BOL: Related items

Aurora: A New Detective for Bacterial Genomes

BioStar — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:31:00 -0500

Imagine trying to solve a mystery with thousands of clues—but some of the clues are labelled incorrectly.

That is the challenge researchers face when studying how bacteria adapt to different environments. A bacterial gene may appear to be linked to a particular habitat, when the real reason is simply that closely related bacteria happen to live there.

In their 2025 Genome Biology paper, Bujdoš, Walter, and O’Toole introduce aurora, a machine-learning tool designed to tackle this problem.

Aurora identifies potentially mislabeled or unusual bacterial strains before performing genome-wide association studies (GWAS). By cleaning up the dataset and accounting for bacterial evolutionary relationships, it can help researchers find genetic features that are more genuinely connected to habitat adaptation.

The researchers tested aurora using simulated and real bacterial datasets and found that it could recover important genetic associations even when datasets contained misleading labels.

The bigger lesson is simple: better biological discoveries often begin with better data.

Aurora gives researchers a new way to separate real genetic clues from misleading ones—and could help us better understand how bacteria adapt, survive, and evolve in the environments they call home.

Based on Bujdoš et al., “aurora: a machine learning GWAS tool for analyzing microbial habitat adaptation,” Genome Biology (2025).[Read the original paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-025-03524-7?)

Luo Lab | Symbiosis Genomics & Evolution

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 03:30:30 -0500

We study the evolutionary genomics of marine invertebrates to understand their origins and diversity. Our lab combines high-throughput sequencing and single-cell transcriptomics to explore a wide range of non-model systems. We are particularly interested in how evolutionary novelty arises, with a focus on animal development and photosymbiosis.

Research Directions

Stony corals: evolution of novelty and photosymbiosis

Symbiotic acoels: cell type evolution and photosymbiosis

Animal genomes: structural evolution and gene regulation

https://sgel.biodiv.tw/home

ALE: a Generic Assembly Likelihood Evaluation Framework for Assessing the Accuracy of Genome and Metagenome Assemblies

Neel — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 03:38:43 -0500

Assembly Likelihood Evaluation (ALE) framework that overcomes these limitations, systematically evaluating the accuracy of an assembly in a reference-independent manner using rigorous statistical methods. This framework is comprehensive, and integrates read quality, mate pair orientation and insert length (for paired-end reads), sequencing coverage, read alignment and k-mer frequency. ALE pinpoints synthetic errors in both single and metagenomic assemblies, including single-base errors, insertions/deletions, genome rearrangements and chimeric assemblies presented in metagenomes. At the genome level with real-world data, ALE identifies three large misassemblies from the Spirochaeta smaragdinae finished genome, which were all independently validated by Pacific Biosciences sequencing. At the single-base level with Illumina data, ALE recovers 215 of 222 (97%) single nucleotide variants in a training set from a GC-rich Rhodobacter sphaeroides genome. Using real Pacific Biosciences data, ALE identifies 12 of 12 synthetic errors in a Lambda Phage genome, surpassing even Pacific Biosciences' own variant caller, EviCons. In summary, the ALE framework provides a comprehensive, reference-independent and statistically rigorous measure of single genome and metagenome assembly accuracy, which can be used to identify misassemblies or to optimize the assembly process.

More at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23303509

Address of the bookmark: http://sc932.github.io/ALE/about.html

LoFreq*: A sequence-quality aware, ultra-sensitive variant caller for NGS data

BioStar — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 03:24:22 -0600

LoFreq* (i.e. LoFreq version 2) is a fast and sensitive variant-caller for inferring SNVs and indels from next-generation sequencing data. It makes full use of base-call qualities and other sources of errors inherent in sequencing (e.g. mapping or base/indel alignment uncertainty), which are usually ignored by other methods or only used for filtering.

https://github.com/CSB5/lofreq

http://csb5.github.io/lofreq/installation/

https://github.com/CSB5/lofreq/tree/master/dist

Address of the bookmark: http://csb5.github.io/lofreq/

JPred4: A Protein Secondary Structure Prediction Server

Poonam Mahapatra — Fri, 29 Dec 2017 16:14:28 -0600

JPred4 (http://www.compbio.dundee.ac.uk/jpred4) is the latest version of the popular JPred protein secondary structure prediction server which provides predictions by the JNet algorithm, one of the most accurate methods for secondary structure prediction.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.compbio.dundee.ac.uk/jpred4/

CONTIGuator !

