BOL: Related items

HiBC: Human Intestinal Bacteria Collection

BioStar — Wed, 07 May 2025 05:49:19 -0500

The human gut is home to trillions of microorganisms, forming one of the most complex and dynamic microbial ecosystems known to science. The Human Intestinal Bacteria Collection (HiBC) is a pioneering initiative aimed at cataloging, preserving, and studying the diverse bacterial species that inhabit the human gastrointestinal tract. This curated collection serves as a critical resource for researchers working on microbiome-related health, disease, and therapeutics.

What is HiBC?

The Human Intestinal Bacteria Collection (HiBC) is a comprehensive, high-quality reference repository of bacterial isolates derived from human fecal samples. It focuses on anaerobic and facultative anaerobic bacteria that play pivotal roles in digestion, immune modulation, vitamin synthesis, and pathogen resistance. The collection includes both culturable strains and genomic data from unculturable taxa, bridging the gap between culture-dependent and -independent microbiome studies.

Why is HiBC Important?

Understanding Microbiome-Host Interactions
HiBC enables deeper insight into the functions of specific bacterial taxa in the gut. With well-characterized isolates, researchers can conduct mechanistic studies to explore how certain bacteria influence metabolism, inflammation, or mental health.
Precision Probiotics and Therapeutics
By providing access to native human gut microbes, HiBC supports the development of next-generation probiotics, live biotherapeutic products (LBPs), and fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) alternatives.
Standardization and Reproducibility
With standardized cultivation and genomic protocols, HiBC ensures consistency across microbiome research studies, improving reproducibility and comparability of findings.
Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Surveillance
HiBC includes metadata on antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), helping track the spread of AMR in commensal gut bacteria and understanding its implications for human health.

Key Features of HiBC

Culturable Bacteria Repository: A living collection of anaerobic and facultative strains isolated from healthy and diseased individuals worldwide.
Metadata-rich Entries: Each isolate is annotated with host details (age, health status, diet), geographical origin, phenotypic traits, and antibiotic susceptibility profiles.
Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS): High-quality genome assemblies for most strains to support functional and comparative genomics.
Interactive Database Access: User-friendly search and filtering options for strain selection based on taxonomy, function, or clinical relevance.
Cross-linking with Other Databases: Integration with NCBI, GOLD, and Human Microbiome Project (HMP) data for broader context and validation.

Applications of HiBC

Microbiome-based diagnostics and biomarker discovery
Host-microbe interaction studies in gnotobiotic mouse models
Gut microbiome modulation through diet, drugs, or engineered bacteria
Longitudinal studies of gut flora across age, geography, and lifestyle
Environmental and evolutionary microbiology of human-associated bacteria

Accessing HiBC

Researchers and interested parties can explore the HiBC database through its official website: https://www.hibc.rwth-aachen.de/. The platform offers comprehensive information on bacterial isolates, including taxonomy, cultivation conditions, and genomic data, facilitating advanced research in human gut microbiome studies.

Final Thoughts

The HiBC is a cornerstone resource in the rapidly evolving field of microbiome research. As science moves toward personalized medicine and microbial therapeutics, having a reliable and diverse collection of human gut bacteria is not just useful — it's essential. Whether you're a microbiologist, clinician, computational biologist, or biotechnologist, HiBC offers tools to accelerate discovery and innovation in gut microbiome science.

Carefully opt for human reference genome

biogeek — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 07:43:32 -0600

Heng Li posted several issues with the human reference genomes given in these resources and suggests the following compressed FASTA file to be used as hg38/GRCh38 human reference genome.

if you map reads to GRCh38 or hg38, use the following:

ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/all/GCA/000/001/405/GCA_000001405.15_GRCh38/seqs_for_alignment_pipelines.ucsc_ids/GCA_000001405.15_GRCh38_no_alt_analysis_set.fna.gz

There are several other versions of GRCh37/GRCh38. What’s wrong with them? Here are a collection of potential issues:

More at http://lh3.github.io/2017/11/13/which-human-reference-genome-to-use

Address of the bookmark: http://lh3.github.io/2017/11/13/which-human-reference-genome-to-use

SeqMule: Automated human exome/genome variants detection

BioStar — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 03:22:54 -0600

SeqMule takes single-end or paird-end FASTQ or BAM files, generates a script consisting of more than 10 popular alignment, analysis tools and runs the script line by line. Users can change the pipeline or fine-tune the parameters by modifying its configuration file.

