BOL: Related items

An NSF-funded REU to study Y-chromosome diversity and sex-biased dispersal in wild brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) is available in the Munshi-South Lab at Fordham University. Our lab is currently investigating rat evolution at scales ranging from landscape genetics of individual cities to global patterns of diversity. Development of resources for investigating Y-chromosome diversity will support many of these studies. The REU student will work with the lab to bioinformatically identify Y-chromosome SNPs, design SNPtype assays,
extract DNA, genotype samples, and analyze data.

We seek applicants interested in bioinformatics, evolutionary biology, and related disciplines. Applicants must have taken a college-level genetics course. This REU will require attention to detail, reliability, independence, and critical thinking.

This position is based at Fordham University's field station, the Louis Calder Center, in Armonk, NY. The Calder Center is located approximately 25 miles north of New York City in a protected woodland area. Housing
will be provided at the Calder Center for the duration of the REU (May 23 to Aug 12, 2016). Additionally, the student will receive a $6,000 stipend. The selected student will participate in professional development activities through the Calder Centers REU program, including presentation of results at a research colloquium at the end of the summer.

To apply, please send a one page personal statement about your scientific interests and how this REU will support your professional goals, unofficial transcripts including a list of Spring 2016 courses, and names of two professional references (including title, address, phone number, and email address) as a single pdf (with your last name in the file name) to Dr. Jason Munshi-South (jmunshisouth@fordham.edu).

Applications are due March 4th, 2016.

Jason Munshi-South

Snippy: Rapid haploid variant calling and core SNP phylogeny

Neel — Sat, 11 Aug 2018 11:06:56 -0500

Snippy finds SNPs between a haploid reference genome and your NGS sequence reads. It will find both substitutions (snps) and insertions/deletions (indels). It will use as many CPUs as you can give it on a single computer (tested to 64 cores). It is designed with speed in mind, and produces a consistent set of output files in a single folder. It can then take a set of Snippy results using the same reference and generate a core SNP alignment (and ultimately a phylogenomic tree).

snippy --cpus 16 --outdir mysnps --ref Listeria.gbk --R1 FDA_R1.fastq.gz --R2 FDA_R2.fastq.gz

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/tseemann/snippy

QuasiModo - Quasispecies Metric Determination on Omics

Neel — Sat, 26 Jun 2021 15:22:56 -0500

This repository contains the scripts and pipeline that reproduces the results of the HCMV benchmarking study. In this study we evaluated genome assemblers and variant callers on 10 in vitro generated, mixed strain HCMV sequence samples, each consisting of two lab strains in different abundance ratios. This tool can also be used to evaluate assemblies and variant calling results on other similar datasets.

https://academic.oup.com/bib/article/22/3/bbaa123/5868070

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/hzi-bifo/Quasimodo

Snakemake workflow: dna-seq-gatk-variant-calling

Jit — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 12:55:07 -0500

This Snakemake pipeline implements the GATK best-practices workflow for calling small genomic variants.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/snakemake-workflows/dna-seq-gatk-variant-calling

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.

Trimmomatic: A flexible read trimming tool for Illumina NGS data

Jit — Fri, 15 Apr 2016 05:58:53 -0500

Paired End:

java -jar trimmomatic-0.35.jar PE -phred33 input_forward.fq.gz input_reverse.fq.gz output_forward_paired.fq.gz output_forward_unpaired.fq.gz output_reverse_paired.fq.gz output_reverse_unpaired.fq.gz ILLUMINACLIP:TruSeq3-PE.fa:2:30:10 LEADING:3 TRAILING:3 SLIDINGWINDOW:4:15 MINLEN:36

This will perform the following:

Remove adapters (ILLUMINACLIP:TruSeq3-PE.fa:2:30:10)
Remove leading low quality or N bases (below quality 3) (LEADING:3)
Remove trailing low quality or N bases (below quality 3) (TRAILING:3)
Scan the read with a 4-base wide sliding window, cutting when the average quality per base drops below 15 (SLIDINGWINDOW:4:15)
Drop reads below the 36 bases long (MINLEN:36)

More at http://www.usadellab.org/cms/?page=trimmomatic

Address of the bookmark: http://www.usadellab.org/cms/?page=trimmomatic

QuorUM: An Error Corrector for Illumina Reads

Jit — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 11:40:41 -0600

Illumina Sequencing data can provide high coverage of a genome by relatively short (most often 100 bp to 150 bp) reads at a low cost. Even with low (advertised 1%) error rate, 100 × coverage Illumina data on average has an error in some read at every base in the genome. These errors make handling the data more complicated because they result in a large number of low-count erroneous k-mers in the reads. However, there is enough information in the reads to correct most of the sequencing errors, thus making subsequent use of the data (e.g. for mapping or assembly) easier. Here we use the term “error correction” to denote the reduction in errors due to both changes in individual bases and trimming of unusable sequence. We developed an error correction software called QuorUM. QuorUM is mainly aimed at error correcting Illumina reads for subsequent assembly. It is designed around the novel idea of minimizing the number of distinct erroneous k-mers in the output reads and preserving the most true k-mers, and we introduce a composite statistic π that measures how successful we are at achieving this dual goal. We evaluate the performance of QuorUM by correcting actual Illumina reads from genomes for which a reference assembly is available.

QuorUM is distributed as an independent software package and as a module of the MaSuRCA assembly software. Both are available under the GPL open source license at http://www.genome.umd.edu.

Address of the bookmark: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0130821

Illumina to Acquire Pacific Biosciences for Approximately $1.2 Billion !

Rahul Nayak — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 09:57:48 -0500

Illumina and Pacific Biosciences announced they have signed an agreement for Illumina to acquire Pacific Biosciences at a price of $8.00 per Pacific Biosciences share in an all-cash transaction.

The agreement has been approved by the board of directors of Illumina and Pacific Biosciences. The acquisition complements Illumina sequencing solutions with accurate long-read sequencing capabilities to answer a set of complex genomic questions. While Illumina's accurate and economic short-read sequencing platforms address the majority of sequencing applications optimally, select applications, such as de novo sequencing and sequencing of highly homologous regions of genomes, are better addressed with accurate long-reads.

Reference https://www.pacb.com/press_releases/illumina-to-acquire-pacific-biosciences-for-approximately-1-2-billion-broadening-access-to-long-read-sequencing-and-accelerating-scientific-discovery/

QuorUM: An Error Corrector for Illumina Reads

BioStar — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 23:26:55 -0600

We produce trimmed and error-corrected reads that result in assemblies with longer contigs and fewer errors. We compared QuorUM against several published error correctors and found that it is the best performer in most metrics we use. QuorUM is efficiently implemented making use of current multi-core computing architectures and it is suitable for large data sets (1 billion bases checked and corrected per day per core)

Address of the bookmark: http://www.genome.umd.edu/