BioStar — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 01:27:58 -0500

CONTIGuator is a Python script for Linux environments whose purpose is to speed-up the bacterial genome assembly process and to obtain a first insight of the genome structure using the well-known artemis comparison tool (ACT).

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

dcGOR

Martin Jones — Sat, 08 Nov 2014 14:54:28 -0600

An R package for analysing ontologies and protein domain annotations has been published in PLoS Computational Biology (http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003929). The package is distributed as part of CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org/package=dcGOR), and also at GitHub for version control.

The dedicated website is available in http://supfam.org/dcGOR, from which several demos are also provided:

1. Analysing SCOP domains: http://supfam.org/dcGOR/demo-Fang.html

2. Analysing Pfam domains: http://supfam.org/dcGOR/demo-Basu.html

3. Analysing InterPro domains: http://supfam.org/dcGOR/demo-Customisation.html

RASTtk : algorithm for building custom annotation pipelines and annotating batches of genomes

Abhi — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 11:07:59 -0500

The RAST (Rapid Annotation using Subsystem Technology) annotation engine was built in 2008 to annotate bacterial and archaeal genomes. It works by offering a standard software pipeline for identifying genomic features (i.e., protein-encoding genes and RNA) and annotating their functions. Recently, in order to make RAST a more useful research tool and to keep pace with advancements in bioinformatics, it has become desirable to build a version of RAST that is both customizable and extensible. In this paper, we describe the RAST tool kit (RASTtk), a modular version of RAST that enables researchers to build custom annotation pipelines. RASTtk offers a choice of software for identifying and annotating genomic features as well as the ability to add custom features to an annotation job. RASTtk also accommodates the batch submission of genomes and the ability to customize annotation protocols for batch submissions. This is the first major software restructuring of RAST since its inception.

More at http://www.nature.com/articles/srep08365

Address of the bookmark: http://rast.nmpdr.org/

MOSAIK: A Hash-Based Algorithm for Accurate Next-Generation Sequencing Short-Read Mapping

Neel — Fri, 20 May 2016 18:53:49 -0500

MOSAIK is a stable, sensitive and open-source program for mapping second and third-generation sequencing reads to a reference genome. Uniquely among current mapping tools, MOSAIK can align reads generated by all the major sequencing technologies, including Illumina, Applied Biosystems SOLiD, Roche 454, Ion Torrent and Pacific BioSciences SMRT. Indeed, MOSAIK was the only aligner to provide consistent mappings for all the generated data (sequencing technologies, low-coverage and exome) in the 1000 Genomes Project. To provide highly accurate alignments, MOSAIK employs a hash clustering strategy coupled with the Smith-Waterman algorithm. This method is well-suited to capture mismatches as well as short insertions and deletions. To support the growing interest in larger structural variant (SV) discovery, MOSAIK provides explicit support for handling known-sequence SVs, e.g. mobile element insertions (MEIs) as well as generating outputs tailored to aid in SV discovery.

Address of the bookmark: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0090581

GAEMR

Jit — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 06:18:37 -0500

The Genome Assembly Evaluation Metrics and Reporting (GAEMR) package is an assembly analysis framework composed a number of integrated modules. These modules can be executed as a single program to generate a complete analysis report, or executed individually to generate specific charts and tables. GAEMR standardizes input by converting a variety of read types to Binary Alignment Map (BAM) format, allowing a single input format to be entered into GAEMR’s analysis pipeline, hence enabling the generation of standard reports.

GAEMR’s analysis philosophy is centered on contiguity, correctness, and completeness -- how many pieces in an assembly composed of, how well those pieces accurately represent the genome sequenced, and how much of that genome is represented by those pieces. By performing over twenty different analyses based on these principles, GAEMR gives a clear picture of the condition of a genome assembly.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.broadinstitute.org/software/gaemr/