BOL: Related items

A guide for complete R beginners :- Installing R packages

Archana Malhotra — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 20:23:34 -0600

Part of the reason R has become so popular is the vast array of packages available at the cran and bioconductor repositories. In the last few years, the number of packages has grown exponentially!

This is a short post giving steps on how to actually install R packages. Let’s suppose you want to install the ggplot2 package. Well nothing could be easier. We just fire up an R shell and type:
> install.packages("ggplot2")

In theory the package should just install, however:

if you are using Linux and don’t have root access, this command won’t work.
you will be asked to select your local mirror, i.e. which server should you use to download the package.

Installing packages without root access

First, you need to designate a directory where you will store the downloaded packages. On my machine, I use the directory /data/Rpackages/ After creating a package directory, to install a package we use the command:
> install.packages("ggplot2", lib="/data/Rpackages/") > library(ggplot2, lib.loc="/data/Rpackages/")

It’s a bit of a pain having to type /data/Rpackages/ all the time. To avoid this burden, we create a file .Renviron in our home area, and add the line R_LIBS=/data/Rpackages/ to it. This means that whenever you start R, the directory /data/Rpackages/ is added to the list of places to look for R packages and so:

> install.packages("ggplot2") > library(ggplot2)

just works!

Setting the repository

Every time you install a R package, you are asked which repository R should use. To set the repository and avoid having to specify this at every package install, simply:

create a file .Rprofile in your home area.
Add the following piece of code to it:

cat(".Rprofile: Setting UK repositoryn") r = getOption("repos") # hard code the UK repo for CRAN r["CRAN"] = "http://cran.uk.r-project.org" options(repos = r) rm(r)

I found this tip in a stackoverflow answer .

Bpipe - a tool for running and managing bioinformatics pipelines

Radha Agarkar — Sat, 21 May 2016 22:42:16 -0500

Bpipe provides a platform for running big bioinformatics jobs that consist of a series of processing stages - known as 'pipelines'.

January 20th, 2016 - New! Bpipe 0.9.9 released!
Download latest, all
Documentation
Mailing List (Google Group)

Bpipe has been published in Bioinformatics! If you use Bpipe, please cite:

Sadedin S, Pope B & Oshlack A, Bpipe: A Tool for Running and Managing Bioinformatics Pipelines, Bioinformatics

Address of the bookmark: http://docs.bpipe.org/

WGS Celera Assembler version 8.3rc2

Jit — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 04:45:40 -0500

These are release notes for Celera Assembler version 8.3rc2, which was released on May 24, 2015.

This distribution package provides a stable, tested, documented version of the software. The distribution is usable on most Unix-like platforms, and some platforms have pre-compiled binary distributions ready for installation.

The source code package includes full source code (revision 4627), Makefiles, and scripts. A subset of the kmer package (http://kmer.sourceforge.net/, version r1994), used by some modules of Celera Assembler, is included. This distribution includes [http://samtools.sourceforge.net/ SAMtools], [http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/software/jellyfish/ Jellyfish 2.0], [https://github.com/pbjd/pbutgcns PBUTGCNS], [https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/pbdagcon PBDAGCON], [https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/BLASR BLASR], and parts of the [https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/FALCON/tree/v0.1.3 Falcon assembler].

Full documentation can be found online at http://wgs-assembler.sourceforge.net/.

