To fully leverage these opportunities, bioinformaticians require specialized tools and databases. This blog highlights essential resources for mycology research, focusing on databases, tools, and platforms tailored for fungal biology.

1. Fungal Databases

1.1. MycoCosm

Website: MycoCosm
Developed by the DOE Joint Genome Institute, MycoCosm is a comprehensive portal for fungal genomics. It offers genomic and transcriptomic data for a wide range of fungi, including saprobes, pathogens, and symbionts.

• Key Features: Genome browsers, comparative genomics tools, and functional annotations.
• Best For: Large-scale studies on fungal evolution and ecology.

1.2. FungiDB

Website: FungiDB
FungiDB is an integrated genomic resource for fungal pathogens and non-pathogens. It provides access to genome sequences, transcriptomic data, and functional annotations.

• Key Features: Advanced search options, BLAST, and pathway analysis tools.
• Best For: Studying fungal pathogenesis and host-pathogen interactions.

1.3. Index Fungorum

Website: Index Fungorum
This nomenclatural database provides information on the scientific names of fungi. It’s an essential resource for taxonomists and researchers focused on fungal biodiversity.

• Key Features: Taxonomic hierarchy and synonymy tracking.
• Best For: Identifying and classifying fungal species.

1.4. UNITE

Website: UNITE
UNITE is a specialized database for fungal ITS (Internal Transcribed Spacer) sequences, often used in fungal identification and phylogenetics.

• Key Features: Curated reference datasets and community annotations.
• Best For: Environmental mycology and microbial ecology studies.

2. Analytical Tools

2.1. Funannotate

Repository: GitHub - Funannotate
Funannotate is a genome annotation tool designed for fungi. It supports tasks like gene prediction, functional annotation, and orthology analysis.

• Best For: Annotating newly sequenced fungal genomes.

2.2. BUSCO (Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs)

Website: BUSCO
BUSCO evaluates genome assembly and annotation completeness using orthologs. It includes a fungal-specific dataset.

• Best For: Assessing the quality of fungal genome assemblies.

2.3. Pathogen-Host Interactions Database (PHI-base)

Website: PHI-base
PHI-base is a manually curated resource containing information on pathogen-host interactions, including fungal pathogens.

• Best For: Exploring virulence factors and host-pathogen relationships.

3. Visualization Platforms

3.1. Cytoscape

Website: Cytoscape
A powerful tool for visualizing molecular interaction networks, Cytoscape can be used to study protein-protein interactions, gene networks, and metabolic pathways in fungi.

• Best For: Network biology and functional genomics.

3.2. iTOL (Interactive Tree of Life)

Website: iTOL
iTOL is an interactive tool for visualizing phylogenetic trees.

• Best For: Displaying fungal phylogenies and comparing evolutionary relationships.

4. Community Resources

4.1. Mycological Society of America (MSA)

Website: MSA
The MSA promotes fungal research and provides access to resources, conferences, and publications.

• Best For: Networking with fungal researchers and accessing recent studies.

4.2. OpenFungi

Website: OpenFungi
OpenFungi is an open-source initiative providing fungal genomic and transcriptomic datasets for research and education.

• Best For: Sharing and accessing public fungal datasets.

5. Genomics Workflows

5.1. Galaxy

Website: Galaxy Project
Galaxy offers a web-based platform for reproducible bioinformatics workflows, including tools for fungal genome and transcriptome analysis.

• Best For: User-friendly analysis pipelines without requiring coding skills.

5.2. Snakemake

Repository: Snakemake
A flexible pipeline management tool that supports fungal data processing and analysis.

• Best For: Custom workflows for large-scale fungal datasets.

Conclusion

Fungal research is a rapidly growing field with vast implications for medicine, agriculture, and industry. For bioinformaticians, the availability of specialized resources—databases, tools, and community platforms—opens doors to innovative discoveries. Whether you are investigating fungal genomics, studying host-pathogen interactions, or exploring fungal biodiversity, the resources outlined above will empower your research journey.

