Ever since a monk called Mendel started breeding pea plants we've been learning about our genomes. In 1953, Watson, Crick and Franklin described the structure of the molecule that makes up our genomes: the DNA double helix. Then, in 2001, scientists wrote down the entire 3-billion letter code contained in the average human genome. Now they're trying to interpret that code; to work out how it's used to make different types of cells and different people. The ENCODE project, as it's called, is the latest chapter in the story of you. To read the ENCODE research papers and more, visit http://www.nature.com/ENCODE

The vital metaphase stage of cell division, when the sister chromatids migrated to the centre and lined up in a row, and pulled apart using attached microtubules in such a way that half the DNA ends up in each daughter cell. However, before the mitotic spindle‐mediated movement gets start and pulled DNA apart, the chromosomes are free to undergo recombination which involves the exchange of genetic material either between multiple chromosomes or between different regions of the same chromosome.

During recombination, the precise breakage of each strand, exchange between the strands, and sealing of the resulting recombined molecules happens. The “chromosomal breakpoints” refers to these places where they break. Mostly, this process occurs with a high degree of accuracy at high frequency in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells. But occasionally this “break and sealing/ break and reattach” process goes wrong and the reattachment happens in the wrong place which usually create disaster (with few exceptions).These chromosome disaster or abnormalities involve the gain, loss or rearrangement of visible amounts of genetic material during cell division. These abnormalities are of two type, the first one is numerical abnormalities  where severe disorders are caused by the loss or gain of whole chromosomes, which affect the copy number of hundreds or even thousands of genes. The second are structural abnormalities which can be unbalanced or balanced. The former are similar to numerical abnormalities in that genetic material is either gained or lost. The natural defects in chromosome segregation are linked to cancer and several genetic diseases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders). Therefore, the enzymes involved in regulating cell division are still the attractive drug targets for many diseases.

Apart from certain chromosome abnormalities, these “crossing over” of segments of maternal and paternal chromosomes to form hybrid chromosomes have some evolutionary importance and considered as a driver of genetic variation. Moreover, the chromosome breakage in evolution is considered to be non-random in nature(http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.0020014). In addition the study of breakpoint regions and non-breakpoint (stable) regions of chromosomes indicates both the regions evolved in distinctly different ways ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2675965/). These breakage may lead to genetic diseases or participate to chromosomal rearranmgnets and contributed in development of new species.

I will try to explain the genome hotspots/Evolutionary Breakpoint Regions(EBRs)/fragile regions/weak fragments/  in my next blog.

Software for recombination detection:

RAT http://cbr.jic.ac.uk/dicks/software/RAT/

Breakpointer https://github.com/ruping/Breakpointer

DRP http://web.cbio.uct.ac.za/~darren/rdp.html

RB-finder http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18707535

LDhat2.0 http://ldhat.sourceforge.net/LDhat2.0/instructions.shtml

Reference:

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/genetic-recombination-514#

Image: Wikipedia , sciencelearn.org.nz

Recommended Articles:

http://www.friendshipcircle.org/blog/2012/05/22/13-chromosomal-disorders-youve-never-heard-of/

http://web.udl.es/usuaris/e4650869/docencia/segoncicle/genclin98/recursos_classe_%28pdf%29/revisionsPDF/chromosyndromes.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2775595/table/T2/

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/disorders/chromosomal/

http://www.ncert.nic.in/html/learning_basket/biology/cc&cd.pdf

EAGER encompasses both state-of-the-art tools for each step as well as new complementary tools tailored for ancient DNA data within a single integrated solution in an easily accessible format.

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-0918-z

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/apeltzer/EAGER-GUI

With Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing, you can access structural variations having a broad range of sizes, types, and GC content with the ability to:

• Uncover missing heritability linked to structural variation
• Unambiguously identify genomic context and variant breakpoints at the sequence level to unravel the genetic etiology of disease
• Resolve structural variation across the complete size spectrum with basepair resolution

Following are the SV tools, which can assist you to achieve your goal.

Sniffles: Structural variation caller using third generation sequencing

Sniffles is a structural variation caller using third generation sequencing (PacBio or Oxford Nanopore). It detects all types of SVs using evidence from split-read alignments, high-mismatch regions, and coverage analysis. Please note the current version of Sniffles requires sorted output from BWA-MEM (use -M and -x parameter) or NGM-LR with the optional SAM attributes enabled! 

More at https://github.com/fritzsedlazeck/Sniffles

MultiBreak-SV: It identifies structural variants from next-generation paired end data, third-generation long read data, or data from a combination of sequencing platforms.

There are two pieces of software in this release: (1) a pre-processor that takes machineformat (.m5) BLASR files, and (2) MultiBreak-SV. For installation and usage instructions, see doc/MultiBreakSV-Manual.txt.

More at https://github.com/raphael-group/multibreak-sv

Parliament: A Structural Variation Tool. Why ask a single sv-detection approach to find every variant when you can have a parliament of tools deciding?

Publication about the algorithm and “…the first long-read characterization of structural variation in a diploid human personal genome…” (HS1011) - “Assessing structural variation in a personal genome—towards a human reference diploid genome”

More at https://sourceforge.net/projects/parliamentsv/

https://www.dnanexus.com/papers/Parliament_Info_Sheet.pdf

PBHoney: the structural variation discovery tool 

PBHoney is an implementation of two variant-identification approaches designed to exploit the high mappability of long reads (i.e., greater than 10,000 bp). PBHoney considers both intra-read discordance and soft-clipped tails of long reads to identify structural variants.

Read The Paper http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/15/180/abstract

More at https://sourceforge.net/projects/pb-jelly/

SMRT-SV: Structural variant and indel caller for PacBio reads

Structural variant (SV) and indel caller for PacBio reads based on methods from Chaisson et al. 2014.

SMRT-SV provides an official software package for tools described in Chaisson et al. 2014 and adds several key features including the following.

• Unified variant calling user interface with built-in cluster compute support
• Small indel calling (2-49 bp)
• Improved inversion calling (screenInversions)
• Quality metric for SV calls based on number of local assemblies supporting each call
• Higher sensitivity for SV calls using tiled local assemblies across the entire genome instead of "signature" regions
• Genotyping of SVs with Illumina paired-end reads from WGS samples

More at https://github.com/EichlerLab/pacbio_variant_caller

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ub.edu/dnasp/

Awards of $5 million to four grantees have been made in fiscal year 2013 under the Genomic Sequencing and Newborn Screening Disorders research program. The program will be funded at $25 million over five years, as funds are made available.

"Hundreds of US babies will be pioneers in genomic medicine through a US$25-million programme to sequence their genomes soon after they are born."

Source:

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/09/scientists-to-sequence-hundreds-of-newborns-genomes.html

http://www.genome.gov/27554919

mScaffolder scaffolds a genome using an existing high quality genome as the reference. It aligns the two genomes using nucmer utility from MUMmer and then orders and orients the contigs of the candidate genome guided by their alignments to the reference genome. Please send your questions and comments to mchakrab@uci.edu.

Citation https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-017-0010-y

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/mahulchak/mscaffolder

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/vpc-ccg/haslr

Smudgeplots are computed from raw or even better from trimmed reads and show the haplotype structure using heterozygous kmer pairs. For example:

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/KamilSJaron/smudgeplot