A recent study by Webster and Chapman introduces Buscogeny (https://github.com/Jwebster89/Buscogeny), an open-source bioinformatics pipeline designed to make this process easier. The tool uses BUSCO (Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs), which identifies conserved genes that are expected to occur as single copies in particular groups of organisms. These genes act like evolutionary landmarks, allowing researchers to compare genomes and investigate their relationships.

Buscogeny brings several steps of phylogenomic analysis into one workflow. It identifies BUSCO genes, extracts and aligns their sequences, removes unreliable regions, combines information from multiple genes, and uses the resulting data to construct a phylogenetic tree. It also provides quality-control information, helping researchers identify genomes that may be too incomplete for reliable analysis.

The authors demonstrate the usefulness of Buscogeny with bacterial and fungal genomes, including Alternaria. This is particularly valuable because fungal genomes can vary greatly in quality and annotation. Ultimately, Buscogeny helps transform massive amounts of genomic data into an understandable evolutionary story. Each DNA sequence becomes a clue, each conserved gene becomes a landmark, and together these clues reveal a picture of how life is connected.

More at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10123-025-00752-6?

"In neuroscience, the project will use neuroinformatics and brain simulation to collect and integrate experimental data, identifying and filling gaps in our knowledge, and prioritising future experiments.

In medicine, the HBP will use medical informatics to identify biological signatures of brain disease, allowing diagnosis at an early stage, before the disease has done irreversible damage, and enabling personalized treatment, adapted to the needs of individual patients. Better diagnosis, combined with disease and drug simulation, will accelerate the discovery of new treatments, drastically lowering the cost of drug discovery.

In computing, new techniques of interactive supercomputing, driven by the needs of brain simulation, will impact a vast range of industries. Devices and systems, modelled after the brain, will overcome fundamental limits on the energy-efficiency, reliability and programmability of current technologies, clearing the road for systems with brain-like intelligence."

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2013/10/07/the-human-brain-project-begins/ 

(https://www.facebook.com/humanbrainproj/info)

Home Page:

https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/

Jobs:

https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/participate/jobs

What is HiBC?

The Human Intestinal Bacteria Collection (HiBC) is a comprehensive, high-quality reference repository of bacterial isolates derived from human fecal samples. It focuses on anaerobic and facultative anaerobic bacteria that play pivotal roles in digestion, immune modulation, vitamin synthesis, and pathogen resistance. The collection includes both culturable strains and genomic data from unculturable taxa, bridging the gap between culture-dependent and -independent microbiome studies.

Why is HiBC Important?

1. Understanding Microbiome-Host Interactions
   HiBC enables deeper insight into the functions of specific bacterial taxa in the gut. With well-characterized isolates, researchers can conduct mechanistic studies to explore how certain bacteria influence metabolism, inflammation, or mental health.

2. Precision Probiotics and Therapeutics
   By providing access to native human gut microbes, HiBC supports the development of next-generation probiotics, live biotherapeutic products (LBPs), and fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) alternatives.

3. Standardization and Reproducibility
   With standardized cultivation and genomic protocols, HiBC ensures consistency across microbiome research studies, improving reproducibility and comparability of findings.

4. Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Surveillance
   HiBC includes metadata on antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), helping track the spread of AMR in commensal gut bacteria and understanding its implications for human health.

Key Features of HiBC

• Culturable Bacteria Repository: A living collection of anaerobic and facultative strains isolated from healthy and diseased individuals worldwide.

• Metadata-rich Entries: Each isolate is annotated with host details (age, health status, diet), geographical origin, phenotypic traits, and antibiotic susceptibility profiles.

• Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS): High-quality genome assemblies for most strains to support functional and comparative genomics.

• Interactive Database Access: User-friendly search and filtering options for strain selection based on taxonomy, function, or clinical relevance.

• Cross-linking with Other Databases: Integration with NCBI, GOLD, and Human Microbiome Project (HMP) data for broader context and validation.

Applications of HiBC

• Microbiome-based diagnostics and biomarker discovery

• Host-microbe interaction studies in gnotobiotic mouse models

• Gut microbiome modulation through diet, drugs, or engineered bacteria

• Longitudinal studies of gut flora across age, geography, and lifestyle

• Environmental and evolutionary microbiology of human-associated bacteria

Accessing HiBC

Researchers and interested parties can explore the HiBC database through its official website: https://www.hibc.rwth-aachen.de/. The platform offers comprehensive information on bacterial isolates, including taxonomy, cultivation conditions, and genomic data, facilitating advanced research in human gut microbiome studies.

Final Thoughts

The HiBC is a cornerstone resource in the rapidly evolving field of microbiome research. As science moves toward personalized medicine and microbial therapeutics, having a reliable and diverse collection of human gut bacteria is not just useful — it's essential. Whether you're a microbiologist, clinician, computational biologist, or biotechnologist, HiBC offers tools to accelerate discovery and innovation in gut microbiome science.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.dkfz.de/en/applied-bioinformatics/telomerehunter/telomerehunter.html

Address of the bookmark: http://ancestralgenomes.org/

The fellowship is part of a larger Nordic collaborative project, MarGen_II, financed by the EU Interreg Öresund-Kattegat-Skagerrak Programme, the Danish Rod and Net License Funds and the National Institute of Aquatic Resources (DTU Aqua). The project will primarily be carried out in the population genetics group, Section for Marine Living Resources, situated in Silkeborg, Denmark. DTU Aqua is an institute at the Technical University of Denmark. In addition, the position offers many opportunities for collaborating with Nordic and other European colleagues in the field.

Application:
Apply online at
https://www.dtu.dk/english/About/JOB-and-CAREER/vacant-positions/job?id=d198fd80-4856-4a56-943d-485106026504.
The deadline is 4 January 2021. For further information, please contact
Senior Researcher Jakob Hemmer-Hansen, jhh@aqua.dtu.dk.

You can read more about DTU Aqua at www.aqua.dtu.dk
and the population genetics group at
https://www.aqua.dtu.dk/english/research/population_genetics.

All interested candidates irrespective of age, gender, race, disability,
religion or ethnic background are encouraged to apply.

Jakob Hemmer Hansen

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/

Once a query gene has been entered, it is displayed in its genomic context in parallel to the genomic context of all its orthologous and paralogous copies in all the other sequenced metazoan genomes. Moreover, Genomicus stores and displays the predicted ancestral genome structure in all the ancestral species within the phylogenetic range of interest.

All the data on extant species displayed in this browser are from Ensembl.

Address of the bookmark: http://genomicus.biologie.ens.fr/genomicus-90.01/cgi-bin/search.pl

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/reubwn/hgt

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/ksnp/files/