BOL: Related items

A Subway Map for the Genome

LEGE — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 04:14:14 -0500

Maya was looking at a genome graph on her computer. There were nodes, branches, and paths going in every direction.

“It’s like a subway map,” she said, “but for DNA.”

That idea is exactly what Sequence Tube Map brings to life.

Instead of showing a genome as one long, confusing sequence, it displays different genomic paths like routes on a metro map. Where sequences are shared, the paths travel together. Where genetic variation occurs, they branch into different routes and may join again later.

This makes complex genome graphs much easier to explore.

Maya could now see how different haplotypes moved through the same genomic region and where they took different paths. She could even view sequencing reads mapped onto the graph, helping her understand what was happening in regions with genetic variation.

What once looked like a tangled network now looked like a journey.

Sequence Tube Map turns the complexity of graph genomes into a visual story—making it easier for scientists to see how DNA can take different routes.

Read more at https://github.com/vgteam/sequencetubemap

and

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/35/24/5318/5542397

Demo at https://vgteam.github.io/sequenceTubeMap/

The Genes That Travel Together: A Genomic Detective Story

BioStar — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:00:36 -0500

Imagine looking through thousands of microbial genomes and discovering two genes that repeatedly appear together. The obvious conclusion is that they must somehow be connected—that perhaps they work together, participate in the same pathway, or depend on each other. But evolution has a way of leaving misleading clues. What if these two genes are found together simply because they were inherited from the same ancient ancestor? In that case, their apparent association may have little to do with their biological function; it may simply be a reflection of shared evolutionary history. This is the intriguing problem addressed by CORGIAS (https://github.com/ynishimuraLv/corgias), a computational framework developed to distinguish genuine gene associations from correlations created by common ancestry.

Instead of asking only whether two genes occur together across genomes, CORGIAS asks a deeper question: did these genes actually evolve together, repeatedly gaining or losing their presence in concert, or are they merely travelling together because of their inherited history? The framework introduces two complementary approaches, Ancestral State Adjustment (ASA) and the Simultaneous EVolution test (SEV), which incorporate evolutionary information into the search for gene associations. This distinction becomes increasingly important as genome sequencing continues to uncover enormous numbers of microbial genomes, many from organisms that have never been cultured and whose genes remain functionally mysterious. In this growing genomic landscape, simply finding a gene is no longer enough—we need clues about what that gene might be doing. CORGIAS approaches this problem almost like a genomic detective: rather than treating every association as evidence, it reconstructs the evolutionary story behind the association and asks whether the evidence survives that history. By doing so, it offers a way to separate coincidence from biological connection and potentially uncover functional relationships hidden within the vast microbial genomic landscape. The broader message is beautifully simple: genes do not evolve in isolation, and understanding what they do may require us to look beyond where they are today and reconstruct how they arrived there. Sometimes, the most important clue in a genome is not the gene itself, but the evolutionary journey it has taken.

More at https://academic.oup.com/nargab/article/7/4/lqaf182/8377910?

Microscope

Jitendra Narayan — Fri, 04 Mar 2016 05:26:31 -0600

Microscope Platform user documentation.

The MicroScope platform is available at this URL:

https://www.genoscope.cns.fr/agc/microscope

Address of the bookmark: http://microscope.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

REAPR: a universal tool for genome assembly evaluation

Jitendra Prajapati — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 18:26:31 -0500

REAPR is a tool that evaluates the accuracy of a genome assembly using mapped paired end reads, without the use of a reference genome for comparison. It can be used in any stage of an assembly pipeline to automatically break incorrect scaffolds and flag other errors in an assembly for manual inspection. It reports mis-assemblies and other warnings, and produces a new broken assembly based on the error calls.

