BOL: Related items

Scalpel

Shruti Paniwala — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 02:07:58 -0500

A team from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has released an algorithm, called Scalpel, for finding insertions and deletions in next generation sequencing data sets. Scalpel, which is open source and available for download on SourceForge, outperformed the popular tools GATK HaplotypeCaller and SOAPindel in test runs on both simulated and real whole human exomes.

Like other indel callers, Scalpel works by performing de novo assembly of regions of interest, so that misalignment to the reference genome cannot obscure the presence of an insertion or deletion. Scalpel's innovation is to repeatedly check its assembly before comparing to the reference genome, to account for simple sequence repeats that are a regular source of error in indel calling. When Scalpel assembles an exon, it collects reads that map to that exon (including partial matches), splits them into k-mers, and creates a de Bruijn graph to span the exon; however, if it detects repeats in the map, it iteratively increases the size of the k-mers by one base until the repeats are eliminated. This ensures that the final assembly of the exon is highly accurate while minimizing compute time.

The Cold Spring Harbor team's validation of Scalpel, published over the weekend in Nature Methods, compares Scalpel's performance on a live whole exome against HaplotypeCaller and SOAPindel. The donor is an individual with serious neurological disorders, which may be linked to a high incidence of indels. One thousand indels from this individual's exome, called by one or more of the informatics pipelines, were selected for focused resequencing. This resequencing revealed a 77% true positive rate for Scalpel calls, dramatically better than the rates for either of the competing tools; Scalpel performed especially well with indels longer than five base pairs, a traditional weak point for indel callers.

Finally, the authors demonstrate Scalpel's use on a large set of genetic data from nearly 600 families who donated samples to the Simons Simplex Collection, a project of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. Scalpel found a very high enrichment for indels in children affected by autism, compared with their unaffected siblings, a pattern that persisted even after excluding common variants.

EXCAVATOR: detecting copy number variants from whole-exome sequencing data

Radha Agarkar — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 10:10:48 -0600

EXCAVATOR, for the detection of copy number variants (CNVs) from whole-exome sequencing data. EXCAVATOR combines a three-step normalization procedure with a novel heterogeneous hidden Markov model algorithm and a calling method that classifies genomic regions into five copy number states. We validate EXCAVATOR on three datasets and compare the results with three other methods. These analyses show that EXCAVATOR outperforms the other methods and is therefore a valuable tool for the investigation of CNVs in largescale projects, as well as in clinical research and diagnostics. EXCAVATOR is freely available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/excavatortool/.

EXCAVATOR is a novel software package for the detection of copy number variants (CNVs) from whole-exome sequencing data.
EXCAVATOR has been published on Genome Biology (http://genomebiology.com/2013/14/10/R120/abstract).

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

MUM&Co is a simple bash script that uses Whole Genome Alignment information provided by MUMmer (v4) to detect variants.

Rahul Nayak — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 04:34:12 -0500

MUM&Co is able to detect:
Deletions, insertions, tandem duplications and tandem contractions (>=50bp & <=150kb)
Inversions (>=1kb) and translocations (>=10kb)

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/SAMtoBAM/MUMandCo

PLAST: A fast, accurate and NGS scalable bank-to-bank sequence similarity search tool

Jit — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 04:10:54 -0600

PLAST is a fast, accurate and NGS scalable bank-to-bank sequence similarity search tool providing significant accelerations of seeds-based heuristic comparison methods, such as the Blast suite of algorithms.

Relying on unique software architecture, PLAST takes full advantage of recent multi-core personal computers without requiring any additional hardware devices.

PLAST stands for Parallel Local Sequence Alignment Search Tool and is was published in BMC Bioinformatics.

