BOL: Related items

Genome Stability Laboratory

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 04:16:32 -0600

The bakers yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae is an ideal model organism to understand mechanisms of meiotic chromosome segregation. In S. cerevisiae and in mammals, the majority of meiotic crossovers are formed through a highly conserved MSH4p-MSH5p, MLH1p-MLH3p dependent pathway. We are interested in charactering the role of these complexes in crossover formation and distribution among all homolog pairs. Errors in this process are linked to congenital birth defects in humans such as Down's syndrome.Our laboratory is also interested in understanding the effect of genetic background on mutation rate variation using S. cerevisiae as a model. These studies are relevant for understanding cancer progression, genome evolution and architecture. We use high- throughput genomic methods as well as classical genetics to achieve these aims.

More at http://faculty.iisertvm.ac.in/~nishantkt/index.html

YASS :: genomic similarity search tool

Jit — Mon, 02 May 2016 09:26:00 -0500

YASS is a genomic similarity search tool, for nucleic (DNA/RNA) sequences in fasta or plain text format (it produces local pairwise alignments). Like most of the heuristic pairwise local alignment tools for DNA sequences (FASTA, BLAST, PATTERNHUNTER, BLASTZ/LASTZ, LAST ...), YASS uses seeds to detect potential similarity regions, and then tries to extend them to local alignments. This genomic search tool uses multiple transition constrained spaced seeds that enable to search more fuzzy repeats, as non-coding DNA/RNA. Another simple, but interesting feature is that you can specify the seed pattern used in the search step (as provided for example by iedera).

Main features of YASS are:

multiple, possibly overlapping seeds and a new hit criterion to ensure a good sensitivity/selectivity trade-off
transition-constrained spaced seeds to improve sensitivity (transition mutations are purine to purine [A<->G] or pyrimidine to pyrimidine [C<->T])
using different scoring schemes with bit-score and E-value evaluated according to the sequence background frequencies
parameterizable output filter for low complexity repeats
reporting of various alignment statistical parameters (mutation bias along triplets, transition/transversion)
post-processing step to group gapped alignments

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinfo.lifl.fr/yass/

KisSplice

Jit — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 08:34:19 -0500

KisSplice is a software that enables to analyse RNA-seq data with or without a reference genome. It is an exact local transcriptome assembler that allows to identify SNPs, indels and alternative splicing events. It can deal with an arbitrary number of biological conditions, and will quantify each variant in each condition. It has been tested on Illumina datasets of up to 1G reads. Its memory consumption is around 5Gb for 100M reads.

KisSplice is not a full-length transcriptome assembler. This means that it will output the variable regions of the transcripts, not reconstruct them entirely.

KisSplice comes as a workflow, with several possible post-treatments meant to facilitate the analysis of the results. The choice of the post-treatment depends on the availability of a reference genome/transcriptome and on the need to perform a differential analysis, as summarised in the following table.

Address of the bookmark: http://kissplice.prabi.fr/

4DGenome

Jitendra Narayan — Mon, 04 Jul 2016 00:44:55 -0500

Records in 4DGenome are compiled through comprehensive literature curation of experimentally-derived and computationally-predicted interactions. The current release contains 4,433,071 experimentally-derived and 3,605,176 computationally-predicted interactions in 5 organisms. Experimental data cover both high throughput datasets and individiual focused studies.

All interaction data are freely available in a standardized file format. Records can be queried by genomic regions, gene names, organism, and detection technology.

Address of the bookmark: http://4dgenome.research.chop.edu/

valet

Jit — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 04:27:09 -0500

VALET is a pipeline for performing de novo validation of metagenomic assemblies. VALET checks a number of properties that should hold true for a correct assembly (e.g., mate-pairs are aligned at the correct distance from each other in the assembly, the depth of coverage is fairly uniform along contigs, etc.). The violations of these invariants are reported allowing one to pinpoint areas that were potentially mis-assembled, or to compare the quality of different assemblies. For comparing multiple assemblies of the same data-sets, VALET also reports an overall estimate of the likelihood a particular assembly is correct.

