BOL: Related items

A Subway Map for the Genome

LEGE — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 04:14:14 -0500

Maya was looking at a genome graph on her computer. There were nodes, branches, and paths going in every direction.

“It’s like a subway map,” she said, “but for DNA.”

That idea is exactly what Sequence Tube Map brings to life.

Instead of showing a genome as one long, confusing sequence, it displays different genomic paths like routes on a metro map. Where sequences are shared, the paths travel together. Where genetic variation occurs, they branch into different routes and may join again later.

This makes complex genome graphs much easier to explore.

Maya could now see how different haplotypes moved through the same genomic region and where they took different paths. She could even view sequencing reads mapped onto the graph, helping her understand what was happening in regions with genetic variation.

What once looked like a tangled network now looked like a journey.

Sequence Tube Map turns the complexity of graph genomes into a visual story—making it easier for scientists to see how DNA can take different routes.

Read more at https://github.com/vgteam/sequencetubemap

and

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/35/24/5318/5542397

Demo at https://vgteam.github.io/sequenceTubeMap/

The Genes That Travel Together: A Genomic Detective Story

BioStar — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:00:36 -0500

Imagine looking through thousands of microbial genomes and discovering two genes that repeatedly appear together. The obvious conclusion is that they must somehow be connected—that perhaps they work together, participate in the same pathway, or depend on each other. But evolution has a way of leaving misleading clues. What if these two genes are found together simply because they were inherited from the same ancient ancestor? In that case, their apparent association may have little to do with their biological function; it may simply be a reflection of shared evolutionary history. This is the intriguing problem addressed by CORGIAS (https://github.com/ynishimuraLv/corgias), a computational framework developed to distinguish genuine gene associations from correlations created by common ancestry.

Instead of asking only whether two genes occur together across genomes, CORGIAS asks a deeper question: did these genes actually evolve together, repeatedly gaining or losing their presence in concert, or are they merely travelling together because of their inherited history? The framework introduces two complementary approaches, Ancestral State Adjustment (ASA) and the Simultaneous EVolution test (SEV), which incorporate evolutionary information into the search for gene associations. This distinction becomes increasingly important as genome sequencing continues to uncover enormous numbers of microbial genomes, many from organisms that have never been cultured and whose genes remain functionally mysterious. In this growing genomic landscape, simply finding a gene is no longer enough—we need clues about what that gene might be doing. CORGIAS approaches this problem almost like a genomic detective: rather than treating every association as evidence, it reconstructs the evolutionary story behind the association and asks whether the evidence survives that history. By doing so, it offers a way to separate coincidence from biological connection and potentially uncover functional relationships hidden within the vast microbial genomic landscape. The broader message is beautifully simple: genes do not evolve in isolation, and understanding what they do may require us to look beyond where they are today and reconstruct how they arrived there. Sometimes, the most important clue in a genome is not the gene itself, but the evolutionary journey it has taken.

More at https://academic.oup.com/nargab/article/7/4/lqaf182/8377910?

Scarpa

Poonam Mahapatra — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 07:59:25 -0500

Scarpa is a stand-alone scaffolding tool for NGS data. It can be used together with virtually any genome assembler and any NGS read mapper that supports SAM format. Other features include support for multiple libraries and an option to estimate insert size distributions from data. Scarpa is available free of charge for academic and commercial use under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

See the user manual or the paper for more information about Scarpa. Click here for the supplementary material.

Address of the bookmark: http://compbio.cs.toronto.edu/hapsembler/scarpa.html

GRASS: a generic algorithm for scaffolding next-generation sequencing assemblies.

