BOL: Related items

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

Strudel

Anjana — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 09:47:02 -0500

Strudel is our graphical tool for visualizing genetic and physical maps of genomes for comparative purposes. The application aims to let the user examine their data at a variety of different levels of resolution, from entire maps to individual markers, and explore syntenic relationships between genomes. All browsing and interaction with Strudel happens in real-time – there is no need to wait while the maps are generated. It is built using Java 1.6 and ships with its own JRE, so there is no need for users to install or update Java.

Address of the bookmark: https://ics.hutton.ac.uk/strudel/

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/

LINKS

Jit — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 06:19:01 -0500

LINKS is a genomics application for scaffolding genome assemblies with long reads, such as those produced by Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd. It can be used to scaffold high-quality draft genome assemblies with any long sequences (eg. ONT reads, PacBio reads, another draft genomes, etc)

Paper at https://gigascience.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13742-015-0076-3

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/warrenlr/LINKS/

BIMA V3: an aligner customized for mate pair library sequencing

Abhimanyu Singh — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:20:00 -0600

Summary: Mate pair library sequencing is an effective and economical method for detecting genomic structural variants and chromosomal abnormalities. Unfortunately, the mapping and alignment of mate pair read pairs to a reference genome is a challenging and
time consuming process for most NGS alignment programs. Large insert sizes, introduction of library preparation protocol artifacts (biotin junction reads, paired-end read contamination, chimeras, etc.), and presence of structural variant breakpoints within reads increases mapping and alignment complexity. We describe an algorithm that is up to 20 times faster and 25% more accurate than popular NGS alignment programs when processing mate pair sequencing.
Availability: http://bioinformaticstools.mayo.edu/research/bima/
Contact: vasmatzis.george@mayo.edu

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/02/12/bioinformatics.btu078.full.pdf

pyScaf

Bulbul — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 14:20:33 -0600

pyScaf orders contigs from genome assemblies utilising several types of information:

paired-end (PE) and/or mate-pair libraries (NGS-based mode)
long reads (NGS-based mode)
synteny to the genome of some related species (reference-based mode)

Scaffolding

In reference-based mode, pyScaf uses synteny to the genome of closely related species in order to order contigs and estimate distances between adjacent contigs.

Contigs are aligned globally (end-to-end) onto reference chromosomes, ignoring:

matches not satisfying cut-offs (--identity and --overlap)
suboptimal matches (only best match of each query to reference is kept)
and removing overlapping matches on reference.

In preliminary tests, pyScaf performed superbly on simulated heterozygous genomes based on C. parapsilosis (13 Mb; CANPA) and A. thaliana (119 Mb; ARATH) chromosomes, reconstructing correctly all chromosomes always for CANPA and nearly always for ARATH (Figures in dropbox, CANPA table, ARATH table).
Runs took ~0.5 min for CANPA on 4 CPUs and ~2 min for ARATH on 16 CPUs.

Important remarks:

Reduce your assembly before (fasta2homozygous.py) as any redundancy will likely break the synteny.
pyScaf works better with contigs than scaffolds, as scaffolds are often affected by mis-assemblies (no de novo assembler / scaffolder is perfect...), which breaks synteny.
pyScaf works very well if divergence between reference genome and assembled contigs is below 20% at nucleotide level.
pyScaf deals with large rearrangements ie. deletions, insertion, inversions, translocations. Note however, this is experimental implementation!
Consider closing gaps after scaffolding.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/lpryszcz/pyScaf

Mercator

Jit — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 04:20:36 -0600

Our basic strategy in building homology maps is to use exons that are orthologous in multiple genomes as map "anchors." Given K genomes, the steps in the map construction are as follows:

For each genome, obtain a set of exon annotations. These annotations can be a combination of both exon predictions (e.g. Genscan) and annotations that have been experimentally verified (e.g. RefSeq). Ideally, we would like to have these annotations be as sensitive as possible. Specificity is not a concern, as incorrect annotations are not likely not have significant alignments with other gene annotations.
Compare all exons against all exons in other genomes and record significant alignments between exons. Currently, we use BLAT to do this all-vs-all comparison with alignments being performed in protein space.
Construct a graph with each vertex corresponding to a exon and edges between vertices whose corresponding exons have significant alignments.
Identify cliques in this graph. These cliques are potential anchors to be used in the map.
Starting with the largest cliques (those that have exons in all or most of the genomes), join neighboring (adjacent in genomic coordinates, in each genome) cliques to form runs. Smaller cliques that are inconsistent with runs formed by larger cliques are filtered out. After the smallest cliques have been considered, cliques that are not part of a run are discarded.
The extents of each run in each genome are outputted as orthologous segments. The cliques from each run are used to output the exact genomic coordinates of anchors within each orthologous segment. These anchors can be used by genomic alignment programs (such as MAVID) to do a detailed alignment of each orthologous segment.

https://www.biostat.wisc.edu/~cdewey/mercator/

Address of the bookmark: https://www.biostat.wisc.edu/~cdewey/mercator/

Cgaln

Jit — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 05:14:15 -0600

Cgaln (Coarse grained alignment) is a program designed to align a pair of whole genomic sequences of not only bacteria but also entire chromosomes of vertebrates on a nominal desktop computer. Cgaln performs an alignment job in two steps, at the block level and then at the nucleotide level. The former "coarse-grained" alignment can explore genomic rearrangements and reduce the regions to be analyzed in the next step. The latter is devoted to detailed alignment within the limited regions found in the first stage. The output of Cgaln is 'glocal' in the sense that rearrangements are taken into consideration while each alignable region is extended as long as possible. Thus, Cgaln is not only fast and memory-efficient, but also can filter noisy outputs without missing the most important homologous segment pairs.

http://www.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/chromosomeinformatics/rnakato/cgaln/

Address of the bookmark: http://www.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/chromosomeinformatics/rnakato/cgaln/

gbtools: Interactive Visualization of Metagenome Bins in R

Jit — Sun, 26 Mar 2017 15:41:31 -0500

We have developed gbtools, a software package that allows users to visualize metagenomic assemblies by plotting coverage (sequencing depth) and GC values of contigs, and also to annotate the plots with taxonomic information. Different sets of annotations, including taxonomic assignments from conserved marker genes or SSU rRNA genes, can be imported simultaneously; users can choose which annotations to plot. Bins can be manually defined from plots, or be imported from third-party binning tools and overlaid onto plots, such that results from different methods can be compared side-by-side. gbtools reports summary statistics of bins including marker gene completeness, and allows the user to add or subtract bins with each other.

Tool at https://github.com/kbseah/genome-bin-tools

Address of the bookmark: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fmicb.2015.01451/full

Genome Annotation Transfer Utility (GATU)

Jit — Mon, 29 May 2017 05:54:53 -0500

Genome Annotation Transfer Utility (GATU) was designed to facilitate quick, efficient annotation of similar genomes using genomes that have already been annotated. For example, whenever a new strain of SARS coronavirus is sequenced, it is possible, using GATU, to automatically annotate the new strain using a previously-annotated strain of SARS CoV. This saves researchers from tedious manual annotation of these sequences.

The program utilizes tBLASTn and BLASTn algorithms to map genes from the reference genome (the annotated strain) to the new sequence (the unannotated strain). The goal is to annotate the majority of the new genome’s genes in a single step. ORFs present in the target genome and absent from the reference genome are also identified; these ORFs can be further analyzed using BLAST, VGO and BBB. Afterwards, they can either be accepted for/rejected from annotation. GATU can handle multiple-exon genes as well as mature peptides. Although it was designed for use with viral genomes, GATU can also be used to help annotate larger genomes (ie. bacterial genomes).

The output is saved in GenBank, XML, or EMBL file format.

Address of the bookmark: https://virology.uvic.ca/help/tool-help/help-books/genome-annotation-transfer-utility-gatu-documentation/