The software requires as input an assembly in FASTA format and paired reads mapped to the assembly in a BAM file. Mapping information such as the fragment coverage and insert size distribution is analysed to locate mis-assemblies. REAPR works best using mapped read pairs from a large insert library (at least 1000bp). Additionally, if a short insert Illumina library is also available, REAPR can combine this with the large insert library in order to score each base of the assembly.

http://www.sanger.ac.uk/science/tools/reapr

Address of the bookmark: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-2013-14-5-r47

SEASTAR: Systematic Evaluation of Alternative STArt site in RNA

BioStar — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 09:54:27 -0500

SEASTAR (Systematic Evaluation of Alternative STArt site in RNA) is a software package for Transcription Start Site (TSS) identification and quantification using only RNA-seq data. It assembles novel TSSs based only on RNA-Seq data and merges them with known TSSs from a public database. This package enables high-quality TSS identification that is comparable to the highly sophisticated CAGE technology. This package is particularly useful for finding novel TSSs that contribute to transcriptome complexity along with identifying differential promoter utilization.

version 1.0.0 - updates several descriptions and tests. To achieve v0.9.4, one can visit https://github.com/zhyqin/SEASTAR-0.9.4 for download.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/Xinglab/SEASTAR

MGRA: Breakpoint graphs and ancestral genome reconstructions

Jit — Tue, 25 Jul 2017 08:48:25 -0500

MGRA (Multiple Genome Rearrangements and Ancestors) is a tool for reconstruction of ancestor genomes and evolutionary history of extant genomes.

It takes as an input a set of genomes represented as sequences of genes (or synteny blocks) and produces such sequences for ancestral genomes at the internal nodes of the phylogenetic tree.

The phylogenetic tree may be also specified completely or partially, in the latter case MGRA can reconstruct conserved ancestral regions (CARs) of the ancestral genome of interest.

Since version 2 MGRA supports gene insertion and deletions in addition to genome rearrangements and allows the input genomes to have different gene content.

It also can reconstruct most plausible phylogenetic tree based on the rearrangement characters.

Address of the bookmark: http://mgra.cblab.org/

coursera genome assembly tutorial

Jit — Sat, 25 Nov 2017 08:57:25 -0600

Solutions to Coursera Genome Sequencing (Bioinformatics II)

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/iansealy/coursera-assembly

Bandage: interactive visualization of de novo genome assemblies

Shruti Paniwala — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 10:09:37 -0600

Bandage (a Bioinformatics Application for Navigating De novo Assembly Graphs Easily) is a tool for visualizing assembly graphs with connections. Users can zoom in to specific areas of the graph and interact with it by moving nodes, adding labels, changing colors and extracting sequences. BLAST searches can be performed within the Bandage graphical user interface and the hits are displayed as highlights in the graph. By displaying connections between contigs, Bandage presents new possibilities for analyzing de novo assemblies that are not possible through investigation of contigs alone.

Availability and implementation: Source code and binaries are freely available at https://github.com/rrwick/Bandage. Bandage is implemented in C++ and supported on Linux, OS X and Windows. A full feature list and screenshots are available at http://rrwick.github.io/Bandage.

Address of the bookmark: http://rrwick.github.io/Bandage/

Mugsy: multiple whole genome alignment tool

Jit — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 17:41:14 -0600

Mugsy is a multiple whole genome aligner. Mugsy uses Nucmer for pairwise alignment, a custom graph based segmentation procedure for identifying collinear regions, and the segment-based progressive multiple alignment strategy from Seqan::TCoffee. Mugsy accepts draft genomes in the form of multi-FASTA files and does not require a reference genome.

To cite Mugsy, use:

Angiuoli SV and Salzberg SL. Mugsy: Fast multiple alignment of closely related whole genomes.Bioinformatics 2011 27(3):334-4

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

Delta: a new Web-based 3D genome visualization and analysis platform

Jit — Wed, 20 Dec 2017 08:49:55 -0600

Delta is an integrative visualization and analysis platform to facilitate visually annotating and exploring the 3D physical architecture of genomes. Delta takes Hi-C or ChIA-PET contact matrix as input and predicts the topologically associating domains and chromatin loops in the genome. It then generates a physical 3D model which represents the plausible consensus 3D structure of the genome. Deltafeatures a highly interactive visualization tool which enhances the integration of genome topology/physical structure with extensive genome annotation by juxtaposing the 3D model with diverse genomic assay outputs.

https://github.com/zhangzhwlab/delta

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/zhangzhwlab/delta