Despite the degrees you’ve earned, the effort and passion you put in every day, the sacrifices you make – academia burdens you with tons of stressors. Financial, psychological, physical, and more.

We’re an unconventional team with backgrounds in various fields – both inside and outside of academia. And through our lens, it’s clear that academia deeply undervalues and underserves its very own community!

It’s time to reimagine research.

Address of the bookmark: https://researchrabbitapp.com/

The most common newbie questions are:

Should I try to use these free open source programs?  Why are we not trying GUI software for computational analysis? Should I use commercial bioinformatics programs/software?”

1. Let’s be open

We generally think free and cheap are useless. But this concept is not applicable when we discuss open source software. Mostly, the bioinformatics software is developed by highly competitive biological programmers who believe in open sharing of knowledge. They come under Open Bioinformatics Foundation or O|B|F which is a non-profit, volunteer run organization focused on supporting open source programming in bioinformatics. The best part about open source tools/software is that they’re free to download the source code and read exactly what the program does. If you are so inclined, you can view all of the parts of the program and see the logical flow of the pipeline. In addition, open source makes an excellent learning tool for any beginning bioinformatician. Moreover, you can modify existing open source programs to deal with cutting-edge problems or to customize your pipeline. Apart from your computational and analysis work, most of the reviewer also prefers the open source based results so that they can validate the results if validation required.

2. Code headache

As a bioinformatician you are supposed to know the basics of programming languages, and if you are not good at it, then please learn it as soon as possible because you are not a bio-analyst but biological programmers. The open source programs usually lack dedicated service and support teams (often because they were the product of an overworked doc/postdoc!) so you are responsible for troubleshooting your own errors most of the time. We commonly receive the HELP email to support and assist to setup the pipeline; you can also find this kind of request on any QA forum. I personally believe this coding horror brings the biggest downside of open-source programs; where you need some programming skills in order to implement the program in your pipeline. But, if you are not able to fix the pipeline and modify the open source code according to your requirements them you should re-think on your bioinformatician name tag!!!

3. Dive into the codes

Some of the biologist turn bioinformatician says “if you can do the same thing with commercial software then why to get migraine with weird codes”, well this statement looks to me that guys are keen to learn swimming but still don’t like to get wet. If you are still using paid software and doing your work by customer support and clicking some of the well-designed GUI button then perhaps you are not interested in learning and trying new and challenging bioinformatics works. You are missing the basic flavour of bioinformatics. Let’s dive into the coding world, I am sure your will enjoy it. I recommend your to swim freely in code’s sea, and enjoy the journey; do not merely watch it from the outside.  

4. Paid does not mean better

The bioinformatics company which are specializes in bioinformatics solutions develop well designed/packed, user friendly software by using a large number of specialised scientist, programmers and support staff. They also provide good services to accomplice your biological analysis work. This means that if you hit a ‘snag’ with your data, help is likely only a phone call away! These companies price their products competitively against the cost of a dedicated bioinformatician. You may be able to afford the program, but not the additional staff! Additionally, most of the functionality that you need in your analysis is already coded into the program. Need to plot a graph? Just click this button right here. It is that easy. But, as a bioinformatician this is not generally well encouraged approach in biological analysis work, because the software is not available to everyone and your data can’t be validated. Moreover, there is very less chances that anyone will repeat your work or love to do similar kind of research (because not all the labs in the world are rich like yours).

5. Take a caution

In biological analysis work, in which you deal GB/TB of data are having maximum chances of getting errors, so please be careful and always cross check your data before coming to any conclusion. Even an error in two line code can alter your entire analysis and display weird results. Some of the scientist blindly believes on commercial software, which is entirely wrong. Using proprietary tools does not absolve you of the need to actually read and research the type of analysis that you are doing. This is particularly true in the case of genome assembly and annotation.

At the end, I would like to tell only one think that open source solutions allows you to do more cutting edge analysis than the commercial tools. So let’s go for it.

Disclaimer:

This is my personal view. I have nothing to do with any company or open source community. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my current/past employers. I do reserve the right to remove comments left by spammers or off-topic comments.

For knowledge about Linux and their importance amongst bioinformatician plesae read this article "An introduction to Linux for bioinformatics" by Paul Stothard.

Linux cheat sheet at http://bioinformaticsonline.com/file/view/87/linux-cheat-sheet

Please browse for futher useful linux pages on right hand side ...

