BOL: Related items

Early Genome Screening: The New Health Horoscope!

LEGE — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 19:44:36 -0600

In an era where precision medicine is reshaping healthcare, genome screening is emerging as the modern equivalent of a health horoscope. It offers insights into our biological "stars," unraveling predispositions to various conditions and empowering individuals with knowledge to navigate their health journeys proactively. But how reliable is this "horoscope," and how does it impact our lives?

Understanding Genome Screening

Genome screening involves analyzing an individual's DNA to identify genetic variations that may influence health and disease susceptibility. This can range from simple single-gene tests to comprehensive whole-genome sequencing. By peering into our genetic blueprint, we can uncover risks for conditions like cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and even rare genetic disorders.

The process is straightforward: a saliva or blood sample is collected, and advanced sequencing technologies decipher the genetic code. The results provide a personalized health map, guiding lifestyle modifications, preventive measures, or medical interventions.

A Shift from Reactive to Proactive Healthcare

Traditional healthcare often focuses on treating diseases after they manifest. Genome screening flips this model on its head, enabling a shift toward prevention and early intervention. For instance:

Cancer Risk Management: Individuals with BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutations can opt for enhanced screening programs or preventive surgeries to mitigate their risk of breast and ovarian cancers.
Cardiovascular Health: Genetic predispositions to conditions like familial hypercholesterolemia can prompt early cholesterol monitoring and lifestyle adjustments.
Rare Diseases: Identifying carriers of genetic disorders can aid in family planning and reduce the incidence of inherited conditions.

The Ethical and Practical Concerns

While genome screening offers incredible promise, it is not without challenges:

Accuracy and Interpretation: Genetic predisposition does not guarantee disease. Misinterpretation of results can lead to unnecessary anxiety or unwarranted medical interventions.
Privacy and Data Security: Genetic data is highly sensitive. Ensuring robust data protection measures is crucial to prevent misuse.
Accessibility and Equity: High costs and limited availability may restrict access to genome screening, exacerbating health disparities.

Balancing Science and Pseudoscience

The comparison of genome screening to horoscopes isn’t entirely unfounded. Both offer predictive insights, but the scientific foundation of genome screening distinguishes it from astrology. Unlike the alignment of celestial bodies, genetic predictions are based on rigorous data and evidence. However, the probabilistic nature of genetic predispositions underscores the importance of interpreting results in conjunction with clinical and lifestyle factors.

The Road Ahead

As genome screening becomes more affordable and integrated into routine healthcare, its potential to transform lives is immense. Policymakers, healthcare providers, and genetic counselors must collaborate to ensure ethical implementation, public awareness, and equitable access.

Imagine a future where your genetic "horoscope" is a trusted guide, not just a prediction. Early genome screening could help chart a healthier path for generations, making it a cornerstone of personalized medicine. After all, our genes might just hold the key to unlocking a future of better health and well-being.

HiTE: a fast and accurate dynamic boundary adjustment approach for full-length Transposable Elements detection and annotation in Genome Assemblies

LEGE — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 09:34:04 -0500

HiTE is a Python software that uses a dynamic boundary adjustment approach to detect and annotate full-length Transposable Elements in Genome Assemblies. In comparison to other tools, HiTE demonstrates superior performance in detecting a greater number of full-length TEs.

panHiTE

We have developed panHiTE, a comprehensive and accurate pipeline for TE detection in large-scale population genomes. It has been successfully applied to hundreds of plant population genomes, demonstrating its effectiveness and scalability.

For detailed instructions, please refer to the panHiTE tutorial.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/CSU-KangHu/HiTE

Platanus

Jit — Fri, 13 May 2016 05:12:40 -0500

Platanus is a novel de novo sequence assembler that can reconstruct genomic sequences of
highly heterozygous diploids from massively parallel shotgun sequencing data.

The latest version is 1.2.4.

To cite Platanus, please use the following:

Kajitani R, Toshimoto K, Noguchi H, Toyoda A, Ogura Y, Okuno M, Yabana M, Harada M, Nagayasu E, Maruyama H, Kohara Y, Fujiyama A, Hayashi T, Itoh T, “Efficient de novo assembly of highly heterozygous genomes from whole-genome shotgun short reads”. Genome Res. 2014 Aug;24(8):1384-95. doi: 10.1101/gr.170720.113. [abstract | full text]

Address of the bookmark: http://platanus.bio.titech.ac.jp/

Samtools Primer !!

Jit — Thu, 23 Jun 2016 07:18:17 -0500

SAMtools: Primer / Tutorial by Ethan Cerami, Ph.D.

keywords: samtools, next-gen, next-generation, sequencing, bowtie, sam, bam, primer, tutorial, how-to, introduction
Revisions

    1.0: May 30, 2013: First public release on biobits.org.
    1.1: July 24, 2013: Updated with Disqus Comments / Feedback section.
    1.2: December 19, 2014: Multiple updates, including:
        Updated to use samtools 1.1 and bcftools 1.2.
        Updated usage for bcftools.

