BOL: Related items

The Tree That Learned to Read Genomes

BioStar — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:51:02 -0500

Imagine trying to reconstruct a family tree when many family photographs are missing, some names are unclear, and different relatives remember the past differently. This is similar to the challenge scientists face when trying to understand how organisms are related. Their family records are genomes, and the family tree is a phylogenetic tree. With modern sequencing technologies, scientists now have access to thousands of genomes, but comparing them can be difficult, especially when genomes are incomplete or poorly annotated.

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?

LAMSA: fast split read alignment with long approximate matches

Jit — Tue, 15 May 2018 04:44:42 -0500

LAMSA (Long Approximate Matches-based Split Aligner) is a novel split alignment approach with faster speed and good ability of handling SV events. It is well-suited to align long reads (over thousands of base-pairs). LAMSA takes takes the advantage of the rareness of SVs to implement a specifically designed two-step strategy. That is, LAMSA initially splits the read into relatively long fragments and co-linearly align them to solve the small variations or sequencing errors, and mitigate the effect of repeats. The alignments of the fragments are then used for implementing a sparse dynamic programming (SDP)-based split alignment approach to handle the large or non-co-linear variants. We benchmarked LAMSA with simulated and real datasets having various read lengths and sequencing error rates, the results demonstrate that it is substantially faster than the state-of-the-art long read aligners; mean-while, it also has good ability to handle various categories of SVs. LAMSA is open source and free for non-commercial use. LAMSA is mainly designed by Bo Liu & Yan Gao and developed by Yan Gao in Center for Bioinformatics, Harbin Institute of Technology, China.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/hitbc/LAMSA

TULIP - The Uncorrected Long read Itegration Pipeline

Jit — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 09:30:01 -0600

#Running TULIP (The Uncorrected Long-read Integration Process), version 0.4 late 2016 (European eel)

TULIP currently consists of to Perl scripts, tulipseed.perl and tulipbulb.perl. These are very much intended as prototypes, and additional components and/or implementations are likely to follow.
Tulipseed takes as input alignments files of long reads to sparse short seeds, and outputs a graph and scaffold structures. Tulipbulb adds long read sequencing data to these.

https://github.com/Generade-nl/TULIP

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/Generade-nl/TULIP

TULIP - The Uncorrected Long read Integration Pipeline

Jit — Tue, 15 May 2018 09:06:37 -0500

TULIP currently consists of two Perl scripts, tulipseed.perl and tulipbulb.perl. These are very much intended as prototypes, and additional components and/or implementations are likely to follow. Tulipseed takes as input alignments files of long reads to sparse short seeds, and outputs a graph and scaffold structures.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/Generade-nl/TULIP

PyParanoid: a pipeline for rapid identification of homologous gene families in a set of genomes

BioStar — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 10:06:19 -0500

PyParanoid is a pipeline for rapid identification of homologous gene families in a set of genomes - a central task of any comparative genomics analysis. The "gold standard" for identifying homologs is to use reciprocal best hits (RBHs) which depends on performing a all-vs-all sequence comparison, usually using BLAST, to determine homology. However, these methods are computationally expensive, requiring O(n2) resources to identify RBHs. This is problematic, as the modern deluge of sequencing data means that comparative genomics analyses could be performed on datasets of thousands of strains.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ryanmelnyk/PyParanoid

S-plot2: Rapid Visual and Statistical Analysis of Genomic Sequences

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 17:57:27 -0500

S-plot2 creates an interactive, two-dimensional heatmap capturing the similarities and dissimilarities in nucleotide usage between genomic sequences (partial or complete). In S-plot2, whole eukaryotic chromosomes and smaller prokaryotic genomes can be efficiently compared. The tool includes functionality to extract, analyze, and automate BLAST queries of regions of interest within the heatmap. This facilitates the investigation of quickly evolving coding regions, novel coding regions, and laterally transferred elements.

Address of the bookmark: https://bitbucket.org/lkalesinskas/splot

Run miniasm assembler on nanopore reads !

Jit — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 04:07:50 -0600

Miniasm is a very fast OLC-based de novo assembler for noisy long reads. It takes all-vs-all read self-mappings (typically by minimap) as input and outputs an assembly graph in the GFA format. Different from mainstream assemblers, miniasm does not have a consensus step. It simply concatenates pieces of read sequences to generate the final unitig sequences. Thus the per-base error rate is similar to the raw input reads.

