BOL: Related items

Flu Attack! How A Virus Invades Your Body

Thu, 22 Aug 2013 08:09:51 -0500

When you get the flu, viruses turn your cells into tiny factories that help spread the disease. In this animation, NPR's Robert Krulwich and medical animator David Bolinsky explain how a flu virus can trick a single cell into making a million more viruses. See and hear the rest of the story on NPR.org: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114075029 Credit: Robert Krulwich, David Bolinsky, Jason Orfanon

Ebola virus disease (EVD)or Ebola haemorrhagic fever !!!

Rahul Nayak — Sun, 10 Aug 2014 13:08:13 -0500

Ebola virus disease (EVD)or Ebola haemorrhagic fever is a severe and often deadly illness in humans, caused by the Ebola virus. The disease has high mortality rate, killing upto 90% of people who are infected.

The ongoing 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak is considered to be the largest and longest outbreak ever recorded of Ebola, killing at least 932 people and infecting more than 1,700 till date since March in Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria and Liberia.

Hence, the World Health Organisation (WHO) on 8 August, 2014 declared the killer Ebola epidemic ravaging parts of West Africa an international health emergency.

Causes

EVD is caused by infection with a virus of the family Filoviridae, genus Ebolavirus. While there are five identified sub-species of Ebolavirus, four viruses cause disease in humans. They are Bundibugyo virus (BDBV), Ebola virus (EBOV), Sudan virus (SUDV), Taï Forest virus (TAFV).

The fifth virus, Reston virus (RESTV), is not considered to be disease-causing in humans.

According to WHO, EVD first appeared in 1976 in two simultaneous outbreaks, in Nzara, Sudan, and in Yambuku, Democratic Republic of Congo. The latter was in a village situated near the Ebola River from which the disease takes its name.

How does it spread?

It is still unclear how Ebola spreads. However, it is believed that the first pateint becomes infected through contact with an infected animal's body fluids.

Human-to-human transmission can occur through direct contact with blood, organs or other body fluids of infected people or exposure to objects such as needles and syringes that have been contaminated with infected secretions.

Ebola can also be transmitted from men who have recovered from the disease through semen as it is infectious for up to 7 weeks.

Infected dead bodies can spread Ebola as they are still infectious. So mourners who have direct contact with the body of deceased person can also get the disease.

Who is most at risk?

Health-care workers who do not wear appropriate protective clothing and family members who are in close contact with infected people or deceased patients.

Signs and symptoms:

Symptoms may occur between 2 and 21 days after contracting the infection. Common signs of Ebola include:

Fever

Headache

Muscle, abdominal and joint pain

Sore throat

Weakness

Diarrhea

Vomit or cough up blood

Chest pain

Difficulty in breathing and swallowing

Rash

Hiccups

Bleeding inside and outside the body

Prevention

Currently there is no vaccine available for humans. But the infection can be controlled through the use of recommended protective measures such as:

Avoid contacting infected blood or secretions, including from those who are dead .

Using standard precautions for all patients in the healthcare setting.

Sterilizing equipment, and wearing protective clothing including masks, gloves, gowns and goggles.

Washing your hands with soaps or detergents.

Disinfecting your surroundings.

Isolate people who have Ebola symptoms.

Culling of infected animals, with close supervision of burial or incineration of carcasses.

Yet, not travelling to the areas or countries where the virus is found is the best way to avoid Ebola.

MPXV Bookmarks

BioStar — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 01:58:20 -0600

MPVX infection across the globe

https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/response/2022/world-map.html

Address of the bookmark: https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/response/2022/world-map.html

Sequencing Solutions to World Health

Rahul Agarwal — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 15:05:35 -0500

"New technology that quickly, easily and economically reveals the genomes of viruses and pathogens transforms public health and medicine."

Source: Life technologies

Address of the bookmark: http://www.lifetechnologies.com/global/en/home/communities-social/blog/blogs/sequencing-solutions-to-world-health.html?cid=social_blogseries_20130829_11098264

Frequently used bioinformatics tools for viral genome analysis !

Neel — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 07:40:41 -0500

IVA: accurate de novo assembly of RNA virus genomes.
Hunt M, Gall A, Ong SH, Brener J, Ferns B, Goulder P, Nastouli E, Keane JA, Kellam P, Otto TD.
Bioinformatics. 2015 Jul 15;31(14):2374-6. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btv120. Epub 2015 Feb 28.

