BOL: Related items

pyScaf

Bulbul — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 14:20:33 -0600

pyScaf orders contigs from genome assemblies utilising several types of information:

paired-end (PE) and/or mate-pair libraries (NGS-based mode)
long reads (NGS-based mode)
synteny to the genome of some related species (reference-based mode)

Scaffolding

In reference-based mode, pyScaf uses synteny to the genome of closely related species in order to order contigs and estimate distances between adjacent contigs.

Contigs are aligned globally (end-to-end) onto reference chromosomes, ignoring:

matches not satisfying cut-offs (--identity and --overlap)
suboptimal matches (only best match of each query to reference is kept)
and removing overlapping matches on reference.

In preliminary tests, pyScaf performed superbly on simulated heterozygous genomes based on C. parapsilosis (13 Mb; CANPA) and A. thaliana (119 Mb; ARATH) chromosomes, reconstructing correctly all chromosomes always for CANPA and nearly always for ARATH (Figures in dropbox, CANPA table, ARATH table).
Runs took ~0.5 min for CANPA on 4 CPUs and ~2 min for ARATH on 16 CPUs.

Important remarks:

Reduce your assembly before (fasta2homozygous.py) as any redundancy will likely break the synteny.
pyScaf works better with contigs than scaffolds, as scaffolds are often affected by mis-assemblies (no de novo assembler / scaffolder is perfect...), which breaks synteny.
pyScaf works very well if divergence between reference genome and assembled contigs is below 20% at nucleotide level.
pyScaf deals with large rearrangements ie. deletions, insertion, inversions, translocations. Note however, this is experimental implementation!
Consider closing gaps after scaffolding.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/lpryszcz/pyScaf

PANDASEQ

Shruti Paniwala — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 04:54:32 -0600

PANDASEQ assembles paired-end Illumina reads into sequences, trying to correct for errors and uncalled bases. The assembler reads two files in FASTQ format with quality information. If amplification primers were used (e.g., to isolate a variable region of the 16S gene, or the constant regions around zinc finger binding residues), they can be removed from the sequence during assembly. The final sequence will correct any uncalled bases in the overlapping region using the complementary strand. When mismatches occur in the overlapping region, the base with the better quality score is chosen.
The algorithm is as follows:

1.Find the positions where the forward and reverse primers match best above the threshold and discard the ends of the sequence, including the primer.
2.Pick and overlap to maximise the probability of the forward and reverse reads having come from a single piece of DNA.
3.Identify the masking of the end of the read with the quality score B or # as done by CASAVA and adjust the probabilities in this region.
4.Construct an assembled sequence between the primers and calculate the quality.
5.Check for various constraints, including quality, length, uncalled bases, and user-supplied modules.

http://neufeldserver.uwaterloo.ca/~apmasell/pandaseq_man1.html

Address of the bookmark: http://neufeldserver.uwaterloo.ca/~apmasell/pandaseq_man1.html

Randomness and Probability

Jit — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 07:17:32 -0600

Randomness and Probability

Randomness and probability are two differnet concepts: probaility is a measure (according to measure theory) which measures the randomness. Randomness is the object to be measured by probability. For example, probability is a mapping from randomness to the real number between 0 and 1. The similar examples are that the entropy measures the uncertanity; product of length and width measures the area of rectangle etc.

Please see “A mathematical theory of ability measure” by N. Kong ets for more examples to answer this question.

EasyBuild

Jit — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 16:00:43 -0600

EasyBuild is a software build and installation framework that allows you to manage (scientific) software on High Performance Computing (HPC) systems in an efficient way.
A full list of supported software packages is available here.

Address of the bookmark: https://hpcugent.github.io/easybuild/

Bioistats Online course

Abhimanyu Singh — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 04:22:51 -0600

One of our primary focuses will be to develop an understanding of the various ways in which we can assign a probability to some chance event. We'll also learn the fundamental properties of probability, investigate how probability behaves, and learn how to calculate the probability of a new chance event.

This book is handy understanding basic concepts.