Find the detail of the reads repeats:

fq2fa ONT_A.fastq ONT_A.fasta

minimap2 -xava-ont ONT_A.fasta ONT_A.fasta -t10 -X > AONT.paf

awk '{if($1==$6){print}}' AONT.paf > AONTself.paf

awk '$5=="-"' AONTself.paf | awk '{print $1}'| sort|uniq > invertedrepeat.list

Generated a few palindrome and repeats plots (highlighting only repeats largest than 10, 20 and 30 kb)

minidot -f 5 -m 30000 AONTself.paf > AONTself30000.eps
sed 's/_template_pass_FAH31515//' AONTself30000.eps > AONTself30000final.eps

minidot -f 5 -m 20000 AONTself.paf > AONTself20000.eps
sed 's/_template_pass_FAH31515//' AONTself20000.eps > AONTself20000final.eps

minidot -f 5 -m 10000 AONTself.paf > AONTself10000.eps
sed 's/_template_pass_FAH31515//' AONTself10000.eps > AONTself10000final.eps

Assemble with miniasm:

miniasm -f ONT_A.fasta AONT.paf > AONT.gfa
grep '^S' AONT.gfa |awk '{print ">"$2"\n"$3}' > AONT_miniasm.fasta

minimap2 -xasm10 AONT_miniasm.fasta AONT_miniasm.fasta -t1 -X > AONT_miniasm.paf

awk '{if($1==$6){print}}' AONT_miniasm.paf > AONT_miniasm_self.paf

minidot -f 5 -m 10000 AONT_miniasm_self.paf > AONT_miniasm_self10000.eps

Njoy the assembly !

Frequent Paired-end reads (PE 2x100) mapping command lines

Jit — Tue, 15 May 2018 08:59:29 -0500

bowtie2 -x hs37m -X 650 -q -1 r1.fq -2 r2.fq -S r12.bowtie2.sam

bwa aln hs37m.fa r1.fq > r1.sai && bwa aln hs37m.fa r2.fq > r2.sai \
&& bwa sampe hs37m r1.sai r2.sai r1.fq r2.fq > r12.bwa.sam

bwa bwasw ../index/bwa/hs37m.fa r12.fq > r12.bwasw.sam

gsnap -A sam -d hs37m r1.fq r2.fq > r12.gsnap.sam

novoalign -r Random -o SAM -f r1.fq r2.fq -i 500 50 -d hs37m-k14s3.novo > r12.novo.sam

smalt map -f samsoft -i 650 -o r12.smalt-k20s13.sam hs37m-k20s13 r1.fq r2.fq

stampy.py -g hs37m -h hs37m -o r12.stampy.sam -M r1.fq,r2.fq

soap -D hs37m.fa.index -a r1.fq -b r2.fq -l 32 -g 3 -u dummy -2 dummy -o r12.soap

PANDASEQ is a program to align Illumina reads, optionally with PCR primers embedded in the sequence, and reconstruct an overlapping sequence.

BioStar — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 10:19:52 -0500

Development packages for zlib and libbz2 are needed, as well as a standard compiler environment. On Ubuntu, this can be installed via:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libtool automake zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev pkg-config

On MacOS, the Apple Developer tools and Fink (or MacPorts or Brew) must be installed, then:

sudo fink install bzip2-dev pkgconfig

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/neufeld/pandaseq

SViper: Swipe your Structural Variants called on long (ONT/PacBio) reads with short exact (Illumina) reads.

Neel — Sun, 22 Dec 2019 03:48:28 -0600

Call sviper

~$ ./sviper -s short-reads.bam -l long-reads.bam -r ref.fa -c variants.vcf -o polished_variants

This will output a polished_variants.vcf file, that contains all the refined variants.

Sometimes it is helpful to look at the polished sequence, e.g. with the IGV browser. In that case you want SViper to output the polished and aligned sequences in a bam file via the option --output-polished-bam:

~$ ./sviper -s short-reads.bam -l long-reads.bam -r ref.fa -c variants.vcf -o polished_variants --output-polished-bam

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/smehringer/SViper