BOL: Related items

Trust But Verify: Sequencing Your Cell Lines Might Reveal an Uninvited Guest

LEGE — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:07:57 -0500

High-throughput sequencing has become indispensable in cell biology, enabling detailed insights into chromatin structure, gene expression, and regulatory dynamics. Yet, when faced with unexpectedly low mapping rates to the human genome, researchers often rush to troubleshoot technical parameters—sequencer quality, adapter trimming, or aligner settings.

Before you go down that path, consider this critical biological question:
Are you sequencing human cells—or bacterial contamination?

The Silent Saboteur: Mycoplasma in Cell Cultures

Mycoplasma contamination remains one of the most widespread and underdiagnosed issues in tissue culture work. Studies suggest that 15–35% of cell lines in use may be contaminated, often without visible signs. Unlike other microbial infections, Mycoplasma does not produce cloudiness, odor, or a change in pH. Many researchers won’t detect it unless they specifically test for it.

The consequences, however, are profound. Mycoplasma can significantly alter:

Host gene expression patterns
Cell proliferation rates
Epigenetic profiles and chromatin accessibility
Cytokine signaling and immune responses

In short, it can skew your results, compromise your biological conclusions, and invalidate weeks or months of research.

A Simple Diagnostic Step: Map Against Mycoplasma Genomes

If you encounter poor alignment rates to the human genome, consider mapping your reads to a Mycoplasma reference genome—or better yet, use a combined human + Mycoplasma reference. There have been cases where over half of all reads, initially assumed to be from human cells, were in fact bacterial in origin. This check is fast, easy, and could save your project.

How Contamination Happens—and Persists

Mycoplasma is small (0.1–0.3 μm), lacks a cell wall, and can pass through standard filters undetected. Common sources include:

Contaminated reagents (e.g., FBS)
Infected cell lines obtained from other labs
Poor aseptic technique or shared equipment

Once present, it spreads quickly between cultures and can persist for months, silently affecting results.

Why Treatment Is Difficult

While antibiotics such as Plasmocin or BM-Cyclin are sometimes used, they often offer only partial resolution and may themselves alter cell behavior. In many cases, the best course of action is to discard the contaminated culture and start with a fresh, verified stock.

Practical Recommendations for Researchers

Routinely test for Mycoplasma using PCR, qPCR, or fluorescence-based assays
Incorporate contamination screens into your sequencing QC pipeline
Use combined reference genomes when mapping ambiguous reads
Practice strict aseptic technique and monitor all incoming cell lines
Don’t ignore unexplained data anomalies—they might point to contamination

Closing Thought: Contamination Is a Biological Variable

It’s easy to view poor mapping as a technical issue, but sometimes the problem lies deeper—in the biology itself. Mycoplasma contamination doesn’t just interfere with sequencing; it interferes with science. As a research community, we must treat contamination not as an afterthought, but as a key variable to control.

So next time your reads won’t align, don’t just tune the aligner. Ask if your cells are telling the truth—or if they're hiding something.

slacTree: SVG Large Annotated Circular Tree drawing

Jit — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 08:02:56 -0500

A simple, extensible, Perl script for producing figures of large phylogenetic trees.

While there are many other tree drawing programs, slacTree was originally written in 2009 to fill a need for producing publication quality figures of circular trees with more than 1000 taxa with custom annotations
Because it is a single Perl script with very few dependencies, it is easy to run, and easy to further customize
SVG is used because it is a scalable format allowing for very small representations of entire trees or highly magnified regions with unlimited resolution
Circular and radial trees are more compact than linear representations

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/mccrowjp/slacTree

Environment for Tree Exploration (ETE) is a Python programming toolkit that assists in the recontruction, manipulation, analysis and visualization of phylogenetic trees

Rahul Nayak — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 05:32:33 -0600

The Environment for Tree Exploration (ETE) is a Python programming toolkit that assists in the recontruction, manipulation, analysis and visualization of phylogenetic trees (although clustering trees or any other tree-like data structure are also supported).

