Candidates should have a 1st class MSc/MTech/BTech degree in Bioinformatics. Please send complete CV, quoting Application for RMETH-JRF-2014, by email to Dr. Dinesh Gupta: dinesh@icgeb.res.in

Closing date for applications: 6 August 2014

More at http://www.icgeb.org/tl_files/Vacancies/JRF.pdf

Key Features of BLAST:
1. Sequence Comparison: BLAST searches for local alignments between the query sequence and sequences in a database. It identifies regions of similarity, which can help infer functional and evolutionary relationships.

2. Speed and Efficiency: BLAST uses heuristic algorithms, making it faster than exhaustive search methods, suitable for large-scale database searches.

3. Versatility: There are several versions of BLAST for different types of sequence comparisons:
- blastn: Compares a nucleotide query sequence against a nucleotide sequence database.
- blastp: Compares a protein query sequence against a protein sequence database.
- blastx: Compares a nucleotide query sequence translated in all reading frames against a protein sequence database.
- tblastn: Compares a protein query sequence against a nucleotide sequence database translated in all reading frames.
- tblastx: Compares the six-frame translations of a nucleotide query sequence against the six-frame translations of a nucleotide sequence database.

4. Scoring and E-value: BLAST results are scored based on the quality and length of the alignments. The E-value (expect value) indicates the number of alignments one can expect to find by chance, with lower E-values representing more significant matches.

5. Output Formats: BLAST provides results in various formats, including plain text, HTML, XML, and JSON, making it adaptable for different types of analyses and integrations with other tools.

Applications of BLAST:
- Genomic Research: Identifying genes, understanding genetic diversity, and mapping genome sequences.
- Protein Function Prediction: Inferring the function of unknown proteins by comparing them to known protein sequences.
- Evolutionary Studies: Exploring evolutionary relationships between organisms by comparing their genetic material.
- Medical Research: Identifying pathogens, understanding disease mechanisms, and developing treatments by comparing sequences of interest.

Overall, BLAST is an essential tool in bioinformatics, offering a reliable and efficient way to analyze and interpret biological sequence data.

sort a space-delimited file based on its first column, then the second if the first is the same, and so on:
sort input.txt

sort a huge file (GNU sort ONLY):
sort -S 1500M -t $HOME/tmp input.txt > sorted.txt

sort starting from the third column, skipping the first two columns:
sort +2 input.txt

sort the second column as numbers, descending order; if identical, sort the 3rd as strings, ascending order:
sort -k2,2nr -k3,3 input.txt

sort starting from the 4th character at column 2, as numbers:
sort -k2.4n input.txt

More Linxu sort command information

If you have any sort commands you'd like to share, please add them to our comments section below. For more help, you can also type:

man sort

or

sort --help

on your Unix/Linux system.

RMBlast supports RepeatMasker searches by adding a few necessary features to the stock NCBI blastn program. These include:

• Support for custom matrices ( without KA-Statistics ).
• Support for cross_match-like complexity adjusted scoring. Cross_match is Phil Green's seeded smith-waterman search algorithm.
• Support for cross_match-like masklevel filtering.

https://anaconda.org/bioconda/rmblast

Address of the bookmark: http://www.repeatmasker.org/RMBlast.html

Biostrings

The Biostrings package from Bioconductor provides an advanced environment for efficient sequence management and analysis in R. It contains many speed and memory effective string containers, string matching algorithms, and other utilities, for fast manipulation of large sets of biological sequences. The objects and functions provided by Biostrings form the basis for many other sequence analysis packages. Documentation

Address of the bookmark: https://kablammo.wasmuthlab.org/

The work will focus on the functional studies of small RNAs by using next-generation sequencing approaches.

Candidates should hold a Ph.D. degree and have strong background in bioinformatics.
The University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis provides a wide range of facilities and training essential for biomedical research.

Interested applicants should send a PDF with a cover letter stating research interests and qualifications, an updated CV, a summary of previous research experience and contact information for two references to Michele Trabucchi ( mtrabucchi@unice.fr )

Homepage: http://www.unice.fr/c3m/EN/Equipe10.html

Address of the bookmark: https://www.kegg.jp/blastkoala/

Address of the bookmark: http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/content/2/1/15?utm_content=buffer25ee0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

In comparative genome analysis work, we usually compare more than two genomes and looks for syntenic regions amongst them. In my research I used Evolution Highway (RH) http://eh-demo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/, which is a collaborative project designed to provide a visual means for simultaneously comparing genomes of multiple amniote species. The tool removes the burden of manually aligning these maps and allows cognitive skills to be used toward something more valuable than preparation and transformation of data. In addition to EH, attractive Circos (http://circos.ca/) is also very popular for this kind of analysis.

The EH is available online, and can be easily access and use, whereas Circos installation is not entirely straightforward. One of the most difficult parts of the installation involves installing the GD library. Since there weren't good instructions for installing this library on the internet I decided to post instructions here in case they are useful to anyone else.

