BOL: Related items

Multiple PhD positions

Sun, 09 Feb 2020 03:10:28 -0600

14 PhD positions in the EU Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Project PRECODE:
International training network which sets a joint research programme to train a new generation of leading scientists in model systems and methods for the development of new therapies for pancreatic cancer (PaCa)

http://precode-project.eu/jobs-board/#1572451761376-39d75f63-c6fb

How DNA is Packaged (Advanced)

Mon, 23 Sep 2013 18:08:34 -0500

Each chromosome consists of one continuous thread-like molecule of DNA coiled tightly around proteins, and contains a portion of the 6,400,000,000 basepairs (DNA building blocks) that make up your DNA. Originally created for DNA Interactive ( http://www.dnai.org ). TRANSCRIPT: In this animation we'll see the remarkable way our DNA is tightly packed up to fit into the nucleus of every cell. The process starts with assembly of a nucleosome, which is formed when eight separate histone protein subunits attach to the DNA molecule. The combined tight loop of DNA and protein is the nucleosome. Six nucleosomes are coiled together and these then stack on top of each other. The end result is a fiber of packed nucleosomes known as chromatin. This structure, is then looped and further packaged using other proteins (which are not shown here) to give the final "chromosomal" shapes. It is this remarkable multiple folding which allows six feet of DNA to fit into the nucleus of each cell in our body. And a typical cell nucleus is so small that ten thousand could fit on the tip of a needle. It is important to realize that chromosomes are not always present, they form only when cells are dividing. At other times, as we can see here at the end of cell division, our DNA becomes less highly organized.)

Ryan E. Mills Lab

Tue, 26 May 2015 09:29:24 -0500

Our research group is primarily focused on the analysis of whole genome sequence data to identify genetic variation (primarily structural variation) and examine their potential functional impact in disease phenotypes. We are particularly interested in analyzing complex regions of the genome that are not easily resolved through modern sequencing approaches and which may exhibit interesting mechanistic origins.

We are also interested in the large-scale integration of genomic, expression, methylation and proteomic data sets, as well as the application of whole genome sequence analysis in clinical diagnostics.

More at http://millslab.ccmb.med.umich.edu/index.html

Pattern Searching in a Single Genome

Aasha — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 05:02:51 -0600

Pattern searching holds much importance for biologists , for the understanding of DNA ( and its functionality) can be more than a matter of satisfying curiosity , but also give answers to many issuess uchas medical conditions . However,there are a number of ways of searching with in a single chromosome.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/5373/LintonFinalReport.pdf

Method in Comparative genomics !!

Jit — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 16:29:24 -0600

We present methods for the automatic determination of genome correspondence. The algorithms enabled the automatic identification of orthologs for more than 90% of genes and intergenic regions across the four species despite the large number of duplicated genes in the yeast genome. The remaining ambiguities in the gene correspondence revealed recent gene family expansions in regions of rapid genomic change.

We present methods for the identification of protein-coding genes based on their patterns of nucleotide conservation across related species. We observed the pressure to conserve the reading frame of functional proteins and developed a test for gene identification with high sensitivity and specificity. We used this test to revisit the genome of S. cerevisiae, reducing the overall gene count by 500 genes (10% of previously annotated genes) and refining the gene structure of hundreds of genes. We present novel methods for the systematic de novo identification of regulatory motifs. The methods do not rely on previous knowledge of gene function and in that way differ from the current literature on computational motif discovery. Based on the genome-wide conservation patterns of known motifs, we developed three conservation criteria that we used to discover novel motifs. We used an enumeration approach to select strongly conserved motif cores, which we extended and collapsed into a small number of candidate regulatory motifs. These include most previously known regulatory motifs as well as several noteworthy novel motifs. The majority of discovered motifs are enriched in functionally related genes, allowing us to infer a candidate function for novel motifs.

Our results demonstrate the power of comparative genomics to further our understanding of any species. Our methods are validated by the extensive experimental knowledge in yeast, and will be invaluable in the study of complex genomes like that of human.

Address of the bookmark: http://web.mit.edu/manoli/www/publications/Kellis_JCB_04.pdf

fineSTRUCTURE v2 & GLOBETROTTER

Shruti Paniwala — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 08:40:23 -0600

Software available at this site

FineSTRUCTURE version 2, a pipeline for running ChromoPainter and FineSTRUCTURE for population inference. A GUI is available for interpretation. Download from the Downloads page.
FineSTRUCTURE R scripts, a facility for exploring the results when the GUI is unavailable.
GLOBETROTTER, the admixture dating method based on ChromoPainter. Download from the Downloads page.
AdmixturePainting, A set of R tools to inmterpret the results of ADMIXTURE and STRUCTURE-like mixture models.
RADpainter, finestructure and ChromoPainter for RAD tag data used for non-model organisms.
Scripts to perform many types of conversion. Included in the main software download from the Downloads page.

