More at http://faculty.iisertvm.ac.in/~nishantkt/index.html

We developed a novel, self-contained technique named Near HGT, based on the synteny index, to measure the divergence of a gene from its native genomic environment and used it to identify candidate HGT events between closely related strains. The method confirms candidate transferred genes based on the constant relative mutability (CRM). Using CRM, the algorithm assigns a confidence score based on “unusual” sequence divergence. A gene exhibiting exceptional deviations according to both synteny and mutability criteria, is considered a validated HGT product. We first employed the technique to a set of three E. coli strains and detected several highly probable horizontally acquired genes. We then compared the method to existing HGT detection tools using a larger strain data set.

When combined with additional approaches our new algorithm provides richer picture and brings us closer to the goal of detecting all newly acquired genes in a particular strain.

Availability: The method is publicly available athttp://research.haifa.ac.il/~ssagi/software/nearHGT.zip

Address of the bookmark: http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004408

• Speed: Prodigal is an extremely fast gene recognition tool (written in very vanilla C). It can analyze an entire microbial genome in 30 seconds or less.
• Accuracy: Prodigal is a highly accurate gene finder. It correctly locates the 3' end of every gene in the experimentally verified Ecogene data set (except those containing introns). It possesses a very sophisticated ribosomal binding site scoring system that enables it to locate the translation initiation site with great accuracy (96% of the 5' ends in the Ecogene data set are located correctly).
• Specificity: Prodigal's false positive rate compares favorably with other gene identification programs, and usually falls under 5%.
• GC-Content Indifferent: Prodigal performs well even in high GC genomes, with over a 90% perfect match (5'+3') to the Pseudomonas aeruginosa curated annotations.
• Metagenomic Version: Prodigal can run in metagenomic mode and analyze sequences even when the organism is unknown.
• Ease of Use: Prodigal can be run in one step on a single genomic sequence or on a draft genome containing many sequences. It does not need to be supplied with any knowledge of the organism, as it learns all the properties it needs to on its own.
• Open Source: Prodigal source code is freely available under the General Public License.

Address of the bookmark: http://prodigal.ornl.gov/

An IVOM approach exploits compositional biases using variable order motif distributions and captures more reliably the local composition of a sequence compared to fixed-order methods. Optionally the predictions can be parsed into a 2-state 2nd order Hidden Markov Model (HMM), in a change-point detection framework, to optimize the localization of the boundaries of the predicted regions. The predictions (embl format) can be automatically loaded into the freely available Artemis genome viewer.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.sanger.ac.uk/science/tools/alien-hunter

Address of the bookmark: http://genomethreader.org/

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   //__| |    //        //   / / //___/ /  //__| |
  / ___  |   //  ____  //   / / / ___ (   / ___  |
 //    | |  //    / / //   / / //   | |  //    | |
//     | | ((____/ / ((___/ / //    | | //     | |

AGORA is used to generate ancestral genomes for the Genomicus online server for gene order comparison, and has been in constant use in the group since.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/DyogenIBENS/Agora

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1852411/

Features

• Linear representation of several segments of DNA
• Comparisons represented by areas between the segments (like Artemis, for example)
• Reads from common formats: Genbank, EMBL, blast, Mauve, and from user-generated tab files
• Plot several subsegments of the same segment on the same line, separated by a //
• Automatic or manual placement of the segments on the plot
• Add annotations to all the lines
• Create smart, automatic annotations for genomes, based on gene names
• Add a user-generated tree
• Add a global scale or a scale to each line
• Use user-defined graphical functions to represent genes

Address of the bookmark: http://genoplotr.r-forge.r-project.org/

Authors: Qiyun Zhu (qiyunzhu@gmail.com), Katharina Dittmar (katharinad@gmail.com)

Affiliation: Department of Biological Sciences, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, USA

Zhu Q, Kosoy M, Dittmar K. HGTector: an automated method facilitating genome-wide discovery of putative horizontal gene transfers. BMC Genomics. 2014. 15:717.

Usage: Simply execute perl HGTector.pl, or, open GUI.html in a web browser to see a step-by-step wizard.

Download HGTector 0.2.2.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/DittmarLab/HGTector