Following are the steps to install GD modules in Mac OS

1. Setup

Create a folder for the files:

$ mkdir -p /SourceCache
$ cd /SourceCache

Get and unpack the required Jpeg-6b and GD libraries:
Download Jpeg-6b (http://code.google.com/p/google-desktop-for-linux-mirror/downloads/detail?name=jpeg-6b.tar.gz&can=2&q)
Download GD (http://search.cpan.org/~lds/GD-2.46/)

Place the "tar.gz" files in "/SourceCache" and double click to unpack.

2. Install libjpeg

Copy the "config.sub" and "config.guess" files to "/SourceCache". Note that your "config.sub" and ""config.guess" files may be in a slightly different location. The commands below show where they were on my machine:

$ cd /SourceCache/jpeg-6b/src
$ cp /usr/share/libtool/config/config.sub .
$ cp /usr/share/libtool/config/config.guess .

Configure libjpeg as follows. Note that this was installed on a 64 bit machine. However, this method may configure it in a 32 bit format. This may not be the best way to configure the installation but it works.

$ .configure --enable-shared
$ make

Check to see if the following directories exist on your machine. Create the missing directories in the following manner:

$ mkdir -p /usr/local/include
$ mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
$ mkdir -p /usr/local/lib
$ mkdir -p /usr/local/man/man1

Finish making and installing libjpeg:

$ make install

3. Install GD

$ cd /SourceCache/GD-2.46/GD/
$ perl Makefile.PL
$ make
$ make test (optional)
$ make html (optional)
$ make install

Other way for Mac OS
The easiest way to get a lot of these is with a program called Fink, which is similar in nature to the CPAN installer, but installs common GNU utilities. Fink is available from <http://sourceforge.net/projects/fink/>.

Follow the instructions for setting up Fink. Once it's installed, you'll want to run the following as root: fink install gd

It will prompt you for a number of dependencies, type 'y' and hit enter to install all of the dependencies. Then watch it work.

To prevent creating conflicts with the software that Apple installs by default, Fink creates its own directory tree at /sw where it installs most of the software that it installs. This means your libraries and headers for libgd will be at /sw/lib and /sw/include instead of /usr/lib and /usr/local/include. Because of these changed locations for the libraries, the Perl GD module will not install directly via CPAN, because it looks for the specific paths instead of getting them from your environment. But there's a way around that :-)

Instead of typing "install GD" at the cpan> prompt, type look GD. This should go through the motions of downloading the latest version of the GD module, then it will open a shell and drop you into the build directory. Apply below patch to the Makefile.PL file (save the patch into a file and use the command patch < patchfile.)

Then, run these commands to finish the installation of the GD module:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install
And don't forget to run exit to get back to CPAN.

Install on MS Window, using PPM

C:\Documents and Settings\Owner>ppm
PPM interactive shell (2.2.0) - type 'help' for available commands.
PPM> install GD
Install package 'GD?' (y/N): y
Installing package 'GD'...
Downloading http://ppm.ActiveState.com/PPMPackages/5.6plus/MSW. ...
Installing C:\Perl\site\lib\auto\GD\GD.bs
Installing C:\Perl\site\lib\auto\GD\GD.dll
Installing C:\Perl\site\lib\auto\GD\GD.exp
Installing C:\Perl\site\lib\auto\GD\GD.lib
Installing C:\Perl\html\site\lib\GD.html
Installing C:\Perl\site\lib\GD.pm
Installing C:\Perl\site\lib\qd.pl
Installing C:\Perl\site\lib\auto\GD\autosplit.ix
PPM>


If you can't install it from ppm. You can download it:
http://ppm.ActiveState.com/PPMPackages/5.6plus/MSW.


BTW,All Perl 5.6.1 Modules are located at:

http://ppm.ActiveState.com/PPMPackages/5.6plus/MSW.

Install the Perl GD Module on Linux

$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell

Since it was the first time I had run this command on this particular machine I had to answer a lot of questions but simply selected the defaults for everything as this usually works for me. Once in the CPAN shell I entered

$ install Bundle::CPAN

and selected all of the defaults again. Once the CPAN bundle had finished installing I tried to install GD::Graph by typing

$ install GD::Graph

but it failed with hundreds of errors – the first of which was

GD.xs:7:16: error: gd.h: No such file or directory

This was fixed with the following apt-get command (in the bash shell)

$ sudo apt-get install libgd2-xpm-dev

back in the CPAN shell I still couldn’t get GD::Graph to build and I guessed this was because of some left over files from the failed build. I don’t know the command to clean things up inside the CPAN shell and am too lazy to read the docs so I simply went into the .cpan/build directory in my home directory and deleted anything that started with GD – eg

$ rm -rf GD-2.35-HC_vkB

$ rm -rf GDGraph-1.44-Evfibe

and so on. Those strings at the end (VkB and so on) look random so they might be different on your machine. Then I went back into the CPAN shell and ran

$ install GD::Graph

There were a few dependencies which the script fetched and installed for me but everything worked smoothly.

Manual and other Perl Module instalation are mentioned in my previous blog @ http://bioinformaticsonline.com/blog/view/710/how-to-install-perl-modules-manually-using-cpan-command-and-other-quick-ways