BOL: Related items

The Gene Detectives: How a New Computational Tool Is Helping Us Read the History Written in Our Genes

BioStar — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:23:42 -0500

Imagine opening an ancient family album with no names, dates, or captions. Some photographs are missing, others have been copied, and a few show people who look almost identical. Your challenge is to discover who is related to whom and reconstruct the family story. In evolutionary biology, scientists face a similar mystery when they study genes. Every genome contains clues about its past, but genes can be duplicated, lost, and changed over millions of years, making their history difficult to trace.

A recent study published in PLOS Computational Biology introduces REvolutionH-tl 2.0 (https://pypi.org/project/revolutionhtl/), a computational tool designed to help solve this mystery. The software analyzes protein sequences and identifies evolutionary relationships between genes. It can help researchers detect important events such as gene duplication, gene loss, and speciation, allowing them to reconstruct how genes evolved across different organisms.

What makes the tool especially interesting is its focus on both speed and interpretation. The researchers compared REvolutionH-tl 2.0 with several existing computational tools and reported that it achieved competitive accuracy while requiring less computational time in their tests. The tool also includes visualization features, helping researchers turn complicated genetic data into evolutionary stories that are easier to explore.

Genes are more than simple sequences of DNA; they are records of life’s long history. Each surviving gene carries traces of the changes that shaped it. By bringing together computational analysis and visualization, REvolutionH-tl 2.0 acts like a detective, helping scientists uncover these hidden stories. Ultimately, tools like this can improve our understanding of how genomes evolved and how genes acquired the roles they perform today.

More at https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013017

KOBAS: a web server for gene/protein functional annotation and functional gene set enrichment

Jit — Fri, 19 Oct 2018 09:36:11 -0500

KOBAS 3.0 is a web server for gene/protein functional annotation (Annotate module) and functional gene set enrichment(Enrichment module). For Annotate module, it accepts gene list as input, including IDs or sequences, and generates annotations for each gene based on multiple databases about pathways, diseases, and Gene Ontology. For Enrichment module, it can accept either gene list or gene expression data as input, and generates enriched gene sets, corresponding name, p-value or a probability of enrichment and enrichment score based on results of multiple methods.

Address of the bookmark: http://kobas.cbi.pku.edu.cn/

jobTree based python wrapper to run the genome simulation tool suite Evolver

Jit — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 16:26:32 -0600

evolverSimControl (eSC) can be used to simulate multi-chromosome genome evolution on an arbitrary phylogeny (Newick format). In addition to simply running evolver, eSC also automatically creates statistical summaries of the simulation as it runs including text and image files. Also included are convenience scripts to: check on a running simulation and see detailed status and logging information; extract fasta sequence files from the leaf nodes of a completed simulation; extract pairwise multiple alignment files (.maf) from leaf and branch nodes from a completed simulation and with the help of mafJoin, join them together into a single maf covering the entire simulation.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/dentearl/evolverSimControl

EAGLER: a scaffolding tool for long reads.

Jit — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 05:26:03 -0500

EAGLER is a scaffolding tool for long reads. The scaffolder takes as input a draft genome created by any NGS assembler and a set of long reads. The long reads are used to extend the contigs present in the NGS draft and possibly join overlapping contigs. EAGLER supports both PacBio and Oxford Nanopore reads.

The tool should be compatible with most UNIX flavors and has been successfully tested on the following operating systems:

Mac OS X 10.11.1
Mac OS X 10.10.3
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