Dive into these resources and help unravel the mysteries of the fungal kingdom!

• BigDataScript – A cross-system scripting language for working with big data pipelines in computer systems of different sizes and capabilities. [ paper-2014 | web ]
• Bpipe – A small language for defining pipeline stages and linking them together to make pipelines. [ web ]
• Common Workflow Language – a specification for describing analysis workflows and tools that are portable and scalable across a variety of software and hardware environments, from workstations to cluster, cloud, and high performance computing (HPC) environments. [ web ]
• Cromwell – A Workflow Management System geared towards scientific workflows. [ web ]
• Galaxy – a popular open-source, web-based platform for data intensive biomedical research. Has several features, from data analysis to workflow management to visualization tools. [ paper-2018 | web ]
• Nextflow (recommended) – A fluent DSL modelled around the UNIX pipe concept, that simplifies writing parallel and scalable pipelines in a portable manner. [ paper-2018 | web ]
• Ruffus – Computation Pipeline library for python widely used in science and bioinformatics. [ paper-2010 | web ]
• SeqWare – Hadoop Oozie-based workflow system focused on genomics data analysis in cloud environments. [ paper-2010 | web ]
• Snakemake – A workflow management system in Python that aims to reduce the complexity of creating workflows by providing a fast and comfortable execution environment. [ paper-2018 | web ]
• Workflow Descriptor Language – Workflow standard developed by the Broad. [ web ]

List of analysis tools developed for Oxford Nanopore data

BWA
Fast nanopore data tuned alignment tool
https://github.com/lh3/bwa

GraphMap
Mapper for long and error-prone reads
https://github.com/isovic/graphmap

LAST
Nanopore tuned alignment tool
http://last.cbrc.jp/

LINKS
Software tool for long read scaffolding
https://github.com/warrenlr/LINKS/

marginAlign
Tools to align nanopore reads to a reference
https://github.com/benedictpaten/marginAlign

minoTour
Real time analysis tools
http://minotour.nottingham.ac.uk/

nanoCORR
Error-correction tool for nanopore sequence data
https://github.com/jgurtowski/nanocorr

NanoOK
Software for nanopore data, quality and error profiles
https://documentation.tgac.ac.uk/display/NANOOK/NanoOK

Nanopolish
Nanopore analysis and genome assembly software
https://github.com/jts/nanopolish

nanopore
Variant-detection tool for nanopore sequence data
https://github.com/mitenjain/nanopore

Nanocorrect
Error-correction tool for nanopore sequence data
https://github.com/jts/nanocorrect/

npReader
Real-time conversion and analysis of nanopore reads
https://github.com/mdcao/npReader

poRe
Tool for analyzing and visualizing nanopore data
https://sourceforge.net/p/rpore/wiki/Home/

PoreSeq
Error-correction and variant-calling software
https://github.com/tszalay/poreseq

Poretools
Nanopore sequence analysis and visualization software
https://github.com/arq5x/poretools

SSPACE-LongRead
Genome scaffolding tool
http://www.baseclear.com/genomics/bioinformatics/basetools/SSPACE-longread

SMIS
Genome scaffolding tool
https://sourceforge.net/projects/phusion2/files/smis/

List of assemblers for Oxford Nanopore MinION long reads

LQS
DALIGNER, Celera OLC Nanocorrect,
Nanopolish corrector
https://github.com/jts/nanopolish

PBcR
HGAP or BLASR, Celera OLC
PBcR corrector
http://wgs-assembler.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/PBcR
–
Canu
MHAP, Celera OLC
Canu corrector
https://github.com/marbl/canu

Falcon
String graph, Celera OLC
Falcon corrector
https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/falcon