Interesting scripts within it

urbe@urbo214b[bin] ls []
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 11K Apr 10 11:41 addCNSToStore
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 575K Apr 10 11:41 addReadsToUnitigs
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 128K Apr 10 11:41 analyzeBest
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 257K Apr 10 11:41 analyzePosMap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,5M Apr 10 11:41 analyzeScaffolds
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 224K Apr 10 11:41 asmOutputFasta
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 448K Apr 10 11:41 asmOutputStatistics
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 2,4K Apr 10 11:41 asmToAGP.pl
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 7,6M Apr 10 11:41 blasr
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,6M Apr 10 11:41 bogart
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 183K Apr 10 11:41 bogus
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 272K Apr 10 11:41 bogusness
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 247K Apr 10 11:41 buildPosMap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 213K Apr 10 11:41 buildRefContigs
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 990K Apr 10 11:41 buildUnitigs
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 18K Apr 10 11:41 ca2ace.pl
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 12K Apr 10 11:41 caqc_help.ini
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 61K Apr 10 11:41 caqc.pl
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 23K Apr 10 11:41 cat-corrects
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 24K Apr 10 11:41 cat-erates
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,9M Apr 10 11:41 cgw
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,4M Apr 10 11:41 cgwDump
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 204K Apr 10 11:41 chimChe
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 201K Apr 10 11:40 chimera
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 220K Apr 10 11:41 classifyMates
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 201K Apr 10 11:41 classifyMatesApply
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 215K Apr 10 11:41 classifyMatesPairwise
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 366K Apr 10 11:41 computeCoverageStat
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 9,8K Apr 10 11:41 convert-fasta-to-v2.pl
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 48K Apr 10 11:41 convertOverlap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 119K Apr 10 11:41 convertSamToCA
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 20K Apr 10 11:41 convertToPBCNS
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 197K Apr 10 11:41 correct-frags
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 259K Apr 10 11:41 correct-olaps
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 520K Apr 10 11:41 correctPacBio
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 540K Apr 10 11:41 ctgcns
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 162K Apr 10 11:40 deduplicate
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 37K Apr 10 11:41 demotePosMap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,5M Apr 10 11:41 dumpCloneMiddles
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 124K Apr 10 11:41 dumpPBRLayoutStore
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,3M Apr 10 11:41 dumpSingletons
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 171K Apr 10 11:41 erate-estimate
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 221K Apr 10 11:40 estimate-mer-threshold
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,5M Apr 10 11:41 extendClearRanges
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,3M Apr 10 11:41 extendClearRangesPartition
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 205K Apr 10 11:40 extractmessages
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 7,2M Apr 10 11:41 falcon_sense
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 9,8K Apr 10 11:41 fastaToCA
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 124K Apr 10 11:40 fastqAnalyze
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 137K Apr 10 11:40 fastqSample
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 62K Apr 10 11:40 fastqSimulate
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 121K Apr 10 11:40 fastqSimulate-sort
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 246K Apr 10 11:40 fastqToCA
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 140K Apr 10 11:41 filterOverlap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 341K Apr 10 11:40 finalTrim
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 228K Apr 10 11:41 fixUnitigs
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 147K Apr 10 11:40 fragmentDepth
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 29K Apr 10 11:41 fragsInVars
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 545K Apr 10 11:41 frgs2clones
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 398K Apr 10 11:40 gatekeeper
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 139K Apr 10 11:40 gatekeeperbench
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 167K Apr 10 11:40 gkpStoreCreate
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 147K Apr 10 11:40 gkpStoreDumpFASTQ
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 184K Apr 10 11:41 greedyFragmentTiling
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,6K Apr 10 11:41 greedy_layout_to_IUM
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 142K Apr 10 11:40 initialTrim
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 967K Apr 10 11:41 jellyfish
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 219K Apr 10 11:41 markRepeatUnique
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 273K Apr 10 11:40 markUniqueUnique
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 114K Apr 10 11:40 mercy
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 3,8K Apr 10 11:41 mergeqc.pl
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 422K Apr 10 11:40 merTrim
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 125K Apr 10 11:40 merTrimApply
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 376K Apr 10 11:40 meryl
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 176K Apr 10 11:41 metagenomics_ovl_analyses
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 297K Apr 10 11:41 olap-from-seeds
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 275K Apr 10 11:41 outputLayout
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 229K Apr 10 11:41 overlapInCore
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 144K Apr 10 11:40 overlap_partition
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 179K Apr 10 11:41 overlapStats
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 179K Apr 10 11:41 overlapStore
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 153K Apr 10 11:41 overlapStoreBucketizer
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 175K Apr 10 11:41 overlapStoreBuild
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 33K Apr 10 11:41 overlapStoreIndexer
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 48K Apr 10 11:41 overlapStoreSorter
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 604K Apr 10 11:40 overmerry
lrwxrwxrwx 1 urbe urbe 4 Apr 10 11:41 pacBioToCA -> PBcR
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 131K Apr 10 11:41 PBcR
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 2,9M Apr 10 11:41 pbdagcon
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,9M Apr 10 11:41 pbutgcns
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 201K Apr 10 11:40 remove_fragment
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 153K Apr 10 11:40 removeMateOverlap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 2,5K Apr 10 11:41 replaceUIDwithName-fastq
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,2K Apr 10 11:41 replaceUIDwithName-posmap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,3M Apr 10 11:41 resolveSurrogates
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 139K Apr 10 11:41 rewriteCache
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 232K Apr 10 11:41 runCA
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 88K Apr 10 11:41 runCA-dedupe
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 14K Apr 10 11:41 runCA-overlapStoreBuild
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 3,6K Apr 10 11:41 run_greedy.csh
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 297K Apr 10 11:40 sffToCA
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 13K Apr 10 11:40 show-corrects
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 557K Apr 10 11:41 splitUnitigs
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 1,4M Apr 10 11:41 terminator
drwxrwxr-x 2 urbe urbe 4,0K Apr 10 11:41 TIGR
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 526K Apr 10 11:41 tigStore
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 35K Apr 10 11:41 tracearchiveToCA
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 35K Apr 10 11:41 tracedb-to-frg.pl
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 44K Apr 10 11:41 trimFastqByQVWindow
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 18K Apr 10 11:40 uidclient
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 589K Apr 10 11:41 unitigger
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 42K Apr 10 11:40 upgrade-v8-to-v9
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 42K Apr 10 11:40 upgrade-v9-to-v10
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 854 Apr 10 11:41 utg2fasta
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 731K Apr 10 11:41 utgcns
-rwxrwxr-x 1 urbe urbe 561K Apr 10 11:41 utgcnsfix

