BOL: Related items

Genomic architecture surrounding the fusion site of human chromosome 2

LEGE — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 12:26:29 -0600

The article "Genomic Structure and Evolution of the Ancestral Chromosome Fusion Site in 2q13–2q14.1 and Paralogous Regions on Other Human Chromosomes (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC187548/)" explores the genomic architecture surrounding the fusion site of human chromosome 2. This fusion event is a key evolutionary marker distinguishing humans from other great apes, as humans have 46 chromosomes while chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans possess 48. The fusion occurred through an end-to-end joining of two ancestral chromosomes, which remain separate in nonhuman primates.

Key Findings:

Chromosomal Fusion and Its Molecular Signature:
- The fusion site is located at 2q13–2q14.1 and is characterized by degenerate telomeric sequences appearing interstitially, indicating the historical head-to-head joining of ancestral chromosomes.
- Despite being a signature of a past fusion event, these telomeric repeats are no longer functional and have undergone sequence degradation over time.
Extensive Duplications in the Surrounding Genomic Region:
- The study identifies large-scale segmental duplications flanking the fusion site, with several of these regions duplicated and scattered across multiple chromosomes.
- These duplications are predominantly located in subtelomeric and pericentromeric regions, suggesting their role in genomic instability and chromosomal evolution.
Paralogous Regions and Their Evolutionary Relationships:
- A 168-kilobase (kb) segment near the fusion site has 98%–99% sequence identity with three regions on chromosome 9 (9pter, 9p11.2, and 9q13).
- Another 67-kb region distal to the fusion site shows a high degree of homology to sequences in chromosome 22qter.
- Additionally, a 100-kb segment exhibits 96% sequence identity with a region in chromosome 2q11.2.
Comparative Genomics and Evolutionary Implications:
- By comparing the duplicated sequences and their arrangement in primates, the researchers traced the order of duplication events leading to their present distribution.
- The presence of specific repetitive elements within these duplicated segments serves as evolutionary markers that help infer their historical rearrangements.
- Some of these duplicated regions are associated with chromosomal inversion breakpoints, potentially contributing to evolutionary changes in primates.
- Recurrent structural rearrangements in these regions have been linked to human chromosomal disorders.

Conclusions and Implications:

The findings provide valuable insights into the structural evolution of human chromosome 2, which played a crucial role in human speciation.
Understanding these segmental duplications and their evolutionary trajectories sheds light on genomic instability, which may contribute to human genetic diseases.
The study highlights how large-scale chromosomal rearrangements, such as fusion and duplication, have influenced the evolutionary divergence of humans from other primates.

This research advances our understanding of human genome evolution and offers a foundation for studying the effects of structural variants in genetic disorders.

Illumina Smartphone Chip !!!

Robert M Willioms — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 23:19:54 -0600

Illumina, the company that claims it brought human genome sequencing down to $1000 prices, has now turned its attention to a consumer product - a chip that you can plug into your smartphone and have it read your genetic information.

The biggest challenge ahead of Illumina is simplifying the process of genetic sequencing. Currently, Illumina’s DNA sequencers are gigantic machines that use techinques like colorimetry to work, but while the core technology is computational, it takes some 30 steps to extract genetic data and run it through. This process will likely have to be hugely simplified on mobile devices, given the fact that some studies require extracting 10 mililiters of blood. Illumina researchers are also working on finding the optimal technology for this on-chip DNA sequencing - be it electrical, optical, or other.

Illumina is one of the most prominent names in genetics, often said to be the Intel of genetic sequencing, as just like Intel it provides the algorithms, the processing brain that runs a DNA reading task.

In other recent smartphone-related biotech news, drug company Pfizer launched its REMOTE project, a new type of clinical trial that does not require going to a hospital for checks - targeted at patients with overactive bladder problems, the FDA-approved REMOTE project allowed to gather data from patients from over 10 states remotely, via mobile devices.

This is indeed the Illumina answer to Apple's Health app, HealthBook, Google HealthFit.