Home Page:

VALET code repository

Address of the bookmark: https://www.cbcb.umd.edu/software/valet

Gene Finding and Predictions

Poonam Mahapatra — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 07:26:27 -0500

In this exercise, a previously annotated gene will be used to measure the accuracy of different gene finding approaches. GRAIL, GENSCAN, geneid, FGENESH, GenomeScan, GrailEXP and GENEWISE will be used to annotate the sequence. Both search by signal, content and homology (protein and cDNA sequences) methods will be employed in order to improve the ab initio results. Weak conservation of Start codons will lead to wrong prediction of initial exons in most cases.

http://genome.crg.es/courses/Bioinformatics2003_genefinding/

Address of the bookmark: http://genome.crg.es/courses/Bioinformatics2003_genefinding/

Artemis Comparison Tool (ACT)

Shruti Paniwala — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 03:54:41 -0500

ACT is a Java application for displaying pairwise comparisons between two or more DNA sequences. It can be used to identify and analyse regions of similarity and difference between genomes and to explore conservation of synteny, in the context of the entire sequences and their annotation. It can read complete EMBL, GENBANK and GFF entries or sequences in FASTA or raw format.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.sanger.ac.uk/science/tools/artemis-comparison-tool-act

Assembly tutorial PPT

Jit — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 03:12:53 -0500

Saved Cornell University assembly workshop PPT.

Reference:

http://cbsu.tc.cornell.edu/lab/doc/assembly_workshop_20150420_lecture1.pdf

FERMI

Jit — Fri, 09 Sep 2016 05:37:13 -0500

Fermi is a de novo assembler with a particular focus on assembling Illumina short sequence reads from a mammal-sized genome. In addition to the role of a typical assembler, fermi also aims to preserve heterozygotes which are often collapsed by other assemblers. Its ultimate goal is to find a minimal set of
unitigs to represent all the information in raw reads.

Fermi follows the overlap-layout-consensus paradigm and uses the FM-DNA-index (FMD-index) as the key data structure. It is inspired by the string graph assembler (Simpson and Durbin, 2010 and 2012) and has a similar workflow.

As a typical de novo assembler, fermi tends to produce contigs with slightly longer N50. However, the major weakness of fermi is the high misassembly rate. Although fermi provides a tool to fix misassemblies by using paired-end reads to achieve an accuracy comparable to other assemblers, this is not a favorable solution.

Fermi is designed to be used on a multi-core Linux machine with large shared memory. The easiest way to run fermi is to use the run-fermi.pl script. It generates a Makefile. The actual assembly is done by invoking make. Premature assembly processes can be resumed. Here is an example:

run-fermi.pl -dAPe ./fermi -p NA12878 -t16 -f18 reads*.fq.gz > NA12878.mak
make -f NA12878.mak -j16

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/lh3/fermi

Shinyheatmap

Jit — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 05:12:11 -0500

Background: Transcriptomics, metabolomics, metagenomics, and other various next-generation sequencing (-omics) fields are known for their production of large datasets. Visualizing such big data has posed technical challenges in biology, both in terms of available computational resources as well as programming acumen. Since heatmaps are used to depict high-dimensional numerical data as a colored grid of cells, efficiency and speed have often proven to be critical considerations in the process of successfully converting data into graphics. For example, rendering interactive heatmaps from large input datasets (e.g., 100k+ rows) has been computationally infeasible on both desktop computers and web browsers. In addition to memory requirements, programming skills and knowledge have frequently been barriers-to-entry for creating highly customizable heatmaps. Results: We propose shinyheatmap: an advanced user-friendly heatmap software suite capable of efficiently creating highly customizable static and interactive biological heatmaps in a web browser. shinyheatmap is a low memory footprint program, making it particularly well-suited for the interactive visualization of extremely large datasets that cannot typically be computed in-memory due to size restrictions. Conclusions: shinyheatmap is hosted online as a freely available web server with an intuitive graphical user interface: http://shinyheatmap.com. The methods are implemented in R, and are available as part of the shinyheatmap project at: https://github.com/Bohdan-Khomtchouk/shinyheatmap.

More at http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/09/21/076463

Address of the bookmark: http://shinyheatmap.com/