What this page is This page provides information about and downloads for methodology for Chromosome Painting. It is not a facility to analyse your genome. Sorry if you were misled by the punchy name!
About Chromosome Painting Painting is an efficient way of identifying important haplotype information from dense genotype data. It describes ancestry in an efficient way suitable for a range of further analyses, including population identification and admixture dating.

Address of the bookmark: http://paintmychromosomes.com/

ChromHMM: Chromatin state discovery and characterization

Abhimanyu Singh — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 04:06:23 -0500

ChromHMM is software for learning and characterizing chromatin states. ChromHMM can integrate multiple chromatin datasets such as ChIP-seq data of various histone modifications to discover de novo the major re-occuring combinatorial and spatial patterns of marks. ChromHMM is based on a multivariate Hidden Markov Model that explicitly models the presence or absence of each chromatin mark. The resulting model can then be used to systematically annotate a genome in one or more cell types. By automatically computing state enrichments for large-scale functional and annotation datasets ChromHMM facilitates the biological characterization of each state. ChromHMM also produces files with genome-wide maps of chromatin state annotations that can be directly visualized in a genome browser.

Address of the bookmark: http://compbio.mit.edu/ChromHMM/

Chromosome breakpoint - a breakup to remember

BioStar — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 13:31:54 -0600

Chromosome breakpoint refers to the physical location where a chromosome is broken and rearranged. Chromosome breakage can occur spontaneously or be induced by environmental factors such as radiation, chemicals, or viruses. The rearrangement of genetic material resulting from a chromosome breakpoint can have important consequences, including the development of genetic diseases, chromosomal abnormalities, or cancer.

Chromosome breakpoints can occur in two ways: interstitial or terminal. Interstitial breakpoints occur within the chromosome, while terminal breakpoints occur at the end of the chromosome. Terminal breakpoints can lead to the loss of genetic material, whereas interstitial breakpoints can result in the duplication or deletion of genetic material.

Chromosome breakpoints can be detected using a variety of techniques, including cytogenetic analysis, fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), and molecular methods such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and next-generation sequencing (NGS). These techniques can also help identify the exact location of the breakpoint and the nature of the rearrangement, such as translocations, inversions, deletions, or duplications.

Translocations are one of the most common types of chromosome rearrangements caused by breakpoints. In a translocation, genetic material is exchanged between two different chromosomes, resulting in a balanced or unbalanced distribution of genetic material. Unbalanced translocations can cause genetic diseases or developmental abnormalities, while balanced translocations can be inherited without any apparent phenotypic effects.

Inversions occur when a chromosome segment is inverted, resulting in a change in the order of genetic material. Inversions can be pericentric, involving the centromere, or paracentric, not involving the centromere. Inversions can cause genetic diseases or phenotypic effects if they disrupt the function of essential genes or regulatory elements.

Deletions and duplications are caused by interstitial breakpoints that result in the loss or gain of genetic material. Deletions can cause genetic diseases or developmental abnormalities if they involve essential genes or regulatory elements. Duplications can also have phenotypic effects, depending on the location and size of the duplicated segment.

Chromosome breakpoints can also be involved in the formation of complex chromosomal rearrangements, such as ring chromosomes or dicentric chromosomes. These complex rearrangements can have important clinical implications, as they can cause genetic diseases or cancer.

In conclusion, chromosome breakpoints are important genetic events that can lead to the rearrangement of genetic material and have important clinical implications. The detection and characterization of chromosome breakpoints using cytogenetic, molecular, and genomic methods are essential for the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of genetic diseases and cancer. Further research is needed to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying chromosome breakage and to develop new therapies targeting these events.

Public Databases for Bioinformatics !

Jit — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 05:32:15 -0500

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17155-y

Server Infrastructure:

File Server:

dhara: Synology 3614 Storage Appliance
4 Core Xeon
108TB disk storage
10Gb ethernet to SCG3
Access atx: dhara:5000
Has btsync server (try it - its much better than dropbox)