Other tools

https://github.com/shenwei356/taxonkit

ETE, version: 3.1.1
BioPython, version: 1.73
taxadb, version: 0.10.1
TaxonKit, version: 0.5.0

Address of the bookmark: https://pypi.org/project/ete3/3.1.1/

FigTree

Rahul Nayak — Wed, 19 Jul 2017 08:06:45 -0500

FigTree is designed as a graphical viewer of phylogenetic trees and as a program for producing publication-ready figures. As with most of my programs, it was written for my own needs so may not be as polished and feature-complete as a commercial program. In particular it is designed to display summarized and annotated trees produced by BEAST.

Address of the bookmark: http://tree.bio.ed.ac.uk/software/figtree/

k-mers tutorial - classification and taxonomy

Neel — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 10:28:43 -0500

DNA k-mers underlie much of our assembly work, and we (along with many others!) have spent a lot of time thinking about how to store k-mer graphs efficiently, discard redundant data, and count them efficiently.

More recently, we've been enthused about using k-mer based similarity measures and computing and searching k-mer-based sketch search databases for all the things.

But I haven't spent too much talking about using k-mers for taxonomy, although that has become an ahem area of interest recently, if you read into our papers a bit.

In this blog post I'm going to fix this by doing a little bit of a literature review and waxing enthusiastic about other people's work. Then in a future blog post I'll talk about how we're building off of this work in fun! and interesting? ways!

Address of the bookmark: http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2017-something-about-kmers.html

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/

RGFA: powerful and convenient handling of assembly graphs

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 05:47:53 -0600

RGFA, an implementation of the proposed GFA specification in Ruby. It allows the user to conveniently parse, edit and write GFA files. Complex operations such as the separation of the implicit instances of repeats and the merging of linear paths can be performed. A typical application of RGFA is the editing of a graph, to finish the assembly of a sequence, using information not available to the assembler. We illustrate a use case, in which the assembly of a repetitive metagenomic fosmid insert was completed using a script based on RGFA.

https://github.com/ggonnella/rgfa

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5103826/

ChopStitch: exon annotation and splice graph construction using transcriptome assembly and whole genome sequencing data

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 04:14:52 -0500

ChopStitch is a new method for finding putative exons and constructing splice graphs using an assembled transcriptome and whole genome shotgun sequencing (WGSS) data. ChopStitch identifies exon-exon boundaries in de novo assembled RNA-seq data with the help of a Bloom filter that represents the k-mer spectrum of WGSS reads. The algorithm also detects base substitutions in transcript sequences corresponding to sequencing or assembly errors, haplotype variations, or putative RNA editing events. The primary output of our tool is a FASTA file containing putative exons. Further, exon edges are interrogated for alternative exon-exon boundaries to detect transcript isoforms, which are reported as splice graphs in dot output format.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/bcgsc/ChopStitch

Genobuntu: A software package containing more than 70 software and packages oriented towards NGS and genome assembly

BioStar — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 05:15:57 -0600

Genobuntu is a software package containing more than 70 software and packages oriented towards NGS. In its current version, Genobuntu supports pre assembly tools, genome assemblers as well as post assembly tools.

Commonly used biological software and example script files for different assembly pipelines have also been provided, where the example script files can be updated to suit one’s experimental needs. Genobuntu attempts to reduce the amount of time and energy needed to build software workstations and it can also act as a good teaching source for a class room setting.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/genobuntu/

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/genobuntu/

Genome assembly forensics: finding the elusive mis-assembly

Jit — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 18:02:01 -0600

We present the first collection of tools aimed at automated genome assembly validation. This work formalizes several mechanisms for detecting mis-assemblies, and describes their implementation in our automated validation pipeline, called amosvalidate. We demonstrate the application of our pipeline in both bacterial and eukaryotic genome assemblies, and highlight several assembly errors in both draft and finished genomes. The software described is compatible with common assembly formats and is released, open-source, at http://amos.sourceforge.net.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2397507/

http://amos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/AMOS

Address of the bookmark: http://amos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/AMOS