NAME OF THE POST : Bioinformatician (Part time 3 days in a week) (One Position only)

DURATION : One Year

NAME OF THE PROJECT : Next generation sequencing facility

EDUCATIONAL QUALIFICATIONS : At least a Masters degree in Bioinformatics and Bachelors degree in any stream of life sciences

REQUIREMENTS :

Around 5 years of experience and proven track record in next generation sequence data analysis (supported by publications in peer-reviewed journals), ability to analyze transcriptomics, Chip-seq, and small RNA –seq data.

: Should have the ability to analyze raw primary data generated by Illumina next generation sequencing platforms and create / troubleshoot custom analysis Pipelines.

Should have ability to handle all downstream secondary and tertiary data analysis using commercially available as well as open source softwares (transcriptomics, ChIP-seq, small RNA-seq)

Apart from these, the applicant should have knowledge of the following: Programming: Perl and Python. Operating system:

Linux and Windows. NGS Analysis tools: Maq, BWA, Bowtie, SAM tools, BEDTools, MACS, Galaxy, FastQC, Bismark, MEDIPS, Tophat, Cufflinks, AvadisNGS, CLC Genomics Workbench, Galaxy, BaseSpace, Trinity Statistics: Microsoft Excel and R. Database: MySQL Genome Browser: UCSC, Ensemble, IGV, IGB Motif Analysis Tools: MEME Suite, Transfac and RSAT Functional Annotation Tools: DAVID, GeneCodis, Gene Cards Networking Tools: Cytoscape

EMOLUMENTS : The incumbent will be paid a fee of Rs. 2000/- per sitting/ per day.

SCIENTIST NAME : Dr. Arnab Mukhopadhyay,

Staff Scientific V Next generation sequencing facility

SCIENTIST’S E-MAIL ID : arnab@nii.ac.in

WALK IN INTERVIEW ON : 18th September, 2015

REGISTRATION OF CANDIDATES: 10.30 AM to 11.00 AM

PLEASE NOTE- 1. CANDIDATE MAY FILL UP APPLICATION IN THE PRECRIBED FORMAT ALONG WITH NECESSARY DOCUMENTS FOR VERIFICATION. 2. APPLICATIONS CONTAINING INCOMPLETE INFORMATION SHALL NOT BE ENTERTAINED. 3. DATE OF PASSING THE EXAMINATIONS MUST BE INDICATED CLEARLY. 4. ONLY REGISTERED CANDIDATES WILL BE INTERVIEWED. 5. NO TA/DA WILL BE PAID FOR ATTENDING THE INTERVIEW PRESCRIBED FORM 1. NAME 2. FATHER’S NAME 3. MOTHER’S NAME 4. DATE OF BIRTH 5. SEX (MALE/FEMALE) 6. CATEGORY (SC/ ST/ OBC/ PH) 7. ADDRESS a. (CORRSPONDENCE) b. (PERMANENT) 8. E MAIL, TELEPHONE NO. & MOBILE No (if any) 9. ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATIONS NAME OF EXAMINATION PASSED WITH SUBJECTS YEAR OF PASSING BOARD/ UNIVERSITY PERCENTAGE/ DIVISION REMARKS 10. PAST EXPERIENCE & PRESENT EMPLOYMENT, IF ANY 11. CANDIDATES SHOULD STATE CLEARLY WHETHER THEY HAVE BEEN AWARDED PH.D DEGREE OR THESIS HAS BEEN SUBMITTED. 12. HAVE YOU APPLIED FOR A POSITION EARLIER IN THE INSTITUTE? IF SO:- (1) THE DETAILS OF THE PROJECT AND PROJECT INVESTIGATOR (2) IF CALLED FOR INVERVIEW, RESULTS THEREOF

More at http://www1.nii.res.in/sites/default/files/walkininterview-18sept2015.pdf

https://github.com/pditommaso/awesome-pipeline

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/pditommaso/awesome-pipeline

Arlequin: http://cmpg.unibe.ch/software/arlequin3/

BEAGLE: http://faculty.washington.edu/browning/beagle/beagle.html

fastPHASE: http://stephenslab.uchicago.edu/software.html

GENEHUNTER: http://linkage.rockefeller.edu/soft/gh/

The Genome Analysis Toolkit:

http://www.broadinstitute.org/gsa/wiki/index.php/The_Genome_Analysis_Toolkit

IMPUTE2: https://mathgen.stats.ox.ac.uk/impute/impute_v2.html

MACH: http://www.sph.umich.edu/csg/abecasis/MACH/

MERLIN: http://www.sph.umich.edu/csg/abecasis/Merlin/

PHASE: http://stephenslab.uchicago.edu/software.html

PL-EM: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~junliu/plem/

“Read-backed phasing” algorithm: http://www.broadinstitute.org/gsa/wiki/index.php/Read-backed_phasing_algorithm

