BOL: Related items

Biggest Human Brain Project (HBP) launched!!!

Rahul Agarwal — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 19:50:55 -0500

"In neuroscience, the project will use neuroinformatics and brain simulation to collect and integrate experimental data, identifying and filling gaps in our knowledge, and prioritising future experiments.

In medicine, the HBP will use medical informatics to identify biological signatures of brain disease, allowing diagnosis at an early stage, before the disease has done irreversible damage, and enabling personalized treatment, adapted to the needs of individual patients. Better diagnosis, combined with disease and drug simulation, will accelerate the discovery of new treatments, drastically lowering the cost of drug discovery.

In computing, new techniques of interactive supercomputing, driven by the needs of brain simulation, will impact a vast range of industries. Devices and systems, modelled after the brain, will overcome fundamental limits on the energy-efficiency, reliability and programmability of current technologies, clearing the road for systems with brain-like intelligence."

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2013/10/07/the-human-brain-project-begins/

(https://www.facebook.com/humanbrainproj/info)

Home Page:

https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/

Jobs:

https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/participate/jobs

HiBC: Human Intestinal Bacteria Collection

BioStar — Wed, 07 May 2025 05:49:19 -0500

The human gut is home to trillions of microorganisms, forming one of the most complex and dynamic microbial ecosystems known to science. The Human Intestinal Bacteria Collection (HiBC) is a pioneering initiative aimed at cataloging, preserving, and studying the diverse bacterial species that inhabit the human gastrointestinal tract. This curated collection serves as a critical resource for researchers working on microbiome-related health, disease, and therapeutics.

What is HiBC?

The Human Intestinal Bacteria Collection (HiBC) is a comprehensive, high-quality reference repository of bacterial isolates derived from human fecal samples. It focuses on anaerobic and facultative anaerobic bacteria that play pivotal roles in digestion, immune modulation, vitamin synthesis, and pathogen resistance. The collection includes both culturable strains and genomic data from unculturable taxa, bridging the gap between culture-dependent and -independent microbiome studies.

Why is HiBC Important?

Understanding Microbiome-Host Interactions
HiBC enables deeper insight into the functions of specific bacterial taxa in the gut. With well-characterized isolates, researchers can conduct mechanistic studies to explore how certain bacteria influence metabolism, inflammation, or mental health.
Precision Probiotics and Therapeutics
By providing access to native human gut microbes, HiBC supports the development of next-generation probiotics, live biotherapeutic products (LBPs), and fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) alternatives.
Standardization and Reproducibility
With standardized cultivation and genomic protocols, HiBC ensures consistency across microbiome research studies, improving reproducibility and comparability of findings.
Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Surveillance
HiBC includes metadata on antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), helping track the spread of AMR in commensal gut bacteria and understanding its implications for human health.

Key Features of HiBC

Culturable Bacteria Repository: A living collection of anaerobic and facultative strains isolated from healthy and diseased individuals worldwide.
Metadata-rich Entries: Each isolate is annotated with host details (age, health status, diet), geographical origin, phenotypic traits, and antibiotic susceptibility profiles.
Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS): High-quality genome assemblies for most strains to support functional and comparative genomics.
Interactive Database Access: User-friendly search and filtering options for strain selection based on taxonomy, function, or clinical relevance.
Cross-linking with Other Databases: Integration with NCBI, GOLD, and Human Microbiome Project (HMP) data for broader context and validation.

Applications of HiBC

Microbiome-based diagnostics and biomarker discovery
Host-microbe interaction studies in gnotobiotic mouse models
Gut microbiome modulation through diet, drugs, or engineered bacteria
Longitudinal studies of gut flora across age, geography, and lifestyle
Environmental and evolutionary microbiology of human-associated bacteria

Accessing HiBC

Researchers and interested parties can explore the HiBC database through its official website: https://www.hibc.rwth-aachen.de/. The platform offers comprehensive information on bacterial isolates, including taxonomy, cultivation conditions, and genomic data, facilitating advanced research in human gut microbiome studies.

Final Thoughts

The HiBC is a cornerstone resource in the rapidly evolving field of microbiome research. As science moves toward personalized medicine and microbial therapeutics, having a reliable and diverse collection of human gut bacteria is not just useful — it's essential. Whether you're a microbiologist, clinician, computational biologist, or biotechnologist, HiBC offers tools to accelerate discovery and innovation in gut microbiome science.