PLAST is a general purpose sequence comparison tool providing the following benefits:

PLAST is a high-performance sequence comparison tool designed to compare two sets of sequences (query vs. reference),
Reduces the processing time of sequences comparisons while providing highest quality results,
Contains a fully integrated data filtering engine capable of selecting relevant hits with user-defined criteria (E-Value, identity, coverage, alignment length, etc.),
Does not require any additional hardware, since it is a software solution. It is easy to install, cost-effective, takes full advantage of multi-core processors and uses a small RAM footprint,
Ready to be used on desktop computer, cluster, cloud as well as within distributed system running Hadoop.

https://plast.inria.fr/

Address of the bookmark: https://plast.inria.fr/

HapCUT2: robust and accurate haplotype assembly for diverse sequencing technologies

Jit — Tue, 15 May 2018 07:35:26 -0500

HapCUT2 is a maximum-likelihood-based tool for assembling haplotypes from DNA sequence reads, designed to "just work" with excellent speed and accuracy. We found that previously described haplotype assembly methods are specialized for specific read technologies or protocols, with slow or inaccurate performance on others. With this in mind, HapCUT2 is designed for speed and accuracy across diverse sequencing technologies, including but not limited to: NGS short reads (Illumina HiSeq) clone-based sequencing (Fosmid or BAC clones) SMRT reads (PacBio) Oxford Nanopore reads 10X Genomics Linked-Reads proximity-ligation (Hi-C) reads high-coverage sequencing (>40x coverage-per-SNP) using above technologies combinations of the above technologies (e.g. scaffold long reads with Hi-C reads) See below for specific examples of command line options and best practices for some of these technologies. NOTE: At this time HapCUT2 is for diploid organisms only. VCF input should contain diploid variants. If you use HapCUT2 in your research, please cite: Edge, P., Bafna, V. & Bansal, V. HapCUT2: robust and accurate haplotype assembly for diverse sequencing technologies. Genome Res. gr.213462.116 (2016). doi:10.1101/gr.213462.116

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/vibansal/HapCUT2

P_RNA_scaffolder: a fast and accurate genome scaffolder using paired-end RNA-sequencing reads

BioStar — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 05:19:06 -0500

P_RNA_scaffolder is a novel scaffolding tool using Pair-end RNA-seq to scaffold genome fragments. The method is suitable for most genomes. The program could utilize Illumina Paired-end RNA-sequencing reads from target speciesies. Our method provides another practical alternative to existing mate-pair_based approaches or other Protein-based approaches (for instance, PEP_scaffolder ) for scaffolding genome sequences. The most important feature of this method is to improve the completeness of gene regions and long-coding gene regions (for instance, circRNA).

Address of the bookmark: http://www.fishbrowser.org/software/P_RNA_scaffolder/#

Artificial intelligence is more accurate than doctors in diagnosing breast cancer

BioStar — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 22:12:34 -0600

Artificial intelligence is more accurate than doctors in diagnosing breast cancer from mammograms, a study in the journal Nature suggests.

An international team, including researchers from Google Health and Imperial College London, designed and trained a computer model on X-ray images from nearly 29,000 women.

The algorithm outperformed six radiologists in reading mammograms.

AI was still as good as two doctors working together.

Unlike humans, AI is tireless. Experts say it could improve detection. Read More: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50857759

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

dna2bit: an ultra-fast and accurate genomic distance estimation software

LEGE — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 06:24:58 -0500

dna2bit is a software tool developed in C++11, leveraging the capabilities of OpenMP for parallel computing and the popcount technique for efficient bit manipulation. It has been thoroughly tested using the g++ and clang compilers on both Linux and MacOS platforms.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/lijuzeng/dna2bit

RapClust: Accurate, Lightweight Clustering of de novo Transcriptomes using Fragment Equivalence Classes

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 17:57:10 -0500

RapClust is a tool for clustering contigs from de novo transcriptome assemblies. RapClust is designed to be run downstream of the Sailfish or Salmon tools for rapid transcript-level quantification. Specifically, RapClust relies on the fragment equivalence classes computed by these tools in order to determine how seqeunce is shared across the transcriptome, and how reads map to potentially-related contigs across different conditions.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/COMBINE-lab/RapClust