SHAPE-IT: http://www.griv.org/shapeit/

http://molbiol-tools.ca/Convert.htm

Address of the bookmark: http://molbiol-tools.ca/Convert.htm

Tools

• Parsnp - Core-genome alignment and analysis
• Gingr - Interactive visualization of alignments, trees and variants
• HarvestTools - Archiving and postprocessing

Citation

Treangen TJ, Ondov BD, Koren S, Phillippy AM. The Harvest suite for rapid core-genome alignment and visualization of thousands of intraspecific microbial genomes. Genome Biology, 15 (11), 1-15 [PDF]

Address of the bookmark: http://harvest.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

Prokka – Standalone command line tool, takes just a few minutes per genome. This is the best way to get good quality annotation in a flash, which is particularly useful if you have loads of genomes or need to annotate a pangenome or metagenome. Note however that the quality of functional information is not as good as RAST, and you will need several extra steps if you want to do functional profiling and pathway analysis of your genome(s)… which is in-built in RAST.

NCBI Prokaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline is designed to annotate bacterial and archaeal genomes (chromosomes and plasmids).

Genome annotation is a multi-level process that includes prediction of protein-coding genes, as well as other functional genome units such as structural RNAs, tRNAs, small RNAs, pseudogenes, control regions, direct and inverted repeats, insertion sequences, transposons and other mobile elements.

PGAP: NCBI has developed an automatic prokaryotic genome annotation pipeline that combines ab initio gene prediction algorithms with homology based methods. The first version of NCBI Prokaryotic Genome Automatic Annotation Pipeline (PGAAP; see Pubmed Article) developed in 2005 has been replaced with an upgraded version that is capable of processing a larger data volume.  NCBI's annotation pipeline depends on several internal databases and is not currently available for download or use outside of the NCBI environment.

BEACON (automated tool for Bacterial GEnome Annotation ComparisON), a fast tool for an automated and a systematic comparison of different annotations of single genomes. The extended annotation assigns putative functions to many genes with unknown functions. BEACON is available under GNU General Public License version 3.0 and is accessible at: http://www.cbrc.kaust.edu.sa/BEACON/.

BlastKOLA: Assigns K numbers to the user's sequence data by BLAST searches, respectively, against a nonredundant set of KEGG GENES. KOALA (KEGG Orthology And Links Annotation) is KEGG's internal annotation tool for K number assignment of KEGG GENES using SSEARCH computation. Annotate Sequence in KEGG Mapper and Pathogen Checker in KEGG Pathogen are special interfaces to this server and can be executed in an interactive mode. BlastKOALA is suitable for annotating fully sequenced genomes.

PAGIT: Provides a toolkit for improving the quality of genome assemblies created via an assembly software. PAGIT compiled four tools: (i) ABACAS which classifies and orientates contigs and estimates the sizes of gaps between them; (ii) IMAGE uses paired-end reads to extend contigs and close gaps within the scaffolds; (iii) ICORN for identifying and correcting small errors in consensus sequences and; (iv) RATT for help annotation. The software was mainly created to analyze parasite genomes of up to about 300 Mb.

MAKER: A portable and easily configurable genome annotation pipeline. MAKER allows smaller eukaryotic and prokaryotic genome projects to independently annotate their genomes and to create genome databases. It identifies repeats, aligns ESTs and proteins to a genome, produces ab-initio gene predictions and automatically synthesizes these data into gene annotations having evidence-based quality values. MAKER's inputs are minimal and its ouputs can be directly loaded into a Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD). They can also be viewed in the Apollo genome browser; this feature of MAKER provides an easy means to annotate, view and edit individual contigs and BACs without the overhead of a database. MAKER is available for download and can be tested online via the MAKER Web Annotation Service (MWAS).

MyPro is a software pipeline for high-quality prokaryotic genome assembly and annotation. It was validated on 18 oral streptococcal strains to produce submission-ready, annotated draft genomes. MyPro installed as a virtual machine and supported by updated databases will enable biologists to perform quality prokaryotic genome assembly and annotation with ease.

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