HumCFS: a database of fragile sites in human chromosomes

Abhimanyu Singh — Sun, 21 Apr 2019 20:17:29 -0500

Fragile sites are specific chromosomal region that exhibit an increased frequency of chromosdomal breakge when cells are exposed to replicative stress. Since from the discovery of chromosomal fragile sites/regions (CFS), several line of evidence suggests their involvement in human pathologies and they have been recognized as a preferential site for integration of exogenous oncogenic DNA viruses and hotspots for chromosomal re-arrangement. There is large gap in our knowledge of human CFS region as knowledge about CFS are unequally distributed in literature, which impose a problem in studying these region. In order to address these issues, we develop this platform HumCFS, which provides comprehensive information about experimentally identified CFS at a single source.

https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1186/s12864-018-5330-5?author_access_token=ICASEpyMAQaxLlKw--fyCG_BpE1tBhCbnbw3BuzI2RMA57KLmXk5bZabRUiDQzRFHXd6hjm4kWSiLV3mU5XVMitqXUwFMSo4x5vbfty0EDQ9PW1sd1h923_TYXkvJ5niSwAyZ7BklJ0ujFAFhcKtjw%3D%3D

Address of the bookmark: https://webs.iiitd.edu.in/raghava/humcfs/

Andi

Jit — Fri, 13 May 2016 05:16:35 -0500

This is the andi program for estimating the evolutionary distance between closely related genomes. These distances can be used to rapidly infer phylogenies for big sets of genomes. Because andi does not compute full alignments, it is so efficient that it scales even up to thousands of bacterial genomes.

This readme covers all necessary instructions for the impatient to get andi up and running. For extensive instructions please consult the manual.

More at https://github.com/evolbioinf/andi/

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/01/13/bioinformatics.btu815.full

Kraken: ultrafast metagenomic sequence classification using exact alignments

Jit — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 11:01:44 -0500

Kraken is an ultrafast and highly accurate program for assigning taxonomic labels to metagenomic DNA sequences. Previous programs designed for this task have been relatively slow and computationally expensive, forcing researchers to use faster abundance estimation programs, which only classify small subsets of metagenomic data. Using exact alignment of k-mers, Kraken achieves classification accuracy comparable to the fastest BLAST program. In its fastest mode, Kraken classifies 100 base pair reads at a rate of over 4.1 million reads per minute, 909 times faster than Megablast and 11 times faster than the abundance estimation program MetaPhlAn. Kraken is available at http://ccb.jhu.edu/software/kraken/.

Krona

https://sourceforge.net/p/krona/home/krona/

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4053813/

I-PV: Interactive Protein Sequence Visualization

Jit — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 07:52:51 -0500

I-PV is a interactive data visualization software designed for inspection of protein sequences and mutation information. It is mainly used for Genetics and Bioinformatics. So what exactly makes it standout?

http://i-pv.org/ipv_rec

Address of the bookmark: http://i-pv.org/

Platypus: A Haplotype-Based Variant Caller For Next Generation Sequence Data

Shruti Paniwala — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 06:14:55 -0500

Platypus is a tool designed for efficient and accurate variant-detection in high-throughput sequencing data. By using local realignment of reads and local assembly it achieves both high sensitivity and high specificity. Platypus can detect SNPs, MNPs, short indels, replacements and (using the assembly option) deletions up to several kb. It has been extensively tested on whole-genome, exon-capture, and targeted capture data, it has been run on very large datasets as part of the Thousand Genomes and WGS500 projects, and is being used in clinical sequencing trials in the Mainstreaming Cancer Genetics programme.

Tutorial https://github.com/andyrimmer/Platypus/blob/master/misc/README.txt

Address of the bookmark: http://www.well.ox.ac.uk/platypus

DnaSP: DNA Sequence Polymorphism, is a software package for the analysis of DNA polymorphisms

Neel — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:51:38 -0600

DnaSP, DNA Sequence Polymorphism, is a software package for the analysis of DNA polymorphisms using data from a single locus (a multiple sequence aligned -MSA data), or from several loci (a Multiple-MSA data, such as formats generated by some assembler RAD-seq software). DnaSP can estimate several measures of DNA sequence variation within and between populations in noncoding, synonymous or nonsynonymous sites, or in various sorts of codon positions), as well as linkage disequilibrium, recombination, gene flow and gene conversion parameters.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ub.edu/dnasp/

ULTRA (ULTRA Locates Tandemly Repetitive Areas) : Effective Labeling of Repetitive Genomic Sequence

Abhi — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 16:03:39 -0500

ULTRA is a tool to find and annotate tandem repeats inside genomic sequence. It is able to find repeats of any length and of any period (up to a maximum period of 4000). It can find highly decayed repeats missed by other software, and it will also be able to find very large repeats in highly repetitive sequence, regardless of the size of sequence or length of repeats. ULTRA offers meaningful annotation scores and can produce annotation P-values at user request.

More at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.03.597269v1

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/TravisWheelerLab/ULTRA

Taxoblast : Taxoblast is a pipeline to identify contamination in genomic sequence

Jit — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 08:37:15 -0600

Modern genome sequencing strategies are highly sensitive to contamination making the detection of foreign DNA sequences an important part of analysis pipelines. Here we use Taxoblast, a simple pipeline with a graphical user interface, for the post-assembly detection of contaminating sequences in the published genome of the kelp Saccharina japonica. Analyses were based on multiple blastn searches with short sequence fragments. They revealed a number of probable bacterial contaminations as well as hybrid scaffolds that contain both bacterial and algal sequences. This or similar types of analysis, in combination with manual curation, may thus constitute a useful complement to standard bioinformatics analyses prior to submission of genomic data to public repositories. Our analysis pipeline is open-source and freely available at http://sdittami.altervista.org/taxoblast and via SourceForge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/taxoblast).

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/taxoblast/files/