BOL: Related items

Finding the Hidden Switches: The Story of KiNext and Protein Kinases

LEGE — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 02:51:28 -0500

Every newly sequenced genome contains thousands of proteins, but identifying what each protein does is a much harder task. Among these proteins are protein kinases, important molecular regulators that control processes such as cell growth, development, metabolism, stress responses, and signaling. Finding these kinases and determining which families they belong to can reveal important clues about how an organism functions and has evolved.

This is where KiNext comes into the picture. Introduced in a 2024 study published in BMC Bioinformatics, KiNext is a computational workflow designed to identify and classify protein kinases from predicted protein sequences. Instead of relying on a single search method, it brings together several approaches, including Hidden Markov Models, sequence alignment, phylogenetic analysis, and structural comparison.

The search begins with a simple question: does a protein contain the characteristics of a kinase? Protein kinases can change considerably during evolution, but important regions of their sequences often retain recognizable patterns. KiNext uses Hidden Markov Models, or HMMs, to detect these patterns. An HMM does not require a protein to be an exact match to a known kinase. Instead, it looks for a statistical sequence signature associated with kinase proteins, making it possible to detect more distant candidates.

Once potential kinases are identified, KiNext takes the analysis further. It distinguishes conventional eukaryotic protein kinases from atypical protein kinases and then attempts to classify them into different kinase groups and families. This distinction is important because simply identifying a protein as a kinase does not tell the complete story. Different kinase families can have very different evolutionary histories and biological functions.

The next stage brings evolution into the picture. KiNext can align kinase sequences and construct phylogenetic trees, allowing researchers to examine how newly identified proteins are related to previously characterized kinases. When sequence evidence alone is difficult to interpret, structural information can provide another clue. The workflow can incorporate AlphaFold-predicted structures and Foldseek-based structural comparisons to investigate whether an unusual protein resembles known kinase structures.

The researchers tested KiNext using two very different organisms: the Pacific oyster, Crassostrea gigas, and the green alga Ostreococcus tauri. In C. gigas, KiNext recovered previously reported kinases while identifying additional candidates. Structural analysis provided further evidence for many of the newly detected proteins. In O. tauri, the workflow similarly recovered most previously reported kinases and identified additional candidates while refining some of their classifications.

What makes KiNext particularly interesting is not just its ability to find kinases, but how the entire analysis is organized. The workflow uses Nextflow, allowing the different computational steps to be connected into a reproducible pipeline. Containers can also help manage software dependencies, making it easier to run the workflow across different computing environments.

This reproducibility becomes increasingly important as the number of available genomes continues to grow. A researcher studying one organism may be able to perform an analysis manually, but repeating the same process across hundreds or thousands of genomes quickly becomes impractical. A standardized workflow provides a way to perform the analysis consistently while keeping track of how the results were generated.

At its core, KiNext demonstrates a broader change taking place in modern genomics. Sequencing a genome provides an enormous amount of information, but the real scientific challenge begins afterward: understanding what all those sequences mean. Protein kinases are only one part of this larger puzzle, yet they are particularly important because they act as molecular switches throughout the cell.

By combining sequence profiles, evolutionary analysis, and structural evidence within a reproducible computational framework, KiNext provides researchers with a systematic way to uncover these molecular switches. Its real value lies not only in finding more kinases, but in making the process scalable, repeatable, and easier to apply to new genomes.

As genome sequencing continues to expand across the tree of life, tools such as KiNext can help turn enormous collections of protein sequences into meaningful biological stories—one kinase at a time.

Run miniasm assembler on nanopore reads !

Jit — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 04:07:50 -0600

Miniasm is a very fast OLC-based de novo assembler for noisy long reads. It takes all-vs-all read self-mappings (typically by minimap) as input and outputs an assembly graph in the GFA format. Different from mainstream assemblers, miniasm does not have a consensus step. It simply concatenates pieces of read sequences to generate the final unitig sequences. Thus the per-base error rate is similar to the raw input reads.

Find the detail of the reads repeats:

fq2fa ONT_A.fastq ONT_A.fasta

minimap2 -xava-ont ONT_A.fasta ONT_A.fasta -t10 -X > AONT.paf

awk '{if($1==$6){print}}' AONT.paf > AONTself.paf

awk '$5=="-"' AONTself.paf | awk '{print $1}'| sort|uniq > invertedrepeat.list

Generated a few palindrome and repeats plots (highlighting only repeats largest than 10, 20 and 30 kb)

minidot -f 5 -m 30000 AONTself.paf > AONTself30000.eps
sed 's/_template_pass_FAH31515//' AONTself30000.eps > AONTself30000final.eps

minidot -f 5 -m 20000 AONTself.paf > AONTself20000.eps
sed 's/_template_pass_FAH31515//' AONTself20000.eps > AONTself20000final.eps

minidot -f 5 -m 10000 AONTself.paf > AONTself10000.eps
sed 's/_template_pass_FAH31515//' AONTself10000.eps > AONTself10000final.eps

Assemble with miniasm:

miniasm -f ONT_A.fasta AONT.paf > AONT.gfa
grep '^S' AONT.gfa |awk '{print ">"$2"\n"$3}' > AONT_miniasm.fasta

minimap2 -xasm10 AONT_miniasm.fasta AONT_miniasm.fasta -t1 -X > AONT_miniasm.paf

awk '{if($1==$6){print}}' AONT_miniasm.paf > AONT_miniasm_self.paf

minidot -f 5 -m 10000 AONT_miniasm_self.paf > AONT_miniasm_self10000.eps

Njoy the assembly !