Address of the bookmark: https://onlinecourses.science.psu.edu/stat414/node/287

fqtools

Jit — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 09:31:12 -0600

fqtools is a software suite for fast processing of FASTQ files. Various file manipulations are supported. See below for a full list of the subcommands available and a brief description of their purpose. Most of the individual subcommands will take either a single file or a pair of files as input. If no input file is specified, fqtools will attempt to read data from stdin. In this case, it is advisabe to specify the format of the data provided. For subcommands that generate FASTQ data, either a single file or a pair of files will be generated. If no -o argument is provided, single files will be writted to stdout.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/alastair-droop/fqtools

sockeye

Jit — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 08:51:16 -0600

This sockeye software uses the Ensembl database project to import sequence and annotation information from several eukaryotic species. A user can additionally import their own custom sequence and annotation data. Individual annotation objects are displayed in Sockeye by using custom 3D models. Ensembl-derived and imported sequences can be analyzed by using a suite of multiple and pair-wise alignment algorithms. The results of these comparative analyses are also displayed in the 3D environment of Sockeye. By using the Java3D API to visualize genomic data in a 3D environment, we are able to compactly display cross-sequence comparisons. This provides the user with a novel platform for visualizing and comparing genomic feature organization.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.bcgsc.ca/platform/bioinfo/software/sockeye/releases/1.3

CABOG: Celera Assembler with Best Overlap Graph

Abhimanyu Singh — Mon, 15 May 2017 05:04:39 -0500

CABOG (Celera Assembler with Best Overlap Graph) is scientific software for DNA research. CABOG has been a critical component of many genome sequencing projects. CABOG operates on small genomes such as bacterial as well as large genomes such as mammalian. CABOG is an extension of the Celera Assembler software that was originally developed at Celera for the 2001 publication of the first draft human genome sequence. The software was released to the public domain in 2004. Its open source repository on Source Forge is an internet resource for scientists around the world.

CABOG is one of many software programs called genome assemblers. These programs exist to overcome the fundamental limitation of all sequencing machines, namely, that they read out very few DNA letters at a time. These programs reconstruct genomes that are billions of letters long from the hundreds of letters per read that modern sequencers provide. What these programs do is often described as a scaled up version of a family solving a jigsaw puzzle.

The CABOG software was the first to accomplish many scientific goals. It was the first to assemble the genome of a multicellular organism (Drosophila melanogaster, 2000). It was the first to assemble both parental haplotypes of one human genome (J. Craig Venter, 2007). It was the first to assemble environmental sequence from the oceans (Sargasso Sea in 2004 and Global Ocean Sampling in 2007). It was first to combine reads from first-generation Sanger sequencing machines and second-generation pyrosequencing machines (Marine microbes, 2006). Today, CABOG is one of the leading assembly programs for data sets that include paired end data from the Roche 454 line of sequencing machines.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/cabog/overview/

JSON

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 08:02:39 -0500

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language, Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition - December 1999. JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language.

JSON is built on two structures:

A collection of name/value pairs. In various languages, this is realized as an object, record, struct, dictionary, hash table, keyed list, or associative array.
An ordered list of values. In most languages, this is realized as an array, vector, list, or sequence.

These are universal data structures. Virtually all modern programming languages support them in one form or another. It makes sense that a data format that is interchangeable with programming languages also be based on these structures.

Address of the bookmark: http://json.org/

Tetra-Nucleotide Analysis

Jit — Thu, 04 May 2017 05:07:41 -0500

A tetra-nucleotide is a fragment of DNA sequence with 4 bases (e.g. AGTC or TTGG). Pride et al. (2003) showed that the frequency of tetra-nucleotides in bacterial genomes contain useful, albeit weak, phylogenetic signals. Even though tetra-nucleotide analysis (TNA) utilizes the information of whole genome, it is evident that it cannot replace other alignment-based phylogenetic methods such as OrthoANI or 16S rRNA phylogeny. However, TNA can be useful for phylogenetic characterization when whole genome or 16S rRNA gene information is not available. For example, a partial genomic fragment obtained from a metagenome can be identified by TNA (Teeling et al., 2004). TNA is also fast enough that it can be used as a search engine against a large genome database.

Address of the bookmark: https://chunlab.wordpress.com/tetra-nucleotide-analysis/