Address of the bookmark: http://wgs-assembler.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Bioinformatics Head (Bioinformatics Manager III), Cancer Genomics Research Laboratory at Frederick National Laboratory

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 00:19:48 -0500

Frederick National Laboratory seeking an enthusiastic, creative, and seasoned bioinformatics professional to join our leadership team and direct the exceptional Bioinformatics Group at the Cancer Genomics Research Laboratory (CGR). CGR has a diverse team of bioinformatics and computational scientists that support all areas of bioinformatics and data analysis (infrastructure, data QC, pipeline development and maintenance, data curation and sharing, methodology development, statistical analyses, machine learning approaches, and scientific interpretation).

More at https://leidosbiomed.csod.com/ats/careersite/jobdetails.aspx?site=4&c=leidosbiomed&id=2040

Bioinformatician in pipeline development

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 23:43:54 -0600

Are you interested in working with pipeline development in bioinformatics, with the support of competent and friendly colleagues in an international environment? Are you looking for an employer that invests in sustainable employeeship and offers safe, favourable working conditions? We welcome you to apply for a position as Bioinformatician in pipeline development at Uppsala University.

National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden (NBIS) (nbis.se) plays an important role in advancing life science research in Sweden by providing expert support and developing cutting-edge bioinformatics infrastructure. Operating as a truly national initiative, NBIS employs more than 120 bioinformaticians, system developers, and data stewards across multiple locations in Sweden. It serves as the bioinformatics platform at SciLifeLab, a national resource that facilitates research in molecular biosciences by offering access to state-of-the-art technologies and technical expertise. With strong ties to data-producing facilities and ongoing collaborations with leading research groups, NBIS is ideally positioned to support world-class bioinformatics analyses. Furthermore, NBIS is the Swedish node in ELIXIR, the European infrastructure for biological information.

NBIS is seeking an experienced bioinformatician to support both Swedish and international projects. As part of our dynamic team, you will work closely with researchers to process large-scale biological data and contribute to advancing our data analysis infrastructure. Strong problem-solving skills, attention to detail, and the ability to troubleshoot complex bioinformatics pipelines are essential for success in this role. Flexibility and a willingness to learn are also important, as NBIS continually adapts to meet the evolving needs of the Swedish research community.

More at https://www.uu.se/en/about-uu/join-us/jobs-and-vacancies/job-details?query=778701

Amity University Bioinformatics Summer Program - Kolkata

eliabrodsky — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 21:27:10 -0500

Registrations are now open for the 2019 Summer Bioinformatics Training program at Amity University, Kolkata. The program will focus on introductory topics for life science students. We will review important history, topics and challenges bioinformatics can help address in the context of basic research, discovery and industry.

Read more: https://edu.t-bio.info/amity-university-summer-bioinformatics-program-registrations-are-open/

Bioinformatics Scientist, Production Bioinformatics @ South San Francisco, CA

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 08:45:24 -0500

wist is looking for a Bioinformatics Scientist to join our Production Bioinformatics Team. You will work alongside research scientists, software engineers and data scientists to further deliver on our mission to expand access to best-in-class synthetic biology and next-generation sequencing applications. You will be developing and engineering tools to better evaluate and build hardened, production quality pipelines, optimize data quality, and automate lab and bioinformatics processes. Our ideal candidate is an organized problem solver with a background in developing and building novel production-quality bioinformatics tools and packages. Equally excellent communication skills and a proven ability to work independently are required.

More at https://boards.greenhouse.io/twistbioscience/jobs/3135495?gh_src=9ecc0b941us

BioContainers

Jit — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 05:29:46 -0600

BioContainers is a community-driven project that provides the infrastructure and basic guidelines to create, manage and distribute bioinformatics packages (e.g conda) and containers (e.g docker, singularity). BioContainers is based on the popular frameworks Conda, Docker and Singularity.

