BOL: Related items

Genetic basis of tail-loss evolution

LEGE — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 12:12:36 -0600

The paper "On the genetic basis of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07095-8)", published in Nature, investigates the genetic mechanisms that led to the loss of tails in humans and apes. The study suggests that a specific genetic mutation, involving the insertion of an Alu element (a type of transposable DNA sequence), played a critical role in the evolutionary transition from tailed primates to tailless hominoids.

Key Findings of the Study:

Alu Insertion and Tail Loss:
The researchers discovered an Alu-mediated genetic change in a common ancestor of modern apes and humans. This change disrupted the normal function of a gene involved in tail development, leading to the suppression of tail formation.
Gene Disruption Mechanism:
The Alu insertion was found within a regulatory region of the TBXT gene (also known as T or Brachyury), which is crucial for tail development in vertebrates. This insertion likely altered the gene's expression patterns, leading to tail reduction over evolutionary time.
Functional Evidence from Model Organisms:
To test their hypothesis, the researchers introduced similar genetic modifications in mice. The modified mice exhibited shortened or absent tails, supporting the idea that the identified mutation played a role in tail loss in hominoids.
Evolutionary Implications:
The findings suggest that small, random genomic changes—such as transposable element insertions—can have profound effects on body morphology. This study provides evidence that mobile DNA elements (like Alu) can drive major evolutionary transitions.
Relevance to Human Evolution:
Understanding the genetic basis of tail loss helps in reconstructing the evolutionary history of hominins (the lineage that includes humans and our extinct relatives). It also sheds light on how genetic variations contribute to anatomical diversity among primates.

Significance of the Study:

This research highlights the role of transposable elements in shaping evolutionary traits and provides a concrete genetic explanation for a defining characteristic of humans and great apes. It also demonstrates how mutations in regulatory regions of developmental genes can lead to significant anatomical changes.

Scripts for the analysis of HGT in genome sequence data.

Jit — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 16:44:10 -0600

Scripts for the analysis of HGT in genome sequence data

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/reubwn/hgt

JBrowse: Embeddable genome browser built completely with JavaScript and HTML5

Jit — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 09:19:56 -0500

JBrowse is a fast, embeddable genome browser built completely with JavaScript and HTML5, with optional run-once data formatting tools written in Perl. Headline Features: Fast, smooth scrolling and zooming. Explore your genome with unparalleled speed. Scales easily to multi-gigabase genomes and deep-coverage sequencing. Quickly open and view data files on your computer without uploading them to any server. Supports GFF3, BED, FASTA, Wiggle, BigWig, BAM, VCF (with either .tbi or .idx index), REST, and more. BAM, BigBed, BigWig, and VCF data are displayed directly from chunks of the compressed binary files, no conversion needed. Includes an optional “faceted” track selector (see demo) suitable for large installations with thousands of tracks. Very light server resource requirements. In fact, JBrowse has no back-end server code, just tools for formatting data files to be read directly over HTTP. Serve huge datasets from a single low-cost cloud instance. Can run as a stand-alone app on OSX and Windows using the Electron platform Highly extensible plugin architecture, with a large plugin registry of existing examples here https://gmod.github.io/jbrowse-registry https://jbrowse.org/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/GMOD/jbrowse

Cogent: a tool for reconstructing the coding genome using high-quality full-length transcriptome sequences.

Jit — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 05:33:04 -0500

Cogent is a tool that identifies gene families and reconstructs the coding genome using high-quality transcriptome data without a reference genome, and can be used to check assemblies for the presence of these known coding sequences.

Cogent is a tool for reconstructing the coding genome using high-quality full-length transcriptome sequences. It is designed to be used on Iso-Seq data and in cases where there is no reference genome or the ref genome is highly incomplete.

See a recent presentation on Cogent being applied to the Cuttlefish Iso-Seq data.

Cogent preliminary draft paper (updated 2016Dec version), Supplementary

Please see wiki for details on usage.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/Magdoll/Cogent

Biological databases !

BioStar — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 01:16:29 -0600

Now a days there are a lots of genomics databases available around the world. This bookmark is created to provide all links in one place ...

ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genomes/

https://hgdownload.soe.ucsc.edu/downloads.html

Address of the bookmark: ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genomes/

Genome STRiP

Neel — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 03:58:19 -0500

Genome STRiP (Genome STRucture In Populations) is a suite of tools for discovering and genotyping structural variations using sequencing data. The methods are designed to detect shared variation using data from multiple individuals.

Genome STRiP looks both across and within a set of sequenced genomes to detect variation. The methods are adaptive and support heterogeneous data sets, including variations in sequencing depth, read lengths and mixtures of paired and single-end reads. A minimum of 20 to 30 genomes are required to get acceptable results, but the method gains power across genomes and processing more genomes provide better results.

To run discovery or genotyping on a single sequenced genome or a small set of genomes, you need to call your data against a background population, such as a set of genomes from the 1000 Genomes Project. The background population does not need to be matched to the target individuals.

Address of the bookmark: http://software.broadinstitute.org/software/genomestrip/

valet

Jit — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 04:27:09 -0500

VALET is a pipeline for performing de novo validation of metagenomic assemblies. VALET checks a number of properties that should hold true for a correct assembly (e.g., mate-pairs are aligned at the correct distance from each other in the assembly, the depth of coverage is fairly uniform along contigs, etc.). The violations of these invariants are reported allowing one to pinpoint areas that were potentially mis-assembled, or to compare the quality of different assemblies. For comparing multiple assemblies of the same data-sets, VALET also reports an overall estimate of the likelihood a particular assembly is correct.

Home Page:

VALET code repository

Address of the bookmark: https://www.cbcb.umd.edu/software/valet

GeneMANIA

Jit — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 09:55:16 -0500

Faster, more accurate algorithms function prediction "GeneMANIA (Multiple Association Network Integration Algorithm)" have however been developed in recent years and are publicly available on the web, indicating the future direction of function prediction.

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

GeneValidator - Identify problems with predicted genes

Poonam Mahapatra — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 06:00:03 -0500

GeneValidator helps in identifing problems with gene predictions and provide useful information extracted from analysing orthologs in BLAST databases. The results produced can be used by biocurators and researchers who need accurate gene predictions.

If you would like to use GeneValidator on a few sequences, see our online GeneValidator Web App -http://genevalidator.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk.

If you use GeneValidator in your work, please cite us as follows:

Dragan M‡, Moghul MI‡, Priyam A, Bustos C & Wurm Y. 2016. GeneValidator: identify problems with protein-coding gene predictions. Bioinformatics, doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btw015.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/wurmlab/genevalidator

Sushi: An R/Bioconductor package for visualizing genomic data

Jit — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 08:29:12 -0500

Sushi: An R/Bioconductor package for visualizing genomic data

Address of the bookmark: https://www.bioconductor.org/packages/devel/bioc/vignettes/Sushi/inst/doc/Sushi.pdf