Bactopia was inspired by Staphopia, a workflow we (Tim Read and myself) released that is targeted towards Staphylococcus aureus genomes. Using what we learned from Staphopia and user feedback, Bactopia was developed from scratch with usability, portability, and speed in mind from the start.

Bactopia uses Nextflow to manage the workflow, allowing for support of many types of environments (e.g. cluster or cloud). Bactopia allows for the usage of many public datasets as well as your own datasets to further enhance the analysis of your sequencing. Bactopia only uses software packages available from Bioconda and Conda-Forge to make installation as simple as possible for all users.

To highlight the use of Bactopia and Bactopia Tools, we performed an analysis of 1,664 public Lactobacillus genomes, focusing on Lactobacillus crispatus, a species that is a common part of the human vaginal microbiome. The results from this analysis are published in mSystems under the title: Bactopia: a flexible pipeline for complete analysis of bacterial genomes

Address of the bookmark: https://bactopia.github.io/latest/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/meiji-bioinf/heap

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/broadinstitute/VariantBam

DrugBank:

a bioinformatics- cheminformatics resource combining detailed drug data with comprehensive drug target information with >4900 drug (~3500 experimental) and >1500 non-redundant protein entries http://www.drugbank.ca/

Drug-Target Network:

network data of 890 drugs and 394 target human proteins http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v25/ n10/suppinfo/nbt1338_S1.html

Drug-Therapy Network:

three layers of drug-therapy networks according to the ATC classification http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2210/8/5/additional/

FDA Orange Book:

approved drug products with therapeutic equivalence evaluations http://www.fda.gov/cder/ob/HIDdb: Thomson Investigational drugs database including information on 107000 patents, 25000 investigational drugs and 80000 chemical structures http://scientific.thomson.com/products/iddb/HOMIM: a knowledgebase of human genes and genetic disorders http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ sites/entrez?db=omim

PDTD:

3D drug target structure database with a target identification option http://www.dddc.ac.cn/pdtd/

Predicted drug targets:

a set of 1383 predicted drug targets http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/8/353/additional/ [25] Protein ligand network: a network of 4208 ligands and ~15000 binding sites http://pbil.kaist.ac.kr/~parkkw/Lnet/

TDR Targets Database:

identification and ranking targets against neglected tropical diseases http://tdrtargets.org/

Therapeutic Target Database:

lists >1500 therapeutic targets, disease conditions and corresponding drugs http://xin.cz3.nus.edu.sg/group/cjttd/ttd.asp

Smudgeplots are computed from raw or even better from trimmed reads and show the haplotype structure using heterozygous kmer pairs. For example:

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/KamilSJaron/smudgeplot

FIGENO is a
  FIGure
    GENerator
for GENOmics

With figeno, you can plot various types of sequencing data along genomic coordinates. Video overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1cBeXoSYTA.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/CompEpigen/figeno

Following are the weblink for different available browsers:

http://www.ensembl.org/index.html

http://ensemblgenomes.org/

http://genome.ucsc.edu/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome

http://www.ebi.ac.uk/genomes/

http://flybase.org/

http://cmr.jcvi.org/tigr-scripts/CMR/CmrHomePage.cgi

http://www.sanger.ac.uk/resources/databases/

Detail paper at https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-017-3927-8

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/VicugnaPacos/ALPACA

A recent study published in Genome Biology (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-026-04280-y) addressed this challenge by introducing dicast (https://github.com/burgshrimps/dicast), a machine-learning approach for detecting structural variants in short-read sequencing data. Structural variants, such as large deletions, insertions, duplications, and inversions, can have significant biological and clinical implications, yet they are challenging to identify with short-read technologies. Because different detection methods frequently yield divergent results, researchers commonly employ consensus calling, considering a variant valid only if multiple tools detect it. While this approach reduces false positives, it relies on the potentially flawed assumption that the majority is always correct.

The researchers explored the impact of evaluating the supporting evidence for each variant, rather than simply tallying the number of algorithms that identified it. To establish a ground truth, they analyzed nine genomes using multiple sequencing technologies and 15 detection methods, initially identifying approximately 35 million potential variants. Through extensive filtering, evidence integration, and manual review of over 11,500 variants, they developed a robust benchmark comprising more than 236,000 structural variants. The findings underscored the complexity of the problem: short-read methods detected fewer than half of deletions and less than 10 percent of insertions, with performance declining markedly in repetitive genomic regions. In contrast, long-read technologies demonstrated superior detection capabilities. However, replacing the substantial volume of existing short-read data in clinical and research settings is not immediately feasible. Consequently, the researchers questioned whether short-read data might harbor more information than conventional analytical pipelines currently extract.

This line of inquiry led to the development of dicast. Rather than merely confirming agreement among multiple tools, dicast identifies patterns in sequencing data, including split and clipped reads, discordant read pairs, alignment characteristics, and the surrounding genomic context. An XGBoost machine-learning model evaluates which combinations of these signals are indicative of genuine structural variants. Thus, the approach shifts from tallying algorithmic consensus to interpreting the underlying evidence.

The researchers subsequently conducted a targeted evaluation by examining structural variants detected by only a single short-read tool, which are typically missed by consensus-based approaches. dicast successfully recovered approximately 81% of these single-caller deletions, insertions, and duplications. The signals for these variants were present in the data, but conventional filtering methods failed to integrate them effectively.

The utility of dicast was further demonstrated in cohorts with rare diseases, including congenital limb malformations, atrial fibrillation, and neuromuscular disorders. In one instance, dicast achieved a deletion recall rate of approximately 0.96, compared to 0.74 using consensus calling. The median number of variants requiring manual review was 29 per sample. Among 31 experimentally validated variants that standard filters would have missed, dicast identified 12, whereas consensus calling detected only one.

Overall, dicast identified approximately 20 percent more potential disease-causing deletions than consensus-based methods. While a 20 percent increase may appear modest, in clinical genomics such improvements can have significant practical implications. Missing a deletion may leave a case unresolved, whereas detecting a structural variant can provide critical diagnostic insights.

The study does not claim that machine learning has rendered short-read sequencing superior to long-read approaches. Instead, the results underscore the effectiveness of long-read sequencing for structural variant detection. However, dicast highlights a more nuanced perspective: substantial biological information may still be recoverable from the extensive short-read datasets already available.

The principal lesson extends beyond the detection of structural variants. For many years, bioinformatics pipelines have relied on threshold-based criteria, such as minimum coverage, quality scores, or support from multiple tools. While these rules are useful, biological phenomena do not always conform to rigid checklists; multiple weak signals, when considered collectively, can provide compelling evidence.

This perspective prompts consideration of the solitary variant: one algorithm identifies it, while several others do not. Traditional consensus techniques might have dismissed it, yet machine learning approaches evaluate the available evidence to determine whether the variant is plausible.

Occasionally, the most significant variant within a genome is the one that is almost universally overlooked.

Read more at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-026-04280-y