BOL: Related items

Aurora: A New Detective for Bacterial Genomes

BioStar — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:31:00 -0500

Imagine trying to solve a mystery with thousands of clues—but some of the clues are labelled incorrectly.

That is the challenge researchers face when studying how bacteria adapt to different environments. A bacterial gene may appear to be linked to a particular habitat, when the real reason is simply that closely related bacteria happen to live there.

In their 2025 Genome Biology paper, Bujdoš, Walter, and O’Toole introduce aurora, a machine-learning tool designed to tackle this problem.

Aurora identifies potentially mislabeled or unusual bacterial strains before performing genome-wide association studies (GWAS). By cleaning up the dataset and accounting for bacterial evolutionary relationships, it can help researchers find genetic features that are more genuinely connected to habitat adaptation.

The researchers tested aurora using simulated and real bacterial datasets and found that it could recover important genetic associations even when datasets contained misleading labels.

The bigger lesson is simple: better biological discoveries often begin with better data.

Aurora gives researchers a new way to separate real genetic clues from misleading ones—and could help us better understand how bacteria adapt, survive, and evolve in the environments they call home.

Based on Bujdoš et al., “aurora: a machine learning GWAS tool for analyzing microbial habitat adaptation,” Genome Biology (2025).[Read the original paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-025-03524-7?)

Luo Lab | Symbiosis Genomics & Evolution

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 03:30:30 -0500

We study the evolutionary genomics of marine invertebrates to understand their origins and diversity. Our lab combines high-throughput sequencing and single-cell transcriptomics to explore a wide range of non-model systems. We are particularly interested in how evolutionary novelty arises, with a focus on animal development and photosymbiosis.

Research Directions

Stony corals: evolution of novelty and photosymbiosis

Symbiotic acoels: cell type evolution and photosymbiosis

Animal genomes: structural evolution and gene regulation

https://sgel.biodiv.tw/home

Painless package development for R

Abhi — Tue, 03 May 2016 05:31:06 -0500

Devtools makes package development a breeze: it works with R’s existing conventions for code structure, adding efficient tools to support the cycle of package development. With devtools, developing a package becomes so easy that it will be your default layout whenever you’re writing a significant amount of code.

Before you get started be sure to check out:

Address of the bookmark: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rpackages/devtools/

UpSetR: An R Package for the Visualization of Intersecting Sets and their Properties

BioStar — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 18:38:44 -0600

UpSetR generates static UpSet plots. The UpSet technique visualizes set intersections in a matrix layout and introduces aggregates based on groupings and queries. The matrix layout enables the effective representation of associated data, such as the number of elements in the aggregates and intersections, as well as additional summary statistics derived from subset or element attributes.

For further details about the original technique see the UpSet website. You can also check out the UpSetR shiny app. Here is the source code for the shiny wrapper.

A Python package called py-upset to create UpSet plots has been created by GitHub user ImSoErgodic.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/hms-dbmi/UpSetR/

visNetwork: an R package for network visualization, using vis.js javascript library

Jit — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 11:00:32 -0600

visNetwork is an R package for network visualization, using vis.js javascript library (http://visjs.org/). All remarks and bugs are welcome on github : https://github.com/datastorm-open/visNetwork.

Features

Based on htmlwidgets, so :

compatible with shiny, R Markdown documents, and RStudio viewer

The package proposes all the features available in vis.js API, and even more with special features for R :

easy to use
custom shapes, styles, colors, sizes, …
works smooth on any modern browser for up to a few thousand nodes and edges
interactivity controls (highlight, collapsed nodes, selection, zoom, physics, movement of nodes, tooltip, events, …)
visualize rpart tree

Address of the bookmark: https://datastorm-open.github.io/visNetwork/

OMTools: a software package for visualizing and processing optical mapping data

BioJoker — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 01:21:54 -0500

OMTools, an efficient and intuitive data processing and visualization suite to handle and explore large-scale optical mapping profiles. OMTools includes modules for visualization (OMView), data processing and simulation. These modules together form an accessible and convenient pipeline for optical mapping analyses.

https://github.com/TF-Chan-Lab/OMTools

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/TF-Chan-Lab/OMTools

PANEV: an R package for a pathway-based network visualization

Jit — Sun, 09 Feb 2020 12:41:52 -0600

PANEV (PAthway NEtwork Visualizer) is an R package set for gene/pathway-based network visualization. Based on information available on KEGG, it visualizes genes within a network of multiple levels (from 1 to n) of interconnected upstream and downstream pathways. The network graph visualization helps to interpret functional profiles of a cluster of genes.

https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-020-3371-7

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/vpalombo/PANEV

GROMACS: a versatile package to perform molecular dynamics

Neel — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 22:40:38 -0500

GROMACS is a versatile package to perform molecular dynamics, i.e simulate the Newtonian equations of motion for systems with hundreds to millions of particles. GROMACS is able to work with many biochemical molecules like proteins, lipids and nucleic acids. The WeNMR GROMACS web portal combines the versatility of this molecular dynamics package with the calculation power of the eNMR grid. This will enable you to perform many simulations from the comfort of your internet browser anywhere in the world. The server is furthermore aimed to provide a user friendly and efficient MD experience by performing many preparation and optimization steps automatically.

GROMACS conda https://bioconda.github.io/recipes/gromacs/README.html

Address of the bookmark: http://haddock.science.uu.nl/enmr/services/GROMACS/main.php

The Snakemake Wrappers repository

BioStar — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 04:39:34 -0500

The Snakemake Wrapper Repository is a collection of reusable wrappers that allow to quickly use popular tools from Snakemake rules and workflows.

More at https://github.com/snakemake/snakemake-wrappers

Address of the bookmark: https://snakemake-wrappers.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Bioinformatics approach to Boar Taint

Rahul Agarwal — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 15:50:37 -0500

Meat products obtained from intact male pigs often produce offensive smell or odour which is recognized as a complex genetic trait called boar taint.Androstenone and Skatole in the fat primarily cause boar taint. Metabolism of androstenone and sex steroids share a common pathway which makes removal of boar taint a very challenging task. Castration is a traditional solution to remove boar taint but it also results in bad quality of meat due to low level of steroids which is objectionable to many consumers. Detected functional variant(s) underlying boar taint compounds can be used as genetic markers in selection of male pigs with reduced boar taint levels. Resequencing of a total of 47 samples belong to Norwegian Landrace (NL) and Duroc (D) pigs with varied boar taint levels were done in Illumina HiSeq2000 to >10X average coverage. Short reads generated from these samples mapped to Sus Scrofa version 10.2 reference assembly using Bowtie2. Alignment file then used for calling SNPs and InDels inside previousy identified QTL regions on SSC5,13, and 7 with the aid of FreeBayes , a variant caller tool. A final list of SNPs was prepared after filtering SNPs on the basis of SNP quality, coverage of SNP allele, functional and structural annotation, and repeats, etc. Selected SNPs will be genotyped in sample population for validation and then used for constructing SNPs haplotypes in close linkage disequilibrium with QTLs and fine mapping of QTLs through association mapping of genotyped SNPs.