Frequent Paired-end reads (PE 2x100) mapping command lines

Jit — Tue, 15 May 2018 08:59:29 -0500

bowtie2 -x hs37m -X 650 -q -1 r1.fq -2 r2.fq -S r12.bowtie2.sam

bwa aln hs37m.fa r1.fq > r1.sai && bwa aln hs37m.fa r2.fq > r2.sai \
&& bwa sampe hs37m r1.sai r2.sai r1.fq r2.fq > r12.bwa.sam

bwa bwasw ../index/bwa/hs37m.fa r12.fq > r12.bwasw.sam

gsnap -A sam -d hs37m r1.fq r2.fq > r12.gsnap.sam

novoalign -r Random -o SAM -f r1.fq r2.fq -i 500 50 -d hs37m-k14s3.novo > r12.novo.sam

smalt map -f samsoft -i 650 -o r12.smalt-k20s13.sam hs37m-k20s13 r1.fq r2.fq

stampy.py -g hs37m -h hs37m -o r12.stampy.sam -M r1.fq,r2.fq

soap -D hs37m.fa.index -a r1.fq -b r2.fq -l 32 -g 3 -u dummy -2 dummy -o r12.soap

SimLoRD: A read simulator for third generation sequencing reads

Aaryan Lokwani — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 10:40:27 -0500

SimLoRD is a read simulator for third generation sequencing reads and is currently focused on the Pacific Biosciences SMRT error model.

Reads are simulated from both strands of a provided or randomly generated reference sequence.

The reference can be read from a FASTA file or randomly generated with a given GC content. It can consist of several chromosomes, whose structure is respected when drawing reads. (Simulation of genome rearrangements may be incorporated at a later stage.)
The read lengths can be determined in four ways: drawing from a log-normal distribution (typical for genomic DNA), sampling from an existing FASTQ file (typical for RNA), sampling from a a text file with integers (RNA), or using a fixed length
Quality values and number of passes depend on fragment length.
Provided subread error probabilities are modified according to number of passes
Outputs reads in FASTQ format and alignments in SAM format

Address of the bookmark: https://bitbucket.org/genomeinformatics/simlord/

PANDASEQ is a program to align Illumina reads, optionally with PCR primers embedded in the sequence, and reconstruct an overlapping sequence.

BioStar — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 10:19:52 -0500

Development packages for zlib and libbz2 are needed, as well as a standard compiler environment. On Ubuntu, this can be installed via:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libtool automake zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev pkg-config

On MacOS, the Apple Developer tools and Fink (or MacPorts or Brew) must be installed, then:

sudo fink install bzip2-dev pkgconfig

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/neufeld/pandaseq

Pacasus: Correction of palindromes in long reads from PacBio and Nanopore

BioStar — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 05:26:48 -0600

Tool for detecting and cleaning PacBio / Nanopore long reads after whole genome amplification. Check the poster from the Revolutionizing Next-Generation Sequencing (2nd edition) conference in the source folder: https://github.com/swarris/Pacasus/blob/master/vib2017.pdf.

The prepint version is found on http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/08/09/173872

It uses the pyPaSWAS framework for sequence alignment (https://github.com/swarris/pyPaSWAS)

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/swarris/Pacasus

FastGT: an alignment-free method for calling common SNVs directly from raw sequencing reads

Jit — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 03:27:33 -0600

FastGT is a program package for whole-genome genotyping of genome variants directly from raw sequencing reads. It is written in C and runs in Linux. FastGT uses a list of variant-specific k-mer pairs that are unique in human genome, counts the frequency of k-mers in sequencing data and predicts the genotype. All this takes less than 1 hour on average low-cost Linux server.

http://bioinfo.ut.ee/FastGT/

https://github.com/bioinfo-ut/GenomeTester4/

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinfo.ut.ee/FastGT/

Filtlong: quality filtering tool for long reads

Radha Agarkar — Wed, 13 May 2020 10:23:55 -0500

Filtlong is a tool for filtering long reads by quality. It can take a set of long reads and produce a smaller, better subset. It uses both read length (longer is better) and read identity (higher is better) when choosing which reads pass the filter.

Filtlong builds into a stand-alone executable:

git clone https://github.com/rrwick/Filtlong.git
cd Filtlong
make -j
bin/filtlong -h

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/rrwick/Filtlong

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

Stacks

Jitendra Narayan — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 15:52:30 -0600

Stacks is a software pipeline for building loci from short-read sequences, such as those generated on the Illumina platform. Stacks was developed to work with restriction enzyme-based data, such as RAD-seq, for the purpose of building genetic maps and conducting population genomics and phylogeography.

More at http://catchenlab.life.illinois.edu/stacks/

Address of the bookmark: http://catchenlab.life.illinois.edu/stacks/