BOL: Related items

Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 06:44:59 -0500

http://www.ted.com We have no ways to directly observe molecules and what they do -- Drew Berry wants to change that. At TEDxSydney he shows his scientifically accurate (and entertaining!) animations that help researchers see unseeable processes within our own cells. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate If you have questions or comments about this or other TED videos, please go to http://support.ted.com

Amino Acid Flash Tutorial

Jit — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 08:58:17 -0500

Protein is a part of every cell in your body, and no other nutrient plays as many different roles in keeping you alive and healthy. Protein is the building block of our body, and amino acids are the main areas of interest. We have emphasized on all 20 amino acids in this documentary movie. This documentary has been developed that emphasize on chemical structure, chemical formula, IUPAC name and other detail information of all 20 amino acids with the voice, picture with interactive button. This will be helpful for the entire biology and bioinformatics student.

How to run?

You need to install flash player or open it with web browser ( I guess you have installed flash plugin) to play.

Comment below if you like it. Thanks

Bioinformatics approach to Boar Taint

Rahul Agarwal — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 15:50:37 -0500

Meat products obtained from intact male pigs often produce offensive smell or odour which is recognized as a complex genetic trait called boar taint.Androstenone and Skatole in the fat primarily cause boar taint. Metabolism of androstenone and sex steroids share a common pathway which makes removal of boar taint a very challenging task. Castration is a traditional solution to remove boar taint but it also results in bad quality of meat due to low level of steroids which is objectionable to many consumers. Detected functional variant(s) underlying boar taint compounds can be used as genetic markers in selection of male pigs with reduced boar taint levels. Resequencing of a total of 47 samples belong to Norwegian Landrace (NL) and Duroc (D) pigs with varied boar taint levels were done in Illumina HiSeq2000 to >10X average coverage. Short reads generated from these samples mapped to Sus Scrofa version 10.2 reference assembly using Bowtie2. Alignment file then used for calling SNPs and InDels inside previousy identified QTL regions on SSC5,13, and 7 with the aid of FreeBayes , a variant caller tool. A final list of SNPs was prepared after filtering SNPs on the basis of SNP quality, coverage of SNP allele, functional and structural annotation, and repeats, etc. Selected SNPs will be genotyped in sample population for validation and then used for constructing SNPs haplotypes in close linkage disequilibrium with QTLs and fine mapping of QTLs through association mapping of genotyped SNPs.

Genome Browsers

Rahul Agarwal — Fri, 16 Aug 2013 19:04:47 -0500

Genome Browser is the platform/database used for searching and retreiving sequences and annotation of genomes belong to various eukaryotes, prokaryotes, etc.

Following are the weblink for different available browsers:

http://www.ensembl.org/index.html

http://ensemblgenomes.org/

http://genome.ucsc.edu/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome

http://www.ebi.ac.uk/genomes/

http://flybase.org/

http://cmr.jcvi.org/tigr-scripts/CMR/CmrHomePage.cgi

http://www.sanger.ac.uk/resources/databases/

DNA is packaged in a chromosome experiment

Mon, 23 Sep 2013 18:01:12 -0500

For more information, log on to- http://shomusbiology.weebly.com/ Download the study materials here- http://shomusbiology.weebly.com/bio-materials.html A nucleosome is the basic unit of DNA packaging in eukaryotes, consisting of a segment of DNA wound in sequence around four histone protein cores.[1] This structure is often compared to thread wrapped around a spool.[2] Nucleosomes form the fundamental repeating units of eukaryotic chromatin,[3] which is used to pack the large eukaryotic genomes into the nucleus while still ensuring appropriate access to it (in mammalian cells approximately 2 m of linear DNA have to be packed into a nucleus of roughly 10 µm diameter). Nucleosomes are folded through a series of successively higher order structures to eventually form a chromosome; this both compacts DNA and creates an added layer of regulatory control, which ensures correct gene expression. Nucleosomes are thought to carry epigenetically inherited information in the form of covalent modifications of their core histones. Nucleosomes were observed as particles in the electron microscope by Don and Ada Olins [4] and their existence and structure (as histone octamers surrounded by approximately 200 base pairs of DNA) were proposed by Roger Kornberg.[5][6] The role of the nucleosome as a general gene repressor was demonstrated by Lorch et al. in vitro [7] and by Han and Grunstein in vivo.