Address of the bookmark: https://doc-openbio.readthedocs.io/projects/seqmule/en/latest/

Protein-Protein Interaction Sites Predictions !

Poonam Mahapatra — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 04:53:20 -0500

The study of Protein–Protein Interactions (PPIs) has a crucial role in biology, medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. PPIs can be investigated from two aspects: The interaction partners of a specific protein and the amino acid residues participating in a given PPI. Information about a protein’s interaction partners allows scientists to construct protein interaction networks, such as signaling pathways, which in turn facilitate the understanding of many biological and clinical observations.

Following are the list of tools commonly used to PPIs predictions:

Protein-Protein Interaction Sites

PPISP

A consensus neural network method for predicting protein-protein interaction sites

HOMCOS

A server to predict interacting protein pairs and interacting sites by homology modeling of complex structures

HotPOINT

Prediction of protein interfaces using an empirical model

ISIS

Prediction of interaction hotspots from sequence

KFC server

Automated decision-tree approach to predicting protein-protein interaction hot spots

meta-PPISP

A meta server for predicting protein-protein interaction sites. meta-PPISP is built on three individual web servers: cons-PPISP, PINUP, and Promate

ODA

Identification of optimal surface patches with the lowest docking desolvation energy values

PINUP

Protein binding site prediction with an empirical scoring function

Other Sites (DNA, RNA, Metals)

CHED

Web server for predicting soft metal binding sites in proteins

DBD-Hunter

A knowledge-based method for the prediction of DNA-protein interactions

DISPLAR

Given the structure of a protein known to bind DNA, the method predicts residues that contact DNA using neural network method

iDBPs

Predicts DNA binding proteins for proteins with known 3D structure.

PFplus

A tool for extracting and displaying positive electrostatic patches on protein surfaces which can be indicative of nucleic acid binding interfaces.

iRNAD: a computational tool for identifying D modification sites in RNA sequence

Abhimanyu Singh — Thu, 16 May 2019 00:20:07 -0500

iRNAD, for identifying D modification sites in RNA sequence. In this predictor, the RNA samples derived from five species were encoded by nucleotide chemical property and nucleotide density. Support vector machine was utilized to perform the classification.

http://lin-group.cn/server/iRNAD/

Address of the bookmark: http://lin-group.cn/server/iRNAD/

Biggest Human Brain Project (HBP) launched!!!

Rahul Agarwal — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 19:50:55 -0500

"In neuroscience, the project will use neuroinformatics and brain simulation to collect and integrate experimental data, identifying and filling gaps in our knowledge, and prioritising future experiments.

In medicine, the HBP will use medical informatics to identify biological signatures of brain disease, allowing diagnosis at an early stage, before the disease has done irreversible damage, and enabling personalized treatment, adapted to the needs of individual patients. Better diagnosis, combined with disease and drug simulation, will accelerate the discovery of new treatments, drastically lowering the cost of drug discovery.

In computing, new techniques of interactive supercomputing, driven by the needs of brain simulation, will impact a vast range of industries. Devices and systems, modelled after the brain, will overcome fundamental limits on the energy-efficiency, reliability and programmability of current technologies, clearing the road for systems with brain-like intelligence."

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2013/10/07/the-human-brain-project-begins/

(https://www.facebook.com/humanbrainproj/info)

Home Page:

https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/

Jobs:

https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/participate/jobs

Reference Sequence Resource!