About

SAMtools is a popular open-source tool used in next-generation sequence analysis. This primer provides an introduction to SAMtools, and is geared towards those new to next-generation sequence analysis. The primer is also designed to be self-contained and hands-on, meaning that you only need to install SAMtools, and no other tools, and sample data sets are provided. Terms in bold are also explained in the glossary at the end of the document.

Address of the bookmark: http://biobits.org/samtools_primer.html

NovelSeq: Novel Sequence Insertion Detection

Neel — Fri, 09 Jun 2017 04:31:30 -0500

The NovelSeq framework is designed to detect novel sequence insertions using high throughput paired-end whole genome sequencing data.

http://novelseq.sourceforge.net/Home

Paper at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20385726

Address of the bookmark: http://novelseq.sourceforge.net/Home

BEAP: Blast Extension and Assembly Program

Shruti Paniwala — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 04:52:56 -0500

The Blast Extension and Assembly Program (BEAP) is a computer program that uses a short starting DNA fragment, often a EST or partial gene segment, as "primer", to recursively blast nucleotide databases in an attempt to obtain all sequences that overlaps, directly or indirectly, with the "primer" therefore help to "extend" the length of the original sequence for constructing a "full length" sequence for functional analysis, or at least to obtain neighboring regions of the segment for SNP discovery and linkage disequilibrium analysis. The confidence of assembling the resulting sequences is achieved by using a known genome, such as human genome, as a reference. https://www.animalgenome.org/tools/beap/

Address of the bookmark: https://www.animalgenome.org/tools/beap/

medaka: Sequence correction provided by ONT Research

BioStar — Mon, 18 May 2020 16:28:00 -0500

medaka is a tool to create a consensus sequence from nanopore sequencing data. This task is performed using neural networks applied from a pileup of individual sequencing reads against a draft assembly. It outperforms graph-based methods operating on basecalled data, and can be competitive with state-of-the-art signal-based methods, whilst being much faster.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/nanoporetech/medaka

NCBIBLAST+ 2.14.1 now available

Neel — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 02:36:13 -0500

#NCBIBLAST+ 2.14.1 now available with improved documentation, faster and more reliable database downloads, and some bug fixes.

Check out the changes they made.

They added the cleanup-blastdb-volumes.py script to remove unused BLAST database volumes. Read the documentation here.

They also switched the protocol from ftp to https to access BLAST databases for increased performance and reliability when downloading data from the NCBI with the update_blastdb.pl script.

And fixed a few bugs related to downloading data from the NCBI, and mt_mode crashing blastn and blastx.

Check out the release notes.

Download BLAST+ 2.14.1

Questions or comments? Please write the BLAST help desk.

More info and download: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/doc/blast-news/2023-BLAST-News.html

Tbl2asn: a command-line program that automates the creation of sequence records for submission to GenBank

Poonam Mahapatra — Mon, 29 May 2017 07:37:08 -0500

Tbl2asn is a command-line program that automates the creation of sequence records for submission to GenBank. It uses many of the same functions as Sequin but is driven generally by data files. Tbl2asn generates .sqn files for submission to GenBank. Additional manual editing is not required before submission.

Tbl2asn is available by anonymous FTP. Copy the right version for your platform, then uncompress the file, rename it to "tbl2asn", and set the permissions, as necessary for the platform.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/tbl2asn2/

Alignment-free sequence comparison tools available for next-generation sequencing data analysis

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 07 Nov 2017 05:33:33 -0600

kallisto

Transcript abundance quantification from RNA-seq data (uses pseudoalignment for rapid determination of read compatibility with targets)

Software (C++)

https://pachterlab.github.io/kallisto/

Sailfish

Estimation of isoform abundances from reference sequences and RNA-seq data (k-mer based)

Software (C++)

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ckingsf/software/sailfish/

Salmon

Quantification of the expression of transcripts using RNA-seq data (uses k-mers)

https://combine-lab.github.io/salmon/

RNA-Skim

RNA-seq quantification at transcript-level (partitions the transcriptome into disjoint transcript clusters; uses sig-mers, a special type of k-mers)

Software (C++)

http://www.csbio.unc.edu/rs/

Variant calling

ChimeRScope

Fusion transcript prediction using gene k-mers profiles of the RNA-seq paired-end reads

Software (Java)

https://github.com/ChimeRScope/ChimeRScope/wiki

FastGT

Genotyping of known SNV/SNP variants directly from raw NGS sequence reads by counting unique k-mers

Software (C)

https://github.com/bioinfo-ut/GenomeTester4/

Phy-Mer

Reference-independent mitochondrial haplogroup classifier from NGS data (k-mer based)