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 23 May 2017 05:20:32 -0500

GRASS (GeneRic ASsembly Scaffolder)-a novel algorithm for scaffolding second-generation sequencing assemblies capable of using diverse information sources. GRASS offers a mixed-integer programming formulation of the contig scaffolding problem, which combines contig order, distance and orientation in a single optimization objective. The resulting optimization problem is solved using an expectation-maximization procedure and an unconstrained binary quadratic programming approximation of the original problem. We compared GRASS with existing HTS scaffolders using Illumina paired reads of three bacterial genomes. Our algorithm constructs a comparable number of scaffolds, but makes fewer errors. This result is further improved when additional data, in the form of related genome sequences, are used.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/AlexeyG/GRASS

RePS: Repeat-masked Phrap with scaffolding, a WGS sequence assembler

Jit — Sat, 04 Jan 2020 01:08:09 -0600

RePS (Repeat-masked Phrap with scaffolding), a WGS sequence assembler, that explicitly identifies exact kmer repeats from the shotgun data and removes them prior to the assembly. The established software Phrap is used to compute meaningful error probabilities for each base. Clone-end-pairing information is used to construct scaffolds that order and orient the contigs. The updated version of RePS incorporates some of the ideas introduced by Phusion on clustering

More at

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC186573/

Address of the bookmark: ftp://ftp.genomics.org.cn/pub/ricedb/Tools/RePS/RePS-IBM-AIX.tar.gz

bpRNA: large-scale automated annotation and analysis of RNA secondary structure

Rahul Nayak — Wed, 23 May 2018 03:24:33 -0500

bpRNA, a novel annotation tool capable of parsing RNA structures, including complex pseudoknot-containing RNAs, to yield an objective, precise, compact, unambiguous, easily-interpretable description of all loops, stems, and pseudoknots, along with the positions, sequence, and flanking base pairs of each such structural feature.

The bpRNA code is written in perl and requires the Graph perl module. Several additional scripts for analysis are included. The source code is available at http://github.com/hendrixlab/bpRNA.

Address of the bookmark: http://github.com/hendrixlab/bpRNA

miREM: an expectation-maximization approach for prioritizing miRNAs associated with gene-set

Abhimanyu Singh — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 04:48:07 -0500

From list of genes... ... to microRNAs

Using established miRNA-interaction databases, miREM combines hypergeometric and expectation-maximization algorithms to sieve through your genetic data for microRNA signatures

https://bioinfo-csi.nus.edu.sg/mirem2/

Address of the bookmark: https://bioinfo-csi.nus.edu.sg/mirem2/

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

dnaPipeTE: de-novo assembly & annotation Pipeline for Transposable Elements

Rahul Nayak — Sat, 02 Dec 2017 18:25:44 -0600

dnaPipeTE (for de-novo assembly & annotation Pipeline for Transposable Elements), is a pipeline designed to find, annotate and quantify Transposable Elements in small samples of NGS datasets. It is very useful to quantify the proportion of TEs in newly sequenced genomes since it does not require genome assembly and works on small datasets (< 1X).

dnaPipeTE is developped by Clément Goubert, Laurent Modolo and the TREEP team of the LBBE: http://lbbe.univ-lyon1.fr/-Equipe-Elements-transposables-.html?lang=en
You can find the original publication in GBE here: https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/7/4/1192/533768

output examples of quantification and TE landscape (relative age) produced by dnaPipeTE

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/clemgoub/dnaPipeTE

Ra assembler - a de novo DNA assembler for third generation sequencing data

biogeek — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 20:36:54 -0600

Integration of the Ra assembler - a de novo DNA assembler for third generation sequencing data developed on Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), Ruder Boskovic Institute (RBI) and Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS).

Ra is in development since 2014 in the form of several separate components that used to be run individually.
This project aims to ease the usage of Ra by integrating it into a complete de novo assembly tool.

Unlike other state-of-the-art assemblers, Ra does not have an error correction step. Instead, it relies on detecting overlaps using a very sensitive and specific overlapper ("graphmap -w owler", https://github.com/isovic/graphmap) and constructing and reducing an overlap graph (Ra layout, https://github.com/mariokostelac/ra).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/mariokostelac/ra-integrate/