Miniasm
OLC
https://github.com/lh3/miniasm

ra-integrate
OLC
https://github.com/mariokostelac/ra-integrate/

ALLPATHS-LG
de Bruijn graph
ALLPATHS-L corrector
https://www.broadinstitute.org/software/allpaths-lg/blog/?page_id=12

SPAdes
de Bruijn graph
SPAdes corrector
http://bioinf.spbau.ru/spades

https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-018-4724-8

Address of the bookmark: https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-018-4724-8

• Binaries for Linux/macOS
• From sources for Linux/macOS
• From sources for Windows

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/imgag/ngs-bits

This also includes:

• A2Amapper: ATAC, Assembly to Assembly Comparision tool:
  • Comparative mapping between two genome assemblies (same species), or between two different genomes (cross species).

• Sim4db:
  • Spliced alignment of cDNA and genomic sequences, from the same (sim4) or related (sim4cc) species. Optimized for high-throughput batched alignment.

• LEAFF:
  • LEAFF (ahem, Let's Extract Anything From Fasta) is a utility program for working with multi-fasta files. In addition to providing random access to the base level, it includes several analysis functions.

• Meryl:
  • An out-of-core k-mer counter. The amount of sequence that can be processed for any size k depends only on the amount of free disk space.

Address of the bookmark: https://help.rc.ufl.edu/doc/Kmer

Variant calling and/or genotyping

• DiscoSNP++ and discoSnpRAD: Reference-free small variant discovery (SNPs and indels)
• MindTheGap: Detection and assembly of large insertion variants
• TakeABreak: reference-free inversion discovery tool
• SVJedi: Structural Variant genotyper with long read data
• SVJedi-graph: Structural Variant genotyper with long read data using a variation graph

Sequence assembly

• MinYS: reference-guided genome assembly in metagenomics data
• MTG-link: local assembly tool for linked-read data
• Minia: De novo short read assembler
• de-novo pipeline: de-novo assembly pipeline (error correction / contigs / scaffolding) for genomes and meta-genomes
• Mapsembler2: Targeted assembly (not maintained)

Managing k-mers & indexation

• findere: simple strategy for speeding up queries and for reducing false positive calls from any Approximate Membership Query data structure.
  • fimpera extends findere adding the abundance information.
• kmtricks: modular tool suite for counting kmers, and constructing Bloom filters or kmer matrices, for large collections of sequencing data.
• kmindex is a tool for indexing and querying sequencing samples. It is built on top of kmtricks.
• back to sequences: Find sequences (reads, unitigs, genes) related to a set of kmers in large datasets, in a matter of seconds.
• Backpack Quotient Filter: k-mer indexing data structure with abundance
• short read connector: Detect similar reads from potentially large read set
• DSK: Count K-mer in sequences

Pangenome graph manipulation

• Pancat: Pangenome Comparison and Analysis Toolkit
• GFAGraphs: a Python library to handle pangenome graph files in GFA format.

Comparative metagenomics with k-mers

• Simka and SimkaMin: Comparative metagenomics for large-scale datasets
• Comparead & Commet: comparison of metagenomic datasets

Species and bacterial strains identification

• ORI: software using long nanopore reads to identify bacteria present in a sample at the strain level
• StrainFLAIR: STRAIN-level proFiLing using vArIation gRaph

General-purpose sequencing data manipulation

• GASSST: long read mapper
• Leon: short read compressor (now included in GATB-core)
• Bloocoo: short read corrector
• BCALM: Construct compacted de Bruijn graphs (unitigs)

 Protein Structure

• A_Purva: Contact Map Overlap solver
• MD-Jeep: Distance Geometry solver
• CSA: Comparative Structural Alignment

Workflow

• SLICEE: parallel execution of bioinformatics workflows

Comparative Genomics

• CASSIS: detection of rearrangement breakpoints
• PLAST: intensive bank-to-bank sequence comparison
• DRJBreakpointFinder: detection and precise localization of excision sites in proviral segments

https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-015-0644-7

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/surankco/