Compute Servers:

nandi: Kundaje and Phi Server
24 intel cores
256GB RAM
500GB of SSD storage 
36TB RAID6 local storage
4 Intel Phi's (space for 4 more GPU's)


durga: Montgomery and sensitive data
24 intel cores
256GB RAM
500GB of SSD RAID0 storage 
60TB RAID6 local storage

mitra: Bassik and Web/DB Server
24 core
256GB RAM 
500GB of SSD RAID0 storage 
36TB RAID6 local storage

vayu: Kundaje GPU server
4 core
64GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
8TB RAID10 local storage
4 Nvidia GTX 970 4GB GPUs

amold: Bickel and SGE server
32 AMD core
128GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
12TB RAID5 local storage

wotan: Bickel and SGE server
64 AMD core
256GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
12TB RAID5 local storage

Filesystem:

/users/$USER
default home directory
full backups nightly 
nfs mount to dhara
should store code, papers, and other highly processed data here

/mnt/data/
globally accessible data
should store common data here
e.g. genomes and indexes, annotations, ENCODE data  
if you dont want this to count towards your quote you must chown

/mnt/lab_data/$LAB/
lab accessible data
should store lab project data here 
e.g. ATAC-seq prediction data, enhancer prediction, motif calls

/srv/scratch/$USER
fast local storage
not backed up, but on raid and data will never be deleted
most analysis should be performed here

/srv/persistent/$USER
fast local storage
synced nightly, but not backed up
       ie if the hard drives fail or you delete something and notice 
       within 24 hours we can recover. Otherwise not. (vs home which is 
       properly backed up )  
intermediate analysis products that would be hard to recover should be stored here 
       e.g. stochastic analysis results that need to be kept so that paper 
       results can be reproduced

/srv/www/$LABNAME/
web accessible from mitra.stanford.edu
*NOT BACKED UP*

Some parallel programming patterns:

# gzip a bunch of files
parallel gzip -- *.FILESTOGZIP

# fork example in python:
(for more detailed examples look at 
 https://github.com/nboley/grit/ grit/lib/multiprocessing_utils.py)

import os
import time
import random

import multiprocessing

class ProcessSafeOPStream( object ):
    def __init__( self, writeable_obj ):
        self.writeable_obj = writeable_obj
        self.lock = multiprocessing.Lock()
        self.name = self.writeable_obj.name
        return
    
    def write( self, data ):
        self.lock.acquire()
        self.writeable_obj.write( data )
        self.writeable_obj.flush()
        self.lock.release()
        return
    
    def close( self ):
        self.writeable_obj.close()

def worker(queue, ofp):
    # Try without this
    random.seed()
    while True:
        i = queue.get()
        if i == 'FINISHED': return
        # simulate an expensive function
        x = random.random()
        time.sleep(x/10)
        print i, x
        ofp.write("%i\t%s\n" % (i, x))

NSIMS = 10000
NPROC = 25

# populate queue
todo = multiprocessing.Queue()
for i in xrange(NSIMS): todo.put(i)
for i in xrange(NPROC): todo.put('FINISHED')

ofp = ProcessSafeOPStream( open("output.txt", "w") )

pids = []
for i in xrange(NPROC):
    pid = os.fork()
    if pid == 0:
       worker(todo, ofp)
       os._exit(0)
    else:
       pids.append(pid)  

for pid in pids:
    os.waitpid(pid, 0)

ofp.close()

print "FINISHED"

For use case 1 we obtained the following ENCODE and ROADMAP datasets https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF446WOD/@@download/ENCFF446WOD.bed.gz, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF546PJU/@@download/ENCFF546PJU.bam, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF059BEU/@@download/ENCFF059BEU.bam. Blacklisted regions were obtained from http://mitra.stanford.edu/kundaje/akundaje/release/blacklists/hg38-human/hg38.blacklist.bed.gz. The human genome version hg38 was obtained from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg38/bigZips/hg38.fa.gz.

For use case 2 we used the set of narrowPeak files summarized in https://github.com/wkopp/janggu_usecases/tree/master/extra/urls.txt (archived version v1.0.1). The human genome version hg19 was obtained from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg19/bigZips/hg19.fa.gz

For use case 3 we used the ENCODE datasets https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF591XCX/@@download/ENCFF591XCX.bam, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF736LHE/@@download/ENCFF736LHE.bigWig, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF177HHM/@@download/ENCFF177HHM.bam as we as the GENCODE annotation v29 from ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/gencode/Gencode_human/release_29/gencode.v29.annotation.gtf.gz.

Address of the bookmark: http://mitra.stanford.edu/

Ribbon: Visualizing complex genome alignments and structural variation:

Jit — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 07:40:22 -0600

Ribbon can be used for long reads, short reads, paired-end reads, and assembly/genome alignments. Instructions for each data format are available by clicking on "instructions" in each tab on the right.

Local installation:

You can install Ribbon locally from Github by following the instructions here: https://github.com/MariaNattestad/Ribbon

Address of the bookmark: http://genomeribbon.com/