ONT assembly and Illumina polishing pipeline

Jit — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 10:13:42 -0600

This pipeline performs the following steps:

Assembly of nanopore reads using Canu.
Polish canu contigs using racon (optional).
Map a paired-end Illumina dataset onto the contigs obtained in the previous steps using BWA mem.
Perform correction of contigs using pilon and the Illumina dataset.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/nanoporetech/ont-assembly-polish

Musket: a multistage k-mer spectrum based corrector

Jit — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 02:09:56 -0600

Musket is a well-established leading next-generation sequencing read error correction algorithm targetting Illumina sequencing. This corrector employs the k-mer spectrum approach and introduces three correction techniques in a multistage workflow. Our performance evaluation results, in terms of correction quality and de novo genome assembly measures, reveal that Musket is consistently one of the top performing substitution-error-based correctors. In addition, Musket is multi-threaded using a master-slave model and demonstrates superior parallel scalability compared to all other evaluated correctors as well as a highly competitive overall execution time.

Address of the bookmark: http://musket.sourceforge.net/homepage.htm

Merfin: improved variant filtering, assembly evaluation and polishing via k-mer validation

Neel — Sun, 03 Apr 2022 20:35:19 -0500

Merfin, a k-mer based variant-filtering algorithm for improved accuracy in genotyping and genome assembly polishing. Merfin evaluates each variant based on the expected k-mer multiplicity in the reads, independently of the quality of the read alignment and variant caller’s internal score. Merfin increased the precision of genotyped calls in several benchmarks, improved consensus accuracy and reduced frameshift errors when applied to human and nonhuman assemblies built from Pacific Biosciences HiFi and continuous long reads or Oxford Nanopore reads, including the first complete human genome. Moreover, we introduce assembly quality and completeness metrics that account for the expected genomic copy numbers.

More at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-022-01445-y

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/arangrhie/merfin

INC-Seq: accurate single molecule reads using nanopore sequencing

Jit — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 10:38:56 -0600

INC-Seq reads enabled accurate species-level classification, identification of species at 0.1 % abundance and robust quantification of relative abundances, providing a cheap and effective approach for pathogen detection and microbiome profiling on the MinION system.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/CSB5/INC-Seq

ALPACA: A hybrid strategy for assembly of genomic DNA shotgun sequencing reads.

Seema Singh — Mon, 30 Apr 2018 04:38:40 -0500

ALPACA requires Celera Assembler 8.3 or later. It is recommended to build Celera Assembler from source. (Why? The pre-built binaries CA_8.3rc1 and CA8.3rc2 will work for any large data set.

Detail paper at https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-017-3927-8

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/VicugnaPacos/ALPACA

Frequent Paired-end reads (PE 2x100) mapping command lines

Jit — Tue, 15 May 2018 08:59:29 -0500

bowtie2 -x hs37m -X 650 -q -1 r1.fq -2 r2.fq -S r12.bowtie2.sam

bwa aln hs37m.fa r1.fq > r1.sai && bwa aln hs37m.fa r2.fq > r2.sai \
&& bwa sampe hs37m r1.sai r2.sai r1.fq r2.fq > r12.bwa.sam

bwa bwasw ../index/bwa/hs37m.fa r12.fq > r12.bwasw.sam

gsnap -A sam -d hs37m r1.fq r2.fq > r12.gsnap.sam

novoalign -r Random -o SAM -f r1.fq r2.fq -i 500 50 -d hs37m-k14s3.novo > r12.novo.sam

smalt map -f samsoft -i 650 -o r12.smalt-k20s13.sam hs37m-k20s13 r1.fq r2.fq

stampy.py -g hs37m -h hs37m -o r12.stampy.sam -M r1.fq,r2.fq

soap -D hs37m.fa.index -a r1.fq -b r2.fq -l 32 -g 3 -u dummy -2 dummy -o r12.soap

GenomeMapper: Simultaneous alignment of short reads against multiple genomes

Jit — Fri, 25 May 2018 09:29:44 -0500

GenomeMapper is a short read mapping tool designed for accurate read alignments. It quickly aligns millions of reads either with ungapped or gapped alignments. It can be used to align against multiple genomes simulanteously or against a single reference. If you are unsure which one is the appropriate GenomeMapper, you might want to use the latter https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2768987/

Address of the bookmark: http://1001genomes.org/software/genomemapper.html

Breakpointer: using local mapping artifacts to support sequence breakpoint discovery from single-end reads

Jit — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 12:41:10 -0500

Breakpointer is a fast tool for locating sequence breakpoints from the alignment of single end reads (SE) produced by next generation sequencing (NGS). It adopts a heuristic method in searching for local mapping signatures created by insertion/deletions (indels) or more complex structural variants(SVs).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ruping/Breakpointer