LEGE — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 21:15:22 -0500

The ENCODE project uses Reference Genomes from NCBI or UCSC to provide a consistent framework for mapping high-throughput sequencing data. In general, ENCODE data are mapped consistently to 2 human (GRCH38, hg19) and 2 mouse (mm9/mm10) genomes for historical comparability. Drosophia melanogaster experiments are mapped to either dm3 or dm6 and Caenorhabdilis elegans experiments are mapped to ce10 or ce11. T

Address of the bookmark: https://www.encodeproject.org/data-standards/reference-sequences/

Public Databases for Bioinformatics !

Jit — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 05:32:15 -0500

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17155-y

Server Infrastructure:

File Server:

dhara: Synology 3614 Storage Appliance
4 Core Xeon
108TB disk storage
10Gb ethernet to SCG3
Access atx: dhara:5000
Has btsync server (try it - its much better than dropbox)

Compute Servers:

nandi: Kundaje and Phi Server
24 intel cores
256GB RAM
500GB of SSD storage 
36TB RAID6 local storage
4 Intel Phi's (space for 4 more GPU's)


durga: Montgomery and sensitive data
24 intel cores
256GB RAM
500GB of SSD RAID0 storage 
60TB RAID6 local storage

mitra: Bassik and Web/DB Server
24 core
256GB RAM 
500GB of SSD RAID0 storage 
36TB RAID6 local storage

vayu: Kundaje GPU server
4 core
64GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
8TB RAID10 local storage
4 Nvidia GTX 970 4GB GPUs

amold: Bickel and SGE server
32 AMD core
128GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
12TB RAID5 local storage

wotan: Bickel and SGE server
64 AMD core
256GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
12TB RAID5 local storage

Filesystem:

/users/$USER
default home directory
full backups nightly 
nfs mount to dhara
should store code, papers, and other highly processed data here

/mnt/data/
globally accessible data
should store common data here
e.g. genomes and indexes, annotations, ENCODE data  
if you dont want this to count towards your quote you must chown

/mnt/lab_data/$LAB/
lab accessible data
should store lab project data here 
e.g. ATAC-seq prediction data, enhancer prediction, motif calls

/srv/scratch/$USER
fast local storage
not backed up, but on raid and data will never be deleted
most analysis should be performed here

/srv/persistent/$USER
fast local storage
synced nightly, but not backed up
       ie if the hard drives fail or you delete something and notice 
       within 24 hours we can recover. Otherwise not. (vs home which is 
       properly backed up )  
intermediate analysis products that would be hard to recover should be stored here 
       e.g. stochastic analysis results that need to be kept so that paper 
       results can be reproduced

/srv/www/$LABNAME/
web accessible from mitra.stanford.edu
*NOT BACKED UP*

Some parallel programming patterns:

# gzip a bunch of files
parallel gzip -- *.FILESTOGZIP

# fork example in python:
(for more detailed examples look at 
 https://github.com/nboley/grit/ grit/lib/multiprocessing_utils.py)

import os
import time
import random

import multiprocessing

class ProcessSafeOPStream( object ):
    def __init__( self, writeable_obj ):
        self.writeable_obj = writeable_obj
        self.lock = multiprocessing.Lock()
        self.name = self.writeable_obj.name
        return
    
    def write( self, data ):
        self.lock.acquire()
        self.writeable_obj.write( data )
        self.writeable_obj.flush()
        self.lock.release()
        return
    
    def close( self ):
        self.writeable_obj.close()

def worker(queue, ofp):
    # Try without this
    random.seed()
    while True:
        i = queue.get()
        if i == 'FINISHED': return
        # simulate an expensive function
        x = random.random()
        time.sleep(x/10)
        print i, x
        ofp.write("%i\t%s\n" % (i, x))

NSIMS = 10000
NPROC = 25

# populate queue
todo = multiprocessing.Queue()
for i in xrange(NSIMS): todo.put(i)
for i in xrange(NPROC): todo.put('FINISHED')

ofp = ProcessSafeOPStream( open("output.txt", "w") )

pids = []
for i in xrange(NPROC):
    pid = os.fork()
    if pid == 0:
       worker(todo, ofp)
       os._exit(0)
    else:
       pids.append(pid)  

for pid in pids:
    os.waitpid(pid, 0)

ofp.close()

print "FINISHED"

