BOL: Related items

Common steps for reads mapping !

BioStar — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 02:48:02 -0600

Mapping reads to a reference genome is an essential step in many types of genomic analysis, such as variant calling and gene expression analysis. Here are some general steps to follow for mapping reads to a genome:

Choose a read mapper: There are many read mappers available, such as BWA, Bowtie, and HISAT2. Choose a mapper that is appropriate for your type of data and research question.
Index the reference genome: Before mapping reads, the reference genome needs to be indexed. This involves creating an index of the genome sequence that allows the mapper to quickly find matches to the reads. Most mappers have their own indexing tools.
Prepare the read data: The reads should be in a format that is compatible with the mapper. Most mappers accept FASTQ or BAM files. Depending on the quality of the data, it may need to be filtered or trimmed before mapping.
Run the mapper: The mapper is run with the command-line interface or using a graphical user interface. The specific command depends on the mapper being used, but typically involves specifying the input data, reference genome, and output file format.
Evaluate the mapping results: After the mapping is complete, the results should be evaluated. This includes assessing the quality of the mapping, such as the mapping rate, the number of mapped reads, and the mapping quality score.
Post-processing: Depending on the analysis being performed, post-processing of the mapped reads may be necessary. This can include filtering reads based on quality, removing duplicate reads, and calling variants.

Overall, mapping reads to a reference genome is a complex process that requires careful consideration of the type of data, the research question, and the specific mapper being used.

Simulating the Unseen: New Tools Reshaping Metagenomic Research

LEGE — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 09:42:30 -0500

When benchmarking a new metagenomic pipeline the first step is generally to face a simple problem. A bioinformatician might have a good deal of real sequencing data, but there's a drawback in that the actual biological composition underlying those reads is almost never known. What organisms really were there? In what quantities? How many sequencing errors occurred? Can the pipeline correctly reconstruct the community? Since the true answers are unknown, it is difficult to deal with these questions.

Metagenomic simulators are a way of dealing with this issue; they produce artificial sequencing datasets in which both the composition of the microorganisms and the expected results are known. Researchers can then test a pipeline on such a controlled dataset and see precisely how well it functions. However, as metagenomic studies have become larger, more diverse, and more complex, simply generating artificial reads is no longer sufficient. The simulators now have to replicate community variation, sequencing errors, different sequencing platforms, massive data volumes, and even laboratory-based biases.

MIDASim (2024) was designed with a particular emphasis on microbial community dynamics. Unlike previous tools which regarded each simulated sample as individual, MIDASim is able to efficiently generate realistic multi-sample microbiome datasets, covering the cases where changes over time are being tracked. This feature is particularly useful when investigating how microbial communities vary between people, different experimental setups, or at various times. By overcoming the computational limitations of earlier simulation methods, MIDASim has made it easier to carry out large and complex microbiome simulation studies.

A major challenge is scale. Since modern metagenomic projects can involve millions or even billions of sequencing reads, generating such large synthetic datasets can become a significant computational problem. In order to tackle this issue, Izzy (2025) was developed. As a high-throughput metagenomic read simulator, Izzy is designed with speed in mind while still reproducing the typical patterns of sequencing errors. The people who developed it stated that it can be as much as 60 times faster than earlier tools, which makes large-scale simulations far more practical. Now, researchers can begin to ask not how long a simulation will take but rather what size dataset they want to test.

At the same time, the sequencing technology became more diverse. Researchers were not any longer restricted to using Illumina short reads since Oxford Nanopore and PacBio long-read sequencing also became important in the field of metagenomic research. In order to address these new requirements, MeSS (Metagenomic Sequence Simulator, 2025) was developed. The programme is based on a Snakemake framework and is therefore compatible with the Illumina, Oxford Nanopore and PacBio platforms. MeSS has also been designed to operate efficiently and to use less memory than earlier tools; it provides ready-made templates for the microbiomes of different sites in the human body, thus giving researchers a simple means of beginning to generate realistic simulated communities.