Address of the bookmark: https://biocontainers.pro/#/

Next generation sequencing in R or bioconductor environment

John Parker — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 18:03:09 -0500

There are many R software and bioconductor packages for NGS data analysis, some of them are as follows

Biostrings

The Biostrings package from Bioconductor provides an advanced environment for efficient sequence management and analysis in R. It contains many speed and memory effective string containers, string matching algorithms, and other utilities, for fast manipulation of large sets of biological sequences. The objects and functions provided by Biostrings form the basis for many other sequence analysis packages. Documentation

IRanges Overview

IRanges provides the low-level infrastructure and containers for handling sets of integer ranges within Bioconductor's BioC-Seq domain. Its classes and methods provide support for many more high-level packages like GenomicRanges, ShortRead, Rsamtools, etc. Documentation

GenomicRanges Overview

The GenomicRanges package serves as the foundation for representing genomic locations within the Bioconductor project. It is built upon the IRanges infrastructure and defines three major data containers - GRanges, GRangesList and GappedAlignments - which are supporting other important BioC-Seq packages including ShortRead, Rsamtools, rtracklayer, GenomicFeatures and BSgenome. Compared to the IRanges container, the GRanges/GRangesList classes are more flexible and extensible to store additional information about sequence ranges, such as chromosome identifiers (sequence space), strand information and annotation data. Documentation

Motif Discovery

cosmo

The cosmo package allows to search a set of unaligned DNA sequences for a shared motif that may function as transcription factor binding site. The algorithm extends the popular motif discovery tool MEME (Bailey and Elkan, 1995) in that it allows the search to be supervised by specifying a set of constraints that the motif to be discovered must satisfy. Documentation

BCRANK

BCRANK is a method that takes a ranked list of genomic regions as input and outputs short DNA sequences that are overrepresented in some part of the list. The algorithm was developed for detecting transcription factor (TF) binding sites in a large number of enriched regions from high-throughput ChIP-chip or ChIP-seq experiments, but it can be applied to any ranked list of DNA sequences. Documentation

rGADEM: Documentation

MotIV: Documentation

ShortRead

The ShortRead package provides input, quality control, filtering, parsing, and manipulation functionality for short read sequences produced by high throughput sequencing technologies. While support is provided for many sequencing technologies, this package is primairly focused on Solexa/Illumina reads. Documentation

Rsamtools

Rsamtools provides functions for parsing and inspecting samtools BAM formatted binary alignment data. SAM/BAM is quickly becoming a universal standard alignment format, and is now supported by a wide variety of alignment tools. Documentation

Samtools Website
BWA (Burrows-Wheeler Alignment) Website

Additional tools for SNP analysis:

snpMatrix

BSgenome

BSgenome provides an object oriented infrastructure for interacting with a Biostring based genome sequence. BSgenome packages exist for many common genomes, and can be created to represent custom genomes. See the "How to forge a BSgenome data package" Vignette for instructions to create a new BSgenome package if a prebuilt package does not exist for your organism. Documentation

rtracklayer

rtracklayer provides an interface for exporting annotation feature data to various genome browsers and file formats (such as GFF). See the Small RNA Profiling exercise for an example of using rtracklayer to visualize alignment coverage. Documentation

biomaRt

The biomaRt package, provides an interface to a growing collection of databases implementing the BioMart software suite (http:// www.biomart.org). The package enables online retrieval of large amounts of data in a uniform way without the need to know the underlying database schemas. This data is retrieved automatically via the Internet, so it's recommended that you cache the data locally, or check versions if your code will be adversely affected by updates to these data. Documentation

ChIP-Seq Analysis Packages

Bioconductor provides various packages for analyzing and visualizing ChIP-Seq data. Only a small selection of these packages is introduced here. Additional useful introductions to this topic are: BioC ChIP-seq Case Study and BioC ChIP-Seq.

chipseq

The chipseq package combines a variety of HT-Seq packages to a pipeline for ChIP-Seq data analysis. Documentation

BayesPeak

BayesPeak is a peak calling package for identifying DNA binding sites of proteins in ChIP-Seq experiments. Its algorithm uses hidden Markov models (HMM) and Bayesian statistical methods. The following sample code introduces the identification of peaks with the BayesPeak package as well as the incorporation of read coverage information obtained by the chipseq package. Documentation [ Publication ]