Software (Python)

https://github.com/danielnavarrogomez/phy-mer

LAVA

Genotyping of known SNPs (dbSNP and Affymetrix's Genome-Wide Human SNP Array) from raw NGS reads (k-mer based)

Software (C)

http://lava.csail.mit.edu/

MICADo

Detection of mutations in targeted third-generation NGS data (can distinguish patients’ specific mutations; algorithm uses k-mers and is based on colored de Bruijn graphs)

Software (Python)

http://github.com/cbib/MICADo

General mapper

Minimap

Lightweight and fast read mapper and read overlap detector (uses the concept of “minimazers”, a special type of k-mers)

Software (C)

https://github.com/lh3/minimap

Assembly

De novo genome assembly

MHAP

Produces highly continuous assembly (fully resolved chromosome arms) from third-generation long and noisy reads (10 kbp) using a dimensionality reduction technique MinHash

Software (Java)

https://github.com/marbl/MHAP

Miniasm

Assembler of long noisy reads (SMRT, ONT) using the Overlap-Layout Consensus (OLC) approach without the necessity of an error correction stage (uses minimap)

Software (C)

https://github.com/lh3/miniasm

LINKS

Scaffolding genome assembly with error-containing long sequence (e.g., ONT or PacBio reads, draft genomes)

Software (Perl)

https://github.com/warrenlr/LINKS/

Read clustering

afcluster

Clustering of reads from different genes and different species based on k-mer counts

Software (C++)

https://github.com/luscinius/afcluster

QCluster

Clustering of reads with alignment-free measures (k-mer based) and quality values

Software (C++)

http://www.dei.unipd.it/~ciompin/main/qcluster.html

Reads error correction

Lighter

Correction of sequencing errors in raw, whole genome sequencing reads (k-mer based)

Software (C++)

https://github.com/mourisl/Lighter

QuorUM

Error corrector for Illumina reads using k-mers

Software (C++)

https://github.com/gmarcais/Quorum

Trowel

Software (C++)

https://sourceforge.net/projects/trowel-ec/

Metagenomics

Assembly-free phylogenomics

AAF

Phylogeny reconstruction directly from unassembled raw sequence data from whole genome sequencing projects; provides bootstrap support to assess uncertainty in the tree topology (k-mer based)

Software (Python)

https://github.com/fanhuan/AAF

kSNP v3

Reference-free SNP identification and estimation of phylogenetic trees using SNPs (based on k-mer analysis)

Software (C)

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ksnp/files/

NGS-MC

Phylogeny of species based on NGS reads using alignment-free sequence dissimilarity measures d2* and d2 S under different Markov chain models (using k-words)

R package

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~fsun/Programs/NGS-MC/NGS-MC.html

Species identification/taxonomic profiling

CLARK

Taxonomic classification of metagenomic reads to known bacterial genomes using k-mer search and LCA assignment

Software (C++)

http://clark.cs.ucr.edu/

FOCUS

Reports organisms present in metagenomic samples and profiles their abundances (uses composition-based approach and non-negative least squares for prediction)

Web service Software (Python)

http://edwards.sdsu.edu/FOCUS/

GSM

Estimation of abundances of microbial genomes in metagenomic samples (k-mer based)

Software (Go)

https://github.com/pdtrang/GSM

Mash

Species identification using assembled or unassembled Illumina, PacBio, and ONT data (based on MinHash dimensionality-reduction technique)

Software (C++)

https://github.com/marbl/mash

Kraken

Taxonomic assignment in metagenome analysis by exact k-mer search; LCA assignment of short reads based on a comprehensive sequence database

Software (C++)

https://ccb.jhu.edu/software/kraken/

LMAT

Assignment of taxonomic labels to reads by k-mers searches in precomputed database

Software (C++/Python)

https://sourceforge.net/projects/lmat/

stringMLST

k-mer-based tool for MLST directly from the genome sequencing reads

Software (Python)

http://jordan.biology.gatech.edu/page/software/stringMLST

Taxonomer

k-mer-based ultrafast metagenomics tool for assigning taxonomy to sequencing reads from clinical and environmental samples

Web service

http://taxonomer.iobio.io/

Other

d2-tools

Word-based (k-tuple) comparison (pairwise dissimilarity matrix using d2S measure) of metatranscriptomic samples from NGS reads

Software (Python/R)

https://code.google.com/p/d2-tools/

VirHostMatcher

Prediction of hosts from metagenomic viral sequences based on ONF using various distance measures (e.g., d2)

Software (C++)

https://github.com/jessieren/VirHostMatcher

MetaFast

Statistics calculation of metagenome sequences and the distances between them based on assembly using de Bruijn graphs and Bray–Curtis dissimilarity measure

Software (Java)

https://github.com/ctlab/metafast