The simulation problem became even more specialized. Suppose that sequencing is not based on uniform sampling of DNA? In the case of targeted sequencing and hybridization-capture experiments, particular sequences are deliberately enriched, and the probability of capturing a target depends on both the probe and the target sequence. A standard model based on uniform sampling might fail to take into account this important feature of real experiments. That is why RAmpSim has been designed specifically to handle simulations for capture-based and targeted sequencing. Instead of depending solely on the assumption of uniform sampling, it includes a thermodynamic nearest-neighbor energy model to represent probe–target interactions and sequence-dependent enrichment. As a result, it is especially suitable for applications such as hybridization capture in metagenomics, where the efficiency of recovering a sequence can depend strongly on how it relates to the capture probes. RAmpSim thus reflects a wider trend towards simulations that aim not only to reproduce sequencing output but also key aspects of the experimental process itself.

MIDASim, Izzy, MeSS and RAmpSim all demonstrate how fast metagenomic simulation is evolving. MIDASim is able to deal with realistic variation within a large number of and changing microbial communities. Izzy overcomes the problem of generating very large datasets. MeSS provides support for a number of sequencing technologies in an efficient and repeatable manner. RAmpSim increases the experimental realism for capture-based sequencing. Although each of these tools addresses a separate issue, they all contribute to advancing the field.

Modern metagenomic simulation therefore aims not only at producing artificial FASTQ files. Researchers nowadays desire simulated datasets that reflect community changes, incorporate the characteristics of the sequencing platform, include real error patterns, take into account computational scale, and account for experimental biases. As metagenomic workflows become more advanced, the simulators have to keep up with this development. The tools are now going beyond that of simple data generators; they produce controlled versions of complex metagenomic experiments and thus provide researchers with something that ordinary sequencing data seldom does: a dataset in which the answer is known before any analysis takes place.

NGS Tutorial

Jit — Mon, 05 Sep 2016 09:50:46 -0500

These tutorials are written for hundreds of bioinformaticians trying to cope with large volume of next-generation sequencing (NGS) data. NGS technologies brought a dramatic shift in the world of sequencing. Merely five years back, genome sequencing of higher eukaryotes used to be very expensive endeavor. To get a genome of interest sequenced, hundreds of scientists had to raise funds together by writing a joint white-paper and petitioning to various government agencies. The tasks of sequencing and assembly were handled by dedicated sequencing facilities, of which only a few existed around the globe. Naturally, the capacities at those sequencing facilities were significantly constrained from high volume of requests

Address of the bookmark: http://www.homolog.us/Tutorials/index.php

DISCO : multi threaded and multiprocess distributed memory overlap-layout-consensus (OLC) metagenome assembler

Jit — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 10:09:27 -0500

DISCO is a multi threaded and multiprocess distributed memory overlap-layout-consensus (OLC) metagenome assembler. Disco was developed as a scalable assembler to assemble large metagenomes from billions of Illumina sequencing reads of complex microbial communities. Disco was parallelized for computer clusters in a hybrid architecture that integrated shared-memory multi-threading, point-to-point message passing, and remote direct memory access. The assembly and scaffolding were performed using an iterative overlap graph approach.

Address of the bookmark: http://disco.omicsbio.org/

Omega2: metagenome assembly pipeline

Jit — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 05:56:07 -0500

Omega found overlaps between reads using a prefix/suffix hash table. The overlap graph of reads was simplified by removing transitive edges and trimming short branches. Unitigs were generated based on minimum cost flow analysis of the overlap graph and then merged to contigs and scaffolds using mate-pair information. In comparison with three de Bruijn graph assemblers (SOAPdenovo, IDBA-UD and MetaVelvet), Omega provided comparable overall performance on a HiSeq 100-bp dataset and superior performance on a MiSeq 300-bp dataset. In comparison with Celera on the MiSeq dataset, Omega provided more continuous assemblies overall using a fraction of the computing time of existing overlap-layout-consensus assemblers. This indicates Omega can more efficiently assemble longer Illumina reads, and at deeper coverage, for metagenomic datasets.