Adapter sequences:
Optimal enzymes for amplifying sequencing libraries.
Quail, M. a et al. Nat. Methods 9, 10-1 (2012).

GAGE:
GAGE: A critical evaluation of genome assemblies and assembly algorithms.
Salzberg, S. L. et al. Genome Res. 22, 557-67 (2012).

KMC:
Disk-based k-mer counting on a PC.
Deorowicz, S., Debudaj-Grabysz, A. & Grabowski, S. BMC Bioinformatics 14, 160 (2013).

Kraken:
Kraken: ultrafast metagenomic sequence classification using exact alignments.
Wood, D. E. & Salzberg, S. L. Genome Biol. 15, R46 (2014).

MUMmer:
Versatile and open software for comparing large genomes.
Kurtz, S. et al. Genome Biol. 5, R12 (2004).

R:
R: A language and environment for statistical computing.
R Core Team (2013). R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL http://www.R-project.org/.

RATT:
RATT: Rapid Annotation Transfer Tool.
Otto, T. D., Dillon, G. P., Degrave, W. S. & Berriman, M. Nucleic Acids Res. 39, e57 (2011).

SAMtools:
The Sequence Alignment/Map format and SAMtools.
Li, H. et al. Bioinformatics 25, 2078-9 (2009).

Trimmomatic:
Trimmomatic: A flexible trimmer for Illumina Sequence Data.
Bolger, A. M., Lohse, M. & Usadel, B. Bioinformatics 1-7 (2014).

Monkeypox virus isolate MPXV_USA_2022_MA001, complete genome

Jit — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 06:21:07 -0500

LOCUS       ON563414              197205 bp    DNA     linear   VRL 30-MAY-2022
DEFINITION  Monkeypox virus isolate MPXV_USA_2022_MA001, complete genome.
ACCESSION   ON563414
VERSION     ON563414.3
KEYWORDS    .
SOURCE      Monkeypox virus (monkeypox)
  ORGANISM  Monkeypox virus
            Viruses; Varidnaviria; Bamfordvirae; Nucleocytoviricota;
            Pokkesviricetes; Chitovirales; Poxviridae; Chordopoxvirinae;
            Orthopoxvirus.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/ON563414

Automatic Filtering, Trimming, Error Removing and Quality Control for fastq data

Rahul Nayak — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 05:10:23 -0600

Automatic Filtering, Trimming, Error Removing and Quality Control for fastq data
AfterQC can simply go through all fastq files in a folder and then output three folders: good, bad and QC folders, which contains good reads, bad reads and the QC results of each fastq file/pair.
Currently it supports processing data from HiSeq 2000/2500/3000/4000, Nextseq 500/550, MiniSeq...and other Illumina 1.8 or newer formats

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/OpenGene/AfterQC

MinION_GC: An R script to do some QC on MinION data

Radha Agarkar — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 15:19:18 -0600

Other tools focus on getting data out of the fastq or fast5 files, which is slow and computationally intensive. The benefit of this approach is that it works on a single, small, .txt summary file. So it's a lot quicker than most other things out there: it takes about a minute to analyse a 4GB flowcell on my laptop.

https://github.com/roblanf/minion_qc

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/roblanf/minion_qc

MIX: Combining multiple assemblies from NGS data

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 08 May 2018 04:58:05 -0500

Mix is a tool that combines two or more draft assemblies, without relying on a reference genome and has the goal to reduce contig fragmentation and thus speed-up genome finishing. The proposed algorithm builds an extension graph where vertices represent extremities of contigs and edges represent existing alignments between these extremities. These alignment edges are used for contig extension. The resulting output assembly corresponds to a path in the extension graph that maximizes the cumulative contig length.

The Mix algorithm, approach and results were published in BMC bioinformatics : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/14/S15/S16.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/cbib/MIX

NextSV: a meta-caller for structural variants from low-coverage long-read sequencing data

Jit — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 17:24:53 -0500

NextSV, a meta SV caller and a computational pipeline to perform SV calling from low coverage long-read sequencing data. NextSV integrates three aligners and three SV callers and generates two integrated call sets (sensitive/stringent) for different analysis purpose. The output of NextSV is in ANNOVAR-compatible bed format. Users can easily perform downstream annotation using ANNOVAR and disease gene discovery using Phenolyzer.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/Nextomics/NextSV