For use case 1 we obtained the following ENCODE and ROADMAP datasets https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF446WOD/@@download/ENCFF446WOD.bed.gz, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF546PJU/@@download/ENCFF546PJU.bam, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF059BEU/@@download/ENCFF059BEU.bam. Blacklisted regions were obtained from http://mitra.stanford.edu/kundaje/akundaje/release/blacklists/hg38-human/hg38.blacklist.bed.gz. The human genome version hg38 was obtained from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg38/bigZips/hg38.fa.gz.

For use case 2 we used the set of narrowPeak files summarized in https://github.com/wkopp/janggu_usecases/tree/master/extra/urls.txt (archived version v1.0.1). The human genome version hg19 was obtained from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg19/bigZips/hg19.fa.gz

For use case 3 we used the ENCODE datasets https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF591XCX/@@download/ENCFF591XCX.bam, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF736LHE/@@download/ENCFF736LHE.bigWig, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF177HHM/@@download/ENCFF177HHM.bam as we as the GENCODE annotation v29 from ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/gencode/Gencode_human/release_29/gencode.v29.annotation.gtf.gz.

Address of the bookmark: http://mitra.stanford.edu/

chromoMap-An R package for Interactive visualization and mapping of human chromosomes

Rahul Nayak — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 17:22:24 -0500

chromoMap is an R package that provides interactive, configurable and elegant graphics visualization of the human chromosomes allowing users to map chromosome elements (like genes, SNPs etc.) on the chromosome plot. It introduces a special plot viz. the "chromosome heatmap" that, in addition to mapping elements, can visualize the data associated with chromosome elements (like gene expression) in the form of heat colors which can be highly advantageous in the scientific interpretations and research work. Because of the enormous size of the chromosomes, it is impractical to visualize each element on the same plot. But chromoMap plots provide a magnified view for each of chromosome location to render additional information and visualization specific for that location. You can map thousands of genes and can view all mappings easily. Users can investigate the detailed information about the mappings (like gene names or total genes mapped on a location) or can view the magnified single or double stranded view of the chromosome at a location showing each mapped element in sequential order (You will see in the demos below). Not ony that, the plots can be saved as HTML documents that can be customized and shared easily. In addition, you can include them in R Markdown or in R Shiny applications.

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/chromoMap/index.html

PLAR: Pipeline for lncRNA annotation from RNA-seq data

Abhi — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 06:18:01 -0600

Due to several requests, we are releasing an assingment of orthologs, determined using the same methods used in Hezroni et al. (BLAST, Whole Genome Alignment (WGA), and synteny). One is comparing human GENCODE genes (from GENCODE v30) to lncRNAs from other species identified by PLAR. Available here.

Species	Assembly	Code	Transcriptome	lncRNAs	Protein-coding
Human	hg19	hg19	Download	Download	Download
Rhesus	rheMac3	rm3	Download	Download	Download
Marmoset	calJac3	cj3	Download	Download	Download
Mouse	mm9	mm9	Download	Download	Download
Rabbit	oryCun2	oc2	Download	Download	Download
Dog	canFam3	cf3	Download	Download	Download
Ferret	musFur1	oa3	Download	Download	Download
Opossum	monDom5	md5	Download	Download	Download
Chicken	galGal4	gg4	Download	Download	Download
Lizard	anoCar2	ac2	Download	Download	Download
Coelacanth	latCha1	lc1	Download	Download	Download
Zebrafish	danRer7	dr7	Download	Download	Download
Stickleback	gasAcu1	ga1	Download	Download	Download
Nile tilapia	oreNil2	ot2	Download	Download	Download
Spotted gar	lepOcu1	lo1	Download	Download	Download
Elephant shark	calMil1	cm1	Download	Download	Download
Sea urchin	strPur4	sp4	Download	Download	Download

Address of the bookmark: http://www.weizmann.ac.il/Biological_Regulation/IgorUlitsky/PLAR