Address of the bookmark: http://omega.omicsbio.org/

Genome assembly stats plotting

Jit — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 03:45:39 -0600

A de novo genome assembly can be summarised b

y a number of metrics, including:

Overall assembly length
Number of scaffolds/contigs
Length of longest scaffold/contig
Scaffold/contig N50 and N90Assembly base composition, in particular percentage GC and percentage Ns
CEGMA completeness
Scaffold/contig length/count distribution

assembly-stats supports two widely used presentations of these values, tabular and cumulative length plots, and introduces an additional circular plot that summarises most commonly used assembly metrics in a single visualisation. Each of these presentations is generated using javascript from a common (JSON) data structure, allowing toggling between alternative views, and each can be applied to a single or multiple assemblies to allow direct comparison of alternate assemblies.

Tabular presentation allows direct comparison of exact values between assemblies, the limitations of this approach lie in the necessary omission of distributions and the challenge of interpreting ratios of values that may vary by several orders of magnitude.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/rjchallis/assembly-stats

HapCUT2: robust and accurate haplotype assembly for diverse sequencing technologies

Jit — Tue, 15 May 2018 07:35:26 -0500

HapCUT2 is a maximum-likelihood-based tool for assembling haplotypes from DNA sequence reads, designed to "just work" with excellent speed and accuracy. We found that previously described haplotype assembly methods are specialized for specific read technologies or protocols, with slow or inaccurate performance on others. With this in mind, HapCUT2 is designed for speed and accuracy across diverse sequencing technologies, including but not limited to: NGS short reads (Illumina HiSeq) clone-based sequencing (Fosmid or BAC clones) SMRT reads (PacBio) Oxford Nanopore reads 10X Genomics Linked-Reads proximity-ligation (Hi-C) reads high-coverage sequencing (>40x coverage-per-SNP) using above technologies combinations of the above technologies (e.g. scaffold long reads with Hi-C reads) See below for specific examples of command line options and best practices for some of these technologies. NOTE: At this time HapCUT2 is for diploid organisms only. VCF input should contain diploid variants. If you use HapCUT2 in your research, please cite: Edge, P., Bafna, V. & Bansal, V. HapCUT2: robust and accurate haplotype assembly for diverse sequencing technologies. Genome Res. gr.213462.116 (2016). doi:10.1101/gr.213462.116

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/vibansal/HapCUT2

SWALO: Scaffolding with assembly likelihood optimization

Jit — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 02:45:16 -0500

SWALO (scaffolding with assembly likelihood optimization) is a method for scaffolding based on likelihood of genome assemblies computed using generative models for sequencing. Please email your questions, comments, suggestions, and bug reports to atif.bd@gmail.com.

Address of the bookmark: https://atifrahman.github.io/SWALO/

Converting a VCF into a FASTA given some reference !

Jit — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 10:03:53 -0500

Samtools/BCFtools (Heng Li) provides a Perl script vcfutils.pl which does this, the function vcf2fq (lines 469-528)

This script has been modified by others to convert InDels as well, e.g. this by David Eccles

./vcf2fq.pl -f <input.fasta> <all-site.vcf> > <output.fastq>

https://github.com/gringer/bioinfscripts/blob/master/vcf2fq.pl

https://github.com/lh3/samtools/blob/master/bcftools/vcfutils.pl

SKESA: strategic k-mer extension for scrupulous assemblies

Jit — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 04:45:41 -0600

SKESA is a DeBruijn graph-based de-novo assembler designed for assembling reads of microbial genomes sequenced using Illumina. Comparison with SPAdes and MegaHit shows that SKESA produces assemblies that have high sequence quality and contiguity, handles low-level contamination in reads, is fast, and produces an identical assembly for the same input when assembled multiple times with the same or different compute resources.

Source code for SKESA is freely available at https://github.com/ncbi/SKESA/releases.

Research Paper @ Link

SKESA algorithm are as follows:

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ncbi/SKESA/releases