobuntu supports pre assembly tools, genome assemblers as well as post assembly tools.

Commonly used biological software and example script files for different assembly pipelines have also been provided, where the example script files can be updated to suit one’s experimental needs. Genobuntu attempts to reduce the amount of time and energy needed to build software workstations and it can also act as a good teaching source for a class room setting.

Therefore, Genobuntu offers a well-tailored environment for both novices and experts working in the field of genome assembly.

Features

Velvet
MiB
SSAKE
EULER
VCAKE
ABySS
ALLPATHS
Celera
SHARCGS
Allpaths
IDBA
TAIPAN
Edena
SOAPdenovo
Maq
IDBA-UD
No. of Reads present in the Ref. Seq.
ART NGS Reads Simulator
HiTEC, FASTQC
Minimum Description Length
SOAPaligner
Sequencing Read Archive Toolkit

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/genobuntu/

Genobuntu: A software package containing more than 70 software and packages oriented towards NGS and genome assembly

BioStar — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 05:15:57 -0600

https://sourceforge.net/projects/genobuntu/

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/genobuntu/

netGO: R-Shiny package for network-integrated pathway enrichment analysis

Jit — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 12:40:54 -0600

netGO is an R/Shiny package for network-integrated pathway enrichment analysis.
netGO provides user-interactive visualization of enrichment analysis results and related networks.

Currently, netGO supports analysis for four species (Human, Mouse, Arabidopsis thaliana,and Yeast)
These data are available from netGO-Data repository.

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa077/5728635

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/unistbig/netGO

DnaSP: DNA Sequence Polymorphism, is a software package for the analysis of DNA polymorphisms

Neel — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:51:38 -0600

DnaSP, DNA Sequence Polymorphism, is a software package for the analysis of DNA polymorphisms using data from a single locus (a multiple sequence aligned -MSA data), or from several loci (a Multiple-MSA data, such as formats generated by some assembler RAD-seq software). DnaSP can estimate several measures of DNA sequence variation within and between populations in noncoding, synonymous or nonsynonymous sites, or in various sorts of codon positions), as well as linkage disequilibrium, recombination, gene flow and gene conversion parameters.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ub.edu/dnasp/