BOL: Related items

Understanding HiFi Reads !

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 19:48:11 -0500

While little public data is available for either of the new synthetic long read approaches, Illumina showed an example comparison earlier this year at the Festival of Genomics & Biodata conference (FoG 2022). In the IGV screenshot presented (below), synthetic Infinity reads – labeled “Longas” – are at the top, followed by standard Illumina short reads, and PacBio HiFi reads labeled “CCS” depicted at the bottom:

Address of the bookmark: http://pacb.com/blog/the-hifi-difference-true-long-reads-vs-synthetic-long-reads/

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.

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/

ALLHiC: Phasing and scaffolding polyploid genomes based on Hi-C data

BioStar — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 12:03:32 -0600

The major problem of scaffolding polyploid genome is that Hi-C signals are frequently detected between allelic haplotypes and any existing stat of art Hi-C scaffolding program links the allelic haplotypes together. To solve the problem, we developed a new Hi-C scaffolding pipeline, called ALLHIC, specifically tailored to the polyploid genomes. ALLHIC pipeline contains a total of 5 steps: prune, partition, rescue, optimize and build.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/tangerzhang/ALLHiC/wiki

SvABA: Genome-wide detection of structural variants and indels by local assembly

Abhimanyu Singh — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 17:58:56 -0600

SvABA is a method for detecting structural variants in sequencing data using genome-wide local assembly. Under the hood, SvABA uses a custom implementation of SGA (String Graph Assembler) by Jared Simpson, and BWA-MEM by Heng Li. Contigs are assembled for every 25kb window (with some small overlap) for every region in the genome. The default is to use only clipped, discordant, unmapped and indel reads, although this can be customized to any set of reads at the command line using VariantBam rules. These contigs are then immediately aligned to the reference with BWA-MEM and parsed to identify variants. Sequencing reads are then realigned to the contigs with BWA-MEM, and variants are scored by their read support.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/walaj/svaba

MEC: Contig Misassembly Correction

BioStar — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 23:40:49 -0600

MEC, to identify and correct misassemblies in contigs. Firstly, MEC takes fragment coverage as the feature to detect the candidate misassemblies. Then, it can distinguish a large number of false positives from the candidate misassemblies based on the distribution of paired-end reads and the statistical analysis of GC-contents. We apply MEC to four real contig datasets, and carry out experiments to analyze the influence of MEC on scaffolding results, which shows that MEC can reduce misassemblies effectively and result in quantitative improvements in scaffolding quality. MEC is publicly available for download at https://github.com/bioinfomaticsCSU/MEC.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/bioinfomaticsCSU/MEC

SvABA: Structural variation and indel detection by local assembly

Jit — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 07:52:15 -0500

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/walaj/svaba

VICUNA: a software tool that enables consensus assembly of ultra-deep sequence derived from diverse viral or other heterogeneous populations.

biogeek — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 03:40:17 -0500

VICUNA is a de novo assembly program targeting populations with high mutation rates. It creates a single linear representation of the mixed population on which intra-host variants can be mapped. For clinical samples rich in contamination (e.g., >95%), VICUNA can leverage existing genomes, if available, to assemble only target-alike reads. After initial assembly, it can also use existing genomes to perform guided merging of contigs. For each data set (e.g., Illumina paired read, 454), VICUNA outputs consensus sequence(s) and the corresponding multiple sequence alignment of constituent reads. VICUNA efficiently handles ultra-deep sequence data with tens of thousands fold coverage.

http://software.broadinstitute.org/viral/docs/vicuna_v1.0.pdf

Address of the bookmark: https://www.broadinstitute.org/viral-genomics/vicuna

GraphUnzip: Phases an assembly graph using Hi-C data and/or long reads.

Jit — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 21:22:24 -0600

GraphUnzip, a fast, memory-efficient and accurate tool to unzip assembly graphs into their constituent haplotypes using long reads and/or Hi-C data. As GraphUnzip only connects sequences in the assembly graph that already had a potential link based on overlaps, it yields high-quality gap-less supercontigs. To demonstrate the efficiency of GraphUnzip, we tested it on a simulated diploid Escherichia coli genome, and on two real datasets for the genomes of the rotifer Adineta vaga and the potato Solanum tuberosum. In all cases, GraphUnzip yielded highly continuous phased assemblies.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2021/02/01/2021.01.29.428779.full.pdf

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/nadegeguiglielmoni/GraphUnzip