BOL: Related items

IgBLAST: a popular NCBI package for classifying and analyzing immunoglobulin (IG) and T cell receptor (TCR) variable domain sequences

BioJoker — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 11:34:37 -0600

NCBI team released a new version of IgBLAST with four new improvements. IgBLAST is a popular NCBI package for classifying and analyzing immunoglobulin (IG) and T cell receptor (TCR) variable domain sequences. Improvements are:

1. Support for the new FWR4 annotation feature in the AIRR format, both in standard format and in the AIRR alignment format.

2. The previous “-penalty” parameter was renamed as -V_penalty to be consistent with other IgBLAST penalty options.

3. Restored constant internal BLAST search parameters for domain annotation (i.e., FWR/CDR) such that this process is not influenced by user parameters.

4. Corrected FWR/CDR annotations for certain mouse VK and rat VH germline genes.

IgBLAST 1.15.0 is available for download from the BLAST FTP area. See the the new manual on GitHub for information about setting up and running IgBLAST.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact blast-help@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Upgrade R 3.0.3

Rahul Nayak — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 11:23:51 -0500

R is a free software programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. Polls and surveys of data miners are showing R's popularity has increased substantially in recent years. Recently the new version of R codename “Warm Puppy" have been released.

You can download the latest version from here http://cran.rstudio.com/ . Or, if you are using Windows, you can upgrade to the latest version using the installr package http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/installr/ . Simply run the following code:

# installing/loading the package:
if(!require(installr)) {
install.packages("installr"); require(installr)} #load / install+load installr

updateR()

I try to keep the installr package updated and useful. If you have any suggestions or remarks on the package, you’re invited to leave a comment below.

If you use the global library system http://www.r-statistics.com/2010/04/changing-your-r-upgrading-strategy-and-the-r-code-to-do-it-on-windows/ , you can run the following in the new version of R:

source("http://www.r-statistics.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/upgrading-R-on-windows.r.txt")
New.R.RunMe()

Reference:

http://www.r-statistics.com/2014/03/r-3-0-3-is-released/

NCBI PSI-BLAST Tutorial

Wed, 04 Sep 2013 11:46:06 -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.

BLAST+ updated !!!

Jit — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 16:55:24 -0500

A new version (2.2.31) of the stand-alone BLAST executables (Linux, Windows and MacOSX on FTP) is now available. New features include support for BLAST-XML2 specification (information here) and JSON BLAST output format, as well as several bug fixes and improvements. The BLAST AMI at AWS will also be updated to 2.2.31 (see this BLAST Help page for more information). For a full list of improvements, see the release notes.

More at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/news/06-16-2015-blast-plus-update/?

sequenceserver

Jit — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 08:51:55 -0600

SequenceServer lets you rapidly set up a BLAST+ server with an intuitive user interface for use locally or over the web.

More at http://sequenceserver.com.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/wurmlab/sequenceserver

Primer BLAST !

BioStar — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 00:28:49 -0500

BLAST team added a new feature (Max 3' match), shown in Figure 1, to Primer-BLAST that limits the length of 3' exon matches when designing exon-exon spanning primers. This makes it less likely that primers specifically designed to amplify transcripts will also amplify genomic DNA contamination in expression assays. See the NCBI Insights post (https://go.usa.gov/xvUT4) for more details.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact blast-help@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Cleaner BLAST Databases for More Accurate Results

LEGE — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 01:23:08 -0500

Do you use BLAST to identify a sequence or the evolutionary scope of a gene? That can be challenging if contaminated and misclassified sequences are in the BLAST databases and show up in your search results. To address this problem, we now use the NCBI quality assurance tools listed below to systematically remove these misleading sequences from the default nucleotide (nt) and protein (nr) BLAST databases.

Foreign Contamination Screen tool for genome cross-species screening (FCS-GX) detects contamination from foreign organisms in genomes and other sequences using the genome cross-species aligner (GX)
Average Nucleotide Identity (ANI) evaluates the taxonomic classification of prokaryotic genome assemblies. Sequences from genomes marked up as ‘unverified source organism’ are considered suspect and removed.

Ref https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2024/04/22/cleaner-blast-databases-more-accurate-results/

Circoletto: visualizing sequence similarity with Circos

Jit — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 10:23:40 -0600

Circoletto, an online visualization tool based on Circos, which provides a fast, aesthetically pleasing and informative overview of sequence similarity search results.

Online version and downloadable software package for offline use (source code in PERL) freely available at http://bat.ina.certh.gr/tools/circoletto/

Contact:ndarz@certh.gr

Address of the bookmark: http://tools.bat.infspire.org/circoletto/

TwinBLAST: When Two Is Better than One

Jit — Sat, 07 Sep 2019 08:50:08 -0500

TwinBLAST is a web-based tool for viewing 2 BLAST reports simultaneouslyside-by-side. It uses ExtJS (www.sencha.com/products/extjs/) to provide 2independently scrollable panels. BioPerl (www.bioperl.org) is used to indexraw BLAST reports and Bio::Graphics is used to draw pictograms of the BLASThits.

https://github.com/IGS/twinblast

https://mra.asm.org/content/8/35/e00842-19

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/IGS/twinblast

SOWDHAMINI Lab

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 09:19:12 -0500

Genome sequencing projects have enormous potential for benefiting human endeavors. However, just as acquiring a language's vocabulary does not enable one to speak it, databases that list the amino acid composition of proteins do not directly tell us much about these proteins' higher-level structure and function. The most productive way to indirectly exploit these databases has been to start with the small number of proteins that are fully-characterised and to assume that other "similar" proteins will have a related structure and function. Proteins with very similar amino acid sequence are "no-brainers", but the real test, which our group largely focuses on, is to detect the "essential" similarity in proteins whose non-critical sections have experienced random rearrangements during evolution. In such cases functionally similar proteins may have less than 25% sequence overlap.

More @ http://www.ncbs.res.in/sowdhamini/groups_sowdhamini.htm