PICS

The PICS package applies probabilistic inference to aligned-read ChIP-Seq data in order to identify regions bound by transcription factors. PICS identifies enriched regions by modeling local concentrations of directional reads, and uses DNA fragment length prior information to discriminate closely adjacent binding events via a Bayesian hierarchical t-mixture model. The following sample code uses the test data set from the above BayesPeak package in order to compare the results from both methods by identifying their consensus peak set. Documentation [ Publication ]

ChIPpeakAnno

The ChIPpeakAnno package provides. batch annotation of the peaks identified from either ChIP-seq or ChIP-chip experiments. It includes functions to retrieve the sequences around peaks, obtain enriched Gene Ontology (GO) terms, find the nearest gene, exon, miRNA or custom features such as most conserved elements and other transcription factor binding sites supplied by users. The package leverages the biomaRt, IRanges, Biostrings, BSgenome, GO.db, multtest and stat packages. Documentation

Additional ChIP-Seq Packages

DiffBind: Documentation

MOSAICS: Documentation

iSeq: Documentation

ChIPseqR: Documentation

ChiPsim: Documentation

CSAR: Documentation

ChIP-Seq Pipeline: PICS, rGADEM and MotIV (developer web site)

SPP: ChIP-seq processing pipeline

SPP Tutorial

MACS

SIPeS

RNA-Seq Analysis

Counting Reads that Overlap with Annotation Ranges

The GenomicRanges package provides support for importing into R short read alignment data in BAM format (via Rsamtools) and associating them with genomic feature ranges, such as exons or genes. This way one can quantify the number of reads aligning to annotated genomic regions. The package defines general purpose containers for storing genomic intervals as well as more specialized containers for storing alignments against a reference genome. The two main functions for read counting provided by this infrastructure are countOverlaps and summarizeOverlaps. For their proper usage, it is important to read the corresponding PDF manual. Documentation

Differential Gene Expression Analysis with DESeq

The DESeq package contains functions to call differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in count tables based on a model using the negative binomial distribution. It expects as input a data frame with the raw read counts per region/gene of interest (rows) for each test sample (columns). Such a count table can be imported into R or generated from BAM alignment files using the countOverlaps function as introduced above. Documentation

Differential Gene Expression Analysis with edgeR

The edgeR package uses empirical Bayes estimation and exact tests based on the negative binomial distribution to call differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in count data.

Documentation

A variety of additional R packages are available for normalizing RNA-Seq read count data and identifying differentially expressed genes (DEG):

easyRNASeq (simplifies read counting per genome feature)

DEXSeq (Inference of differential exon usage); parathyroidSE explains how to generate exon read counts in R

DEGseq

baySeq (also see: segmentSeq)

Genominator (Bullard et al. 2010)

Detection of Alternative Splice Junctions

Another utility of RNA-Seq experiments is the analysis of splice junctions. The following software suggestions provide this utility:

ERANGE
TopHat

SpliceMap

SplitSeek

DNA-Methylation Data Analysis

methylPipe
bsseq
BiSeq
Much more under BiocViews

HT-Seq Data Visualization

ggbio: ggplot2 extension for genomics data (online manual) Gviz: Plotting data and annotation information along genomic coordinates HilbertVis: Hilbert genome plots

GenomeGraphs: Plotting genomic information from Ensembl

TileQC: Flow Cell Quality Visualization

rtracklayer: R interface to genome browsers

genoPlotR: Plotting maps of genes and genomes

Genominator: Tools for storing, accessing, analyzing and visualizing genomic data.

To install all packages

source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite()
biocLite(c("ShortRead", "Biostrings", "IRanges", "BSgenome", "rtracklayer", "biomaRt", "chipseq", "ChIPpeakAnno", "Rsamtools", "BayesPeak", "PICS", "GenomicRanges", "DESeq", "edgeR", "leeBamViews", "GenomicFeatures", "BSgenome.Celegans.UCSC.ce2"))

Courses to Get You Started with Bioinformatics

LEGE — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 13:07:19 -0500

Bioinformatics is now at the heart of modern biology and medicine. From decoding genomes and predicting antimicrobial resistance, to developing personalized medicine and advancing evolutionary research, computational skills are no longer optional — they are essential.

Yet, for many students, biologists, and even computer scientists, the question is: “Where do I begin?” With so many platforms, books, and tutorials available, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

To make it easier, I’ve compiled 10 excellent resources — ranging from beginner-friendly introductions to advanced computational genomics courses. Many of these are freely available, created by pioneers in the field, and widely used in classrooms and research labs worldwide.

Whether you are a complete beginner or looking to strengthen your foundations, these courses will help you build the skills needed to analyze biological data, design workflows, and think computationally about complex biological systems.