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?

HapCUT2: robust and accurate haplotype assembly for diverse sequencing technologies

Jit — Tue, 15 May 2018 07:35:26 -0500

HapCUT2 is a maximum-likelihood-based tool for assembling haplotypes from DNA sequence reads, designed to "just work" with excellent speed and accuracy. We found that previously described haplotype assembly methods are specialized for specific read technologies or protocols, with slow or inaccurate performance on others. With this in mind, HapCUT2 is designed for speed and accuracy across diverse sequencing technologies, including but not limited to: NGS short reads (Illumina HiSeq) clone-based sequencing (Fosmid or BAC clones) SMRT reads (PacBio) Oxford Nanopore reads 10X Genomics Linked-Reads proximity-ligation (Hi-C) reads high-coverage sequencing (>40x coverage-per-SNP) using above technologies combinations of the above technologies (e.g. scaffold long reads with Hi-C reads) See below for specific examples of command line options and best practices for some of these technologies. NOTE: At this time HapCUT2 is for diploid organisms only. VCF input should contain diploid variants. If you use HapCUT2 in your research, please cite: Edge, P., Bafna, V. & Bansal, V. HapCUT2: robust and accurate haplotype assembly for diverse sequencing technologies. Genome Res. gr.213462.116 (2016). doi:10.1101/gr.213462.116

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/vibansal/HapCUT2

Artificial intelligence is more accurate than doctors in diagnosing breast cancer

BioStar — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 22:12:34 -0600

Artificial intelligence is more accurate than doctors in diagnosing breast cancer from mammograms, a study in the journal Nature suggests.

An international team, including researchers from Google Health and Imperial College London, designed and trained a computer model on X-ray images from nearly 29,000 women.

The algorithm outperformed six radiologists in reading mammograms.

AI was still as good as two doctors working together.

Unlike humans, AI is tireless. Experts say it could improve detection. Read More: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50857759

HiCanu: accurate assembly of segmental duplications, satellites, and allelic variants from high-fidelity long reads

BioStar — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 22:49:31 -0500

HiCanu, a significant modification of the Canu assembler designed to leverage the full potential of HiFi reads via homopolymer compression, overlap-based error correction, and aggressive false overlap filtering.

More at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.14.992248v3

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/marbl/canu

Hifiasm: a haplotype-resolved assembler for accurate Hifi reads

Jit — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 10:03:36 -0600

Hifiasm is a fast haplotype-resolved de novo assembler for PacBio Hifi reads. It can assemble a human genome in several hours and works with the California redwood genome, one of the most complex genomes sequenced so far. Hifiasm can produce primary/alternate assemblies of quality competitive with the best assemblers. It also introduces a new graph binning algorithm and achieves the best haplotype-resolved assembly given trio data.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/chhylp123/hifiasm

dna2bit: an ultra-fast and accurate genomic distance estimation software

LEGE — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 06:24:58 -0500

dna2bit is a software tool developed in C++11, leveraging the capabilities of OpenMP for parallel computing and the popcount technique for efficient bit manipulation. It has been thoroughly tested using the g++ and clang compilers on both Linux and MacOS platforms.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/lijuzeng/dna2bit

RapClust: Accurate, Lightweight Clustering of de novo Transcriptomes using Fragment Equivalence Classes

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 17:57:10 -0500

RapClust is a tool for clustering contigs from de novo transcriptome assemblies. RapClust is designed to be run downstream of the Sailfish or Salmon tools for rapid transcript-level quantification. Specifically, RapClust relies on the fragment equivalence classes computed by these tools in order to determine how seqeunce is shared across the transcriptome, and how reads map to potentially-related contigs across different conditions.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/COMBINE-lab/RapClust

CNIDARIA: fast, reference-free phylogenomic clustering

Shruti Paniwala — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 17:55:17 -0500

Motivation: Identification of biological specimens is a major requirement for a range of applications. Reference-free methods analyse unprocessed sequencing data without relying on prior knowledge, but these do not scale to arbitrarily large genomes and arbitrarily large phylogenetic distances.

Results: We present Cnidaria, a practical tool for clustering genomic and transcriptomic data with no limitation on ge-nome size or phylogenetic distances. We successfully simultaneously clustered 169 genomic and transcriptomic datasets from 4 kingdoms, achieving 100% accuracy at supra-species level and 78% accuracy for species level.

Availability and Implementation: Cnidaria is written in C++ and Python and is available at http://www.ab.wur.nl/cnidaria.

Contact: Saulo Aflitos - sauloal@gmail.com

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/sauloal/cnidaria/wiki

FastANI: fast alignment-free computation of whole-genome Average Nucleotide Identity (ANI)

Jit — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 17:27:01 -0500

FastANI is developed for fast alignment-free computation of whole-genome Average Nucleotide Identity (ANI). ANI is defined as mean nucleotide identity of orthologous gene pairs shared between two microbial genomes. FastANI supports pairwise comparison of both complete and draft genome assemblies. Its underlying procedure follows a similar workflow as described by Goris et al. 2007. However, it avoids expensive sequence alignments and uses Mashmap as its MinHash based sequence mapping engine to compute the orthologous mappings and alignment identity estimates. Based on our experiments with complete and draft genomes, its accuracy is on par with BLAST-based ANI solver and it achieves two to three orders of magnitude speedup. Therefore, it is useful for pairwise ANI computation of large number of genome pairs. More details about its speed, accuracy and potential applications are described here: "High-throughput ANI Analysis of 90K Prokaryotic Genomes Reveals Clear Species Boundaries".

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ParBLiSS/FastANI