How I discovered DNA - James Watson

Fri, 18 Oct 2013 11:30:26 -0500

View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/james-watson-on-how-he-discovered-dna Nobel laureate James Watson opens TED2005 with the frank and funny story of how he and his research partner, Francis Crick, discovered the structure of DNA. Talk by James Watson.

FSA: Fast Statistical Alignment

Jit — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 04:26:01 -0600

FSA is a probabilistic multiple sequence alignment algorithm which uses a "distance-based" approach to aligning homologous protein, RNA or DNA sequences. Much as distance-based phylogenetic reconstruction methods like Neighbor-Joining build a phylogeny using only pairwise divergence estimates, FSA builds a multiple alignment using only pairwise estimations of homology. This is made possible by the sequence annealing technique for constructing a multiple alignment from pairwise comparisons, developed by Ariel Schwartz in "Posterior Decoding Methods for Optimization and Control of Multiple Alignments."

FSA brings the high accuracies previously available only for small-scale analyses of proteins or RNAs to large-scale problems such as aligning thousands of sequences or megabase-long sequences. FSA introduces several novel methods for constructing better alignments:

FSA uses machine-learning techniques to estimate gap and substitution parameters on the fly for each set of input sequences. This "query-specific learning" alignment method makes FSA very robust: it can produce superior alignments of sets of homologous sequences which are subject to very different evolutionary constraints.
FSA is capable of aligning hundreds or even thousands of sequences using a randomized inference algorithm to reduce the computational cost of multiple alignment. This randomized inference can be over ten times faster than a direct approach with little loss of accuracy.
FSA can quickly align very long sequences using the "anchor annealing" technique for resolving anchors and projecting them with transitive anchoring. It then stitches together the alignment between the anchors using the methods described above.
The included GUI, MAD (Multiple Alignment Display), can display the intermediate alignments produced by FSA, where each character is colored according to the probability that it is correctly aligned (see the picture and movie at the top of the page).

You can see more information on the FAQ.

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

Tetra-Nucleotide Analysis

Jit — Thu, 04 May 2017 05:07:41 -0500

A tetra-nucleotide is a fragment of DNA sequence with 4 bases (e.g. AGTC or TTGG). Pride et al. (2003) showed that the frequency of tetra-nucleotides in bacterial genomes contain useful, albeit weak, phylogenetic signals. Even though tetra-nucleotide analysis (TNA) utilizes the information of whole genome, it is evident that it cannot replace other alignment-based phylogenetic methods such as OrthoANI or 16S rRNA phylogeny. However, TNA can be useful for phylogenetic characterization when whole genome or 16S rRNA gene information is not available. For example, a partial genomic fragment obtained from a metagenome can be identified by TNA (Teeling et al., 2004). TNA is also fast enough that it can be used as a search engine against a large genome database.

Address of the bookmark: https://chunlab.wordpress.com/tetra-nucleotide-analysis/

SLIDESORT-BPR

Abhimanyu Singh — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 09:19:52 -0600

Chromosomal rearrangement events are caused by abnormal breaking and rejoining of DNA molecules. They are responsible for many of the cancer related diseases. Detecting the DNA breaking and repairing mechanism, therefore, may offer vital clues about the pathologic causes and diagnostic/therapeutic target of these diseases. But this effort also poses considerable challenges, because the structural variations and the genomes are different from one person to another. Intermediate comparison via reference genome could lead to the loss information. Unlike the current methods which make use the reference genome, we developed a method to detect the breakpoint reads directly from observing the differences between two (or more) NGS short reads samples. Slidesort-BPR is a command line tool implemented in C++.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ewijaya/slidesort-bpr

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/