https://bib.irb.hr/datoteka/844447.Diplomski_2015_Luka_terbi.pdf

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/mculinovic/EAGLER

JBrowse: Embeddable genome browser built completely with JavaScript and HTML5

Jit — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 09:19:56 -0500

JBrowse is a fast, embeddable genome browser built completely with JavaScript and HTML5, with optional run-once data formatting tools written in Perl. Headline Features: Fast, smooth scrolling and zooming. Explore your genome with unparalleled speed. Scales easily to multi-gigabase genomes and deep-coverage sequencing. Quickly open and view data files on your computer without uploading them to any server. Supports GFF3, BED, FASTA, Wiggle, BigWig, BAM, VCF (with either .tbi or .idx index), REST, and more. BAM, BigBed, BigWig, and VCF data are displayed directly from chunks of the compressed binary files, no conversion needed. Includes an optional “faceted” track selector (see demo) suitable for large installations with thousands of tracks. Very light server resource requirements. In fact, JBrowse has no back-end server code, just tools for formatting data files to be read directly over HTTP. Serve huge datasets from a single low-cost cloud instance. Can run as a stand-alone app on OSX and Windows using the Electron platform Highly extensible plugin architecture, with a large plugin registry of existing examples here https://gmod.github.io/jbrowse-registry https://jbrowse.org/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/GMOD/jbrowse

Sequence Ontology Bioinformatics Analysis (SOBA) tool to provide a simple statistical and graphical summary of an annotated genome

BioStar — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 10:11:13 -0500

We have developed the Sequence Ontology Bioinformatics Analysis (SOBA) tool to provide a simple statistical and graphical summary of an annotated genome. We envisage its use during annotation jamborees, genome comparison and for use by developers for rapid feedback during annotation software development and testing. SOBA also provides annotation consistency feedback to ensure correct use of terminology within annotations, and guides users to add new terms to the Sequence Ontology when required. SOBA is available at http://www.sequenceontology.org/cgi-bin/soba.cgi.

More at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20494974/

Address of the bookmark: http://www.sequenceontology.org/cgi-bin/soba.cgi

VCF Compare !

Rahul Nayak — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 10:30:14 -0600

compare two BWA mapping methods with the online hg18-mapped data

We first operate a rapid inspection of the different BAM files using samtools flagstat. Illumina provided chr21 read mapping obtained with their GA IIx deep sequencing platform <ftp://webdata:webdata@ussd-ftp.illumina.com/Data/SequencingRuns/NA18507_GAIIx_100_chr21.bam>, aligned to the b36/hg18 reference genome)

Address of the bookmark: https://wiki.bits.vib.be/index.php/NGS_Exercise.6#compare_aln_.26_mem_results_with_vcf-compare

Comparative genomics visualisation tools !

Neel — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 05:37:55 -0600

Comparative genomics visualisation tools !

Address of the bookmark: https://cmdcolin.github.io/awesome-genome-visualization/?latest=true&selected=%23BRIG&tag=Comparative

bacLIFE: an automated genome mining tool for identification of lifestyle associated genes

BioStar — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 04:59:14 -0500

bacLIFE is a streamlined computational workflow that annotates bacterial genomes and performs large-scale comparative genomics to predict bacterial lifestyles and to pinpoint candidate genes, denominated lifestyle-associated genes (LAGs), and biosynthetic gene clusters associated with each lifestyle detected. This whole process is divided into different modules:

Clustering module Predicts, clusters and annotates the genes of every input genome
Lifestyle prediction Employs a machine learning model to forecast bacterial lifestyle or other specified metadata
Analitical module (Shiny app) Results from the previous modules are embedded in a user-friendly interface for comprehensive and interactive comparative genomics.

You can find the complete wiki here [https://github.com/Carrion-lab/bacLIFE/wiki/bacLIFE-wiki]

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/Carrion-lab/bacLIFE

CANU: Assembling Large Genomes with Single-Molecule Sequencing and Locality Sensitive Hashing.

Jit — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 11:38:10 -0500

Canu is a fork of the Celera Assembler designed for high-noise single-molecule sequencing (such as the PacBio RSII or Oxford Nanopore MinION). The software is currently alpha level, feel free to use and report issues encountered.

Canu is a hierachical assembly pipeline which runs in four steps:

Detect overlaps in high-noise sequences using MHAP
Generate corrected sequence consensus
Trim corrected sequences
Assemble trimmed corrected sequences

Read the documentation

New release https://github.com/marbl/canu/releases

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/marbl/canu