BOL: Related items

The Atlas of Nine Billion Possibilities

Jitendra Narayan — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 02:07:58 -0500

Imagine a book that holds all the instructions for building a human, made up of billions of letters. What if you changed just one letter? Maybe nothing would happen. Or that tiny change could affect how a gene works, quietly shaping a cell’s biology or even helping cause disease.

Scientists face a big challenge with the human genome. They can read its letters, but understanding their roles is much harder. Only about 2 percent of the genome codes for proteins. The rest acts like a huge control panel, deciding when and where genes turn on. With about 9 billion possible single-letter changes, testing them all in a lab just isn’t possible.

So, Google DeepMind asked a new question: what if we could predict what those changes might do?

This question led to the AlphaGenome Atlas (https://deepmind.google.com/science/alphagenome/atlas?), a detailed map of nearly every possible single-letter change in the human genome. Instead of checking each change one by one, researchers can use the Atlas to spot the ones most likely to matter. The AlphaGenome Variant Impact (AVI) score works like a trail marker, pointing scientists toward the changes worth a closer look.

This is where the Atlas gets especially useful. Much of the genome lies outside the protein-coding regions, where DNA acts as a switch or controller for genes. AlphaGenome lets researchers explore these areas and see how small changes could affect gene activity.

An atlas isn't the destination; it's a guide.

The AlphaGenome Atlas doesn’t replace experiments or solve every mystery. Instead, it helps scientists decide where to begin. From billions of possibilities, it turns the vast genetic landscape into something researchers can start to explore.

There are nine billion possibilities, a vast map, and maybe among them therWith nine billion possibilities and a huge map to explore, there may be clues hidden here to some of medicine’s toughest mysteries.

More at https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/DeepMind.com/Blog/alphagenome-atlas-a-predictive-map-of-every-possible-dna-letter-change-in-the-human-genome/alphagenome-atlas.pdf

LR_Gapcloser: a tiling path-based gap closer that uses long reads to complete genome assembly

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 14 May 2020 15:09:52 -0500

LR_Gapcloser is a gap closing tool using long reads from studied species. The long reads could be downloaed from public read archive database (for instance, NCBI SRA database ) or be your own data. Then they are fragmented and aligned to scaffolds using BWA mem algorithm in BWA package. In the package, we provided a compiled bwa, so the user needn't to install bwa. LR_Gapcloser uses the alignments to find the bridging that cross the gap, and then fills the long read original sequence into the genomic gaps.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/CAFS-bioinformatics/LR_Gapcloser

Complete genome sequence of Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus is out !

Jit — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 02:36:59 -0600

Wuhan-Hu-1 claimed at least 40 lives and infected at least 1300 others in China. Cases are now being reported from Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Nepal, France, Australia and even as far as the US. On Jan 10 2020, while news of the first fatality was barely trickling in, the 29,903 letters constituting the viral genome from an affected individual in Wuhan had already been elucidated (even though a few corrections were made subsequently). All the viral genome sequences from affected individuals are very very close to each other. Several are identical and none has more than 5 differences (99.983% similarity). This strongly suggests that transmission into humans came from a single pointed source and happened very recently, between Sep-Dec 2019.

Check out the detail at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MN908947

Public Databases for Bioinformatics !

Jit — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 05:32:15 -0500

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17155-y

Server Infrastructure:

File Server:

dhara: Synology 3614 Storage Appliance
4 Core Xeon
108TB disk storage
10Gb ethernet to SCG3
Access atx: dhara:5000
Has btsync server (try it - its much better than dropbox)

Compute Servers:

nandi: Kundaje and Phi Server
24 intel cores
256GB RAM
500GB of SSD storage 
36TB RAID6 local storage
4 Intel Phi's (space for 4 more GPU's)


durga: Montgomery and sensitive data
24 intel cores
256GB RAM
500GB of SSD RAID0 storage 
60TB RAID6 local storage

mitra: Bassik and Web/DB Server
24 core
256GB RAM 
500GB of SSD RAID0 storage 
36TB RAID6 local storage

vayu: Kundaje GPU server
4 core
64GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
8TB RAID10 local storage
4 Nvidia GTX 970 4GB GPUs

amold: Bickel and SGE server
32 AMD core
128GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
12TB RAID5 local storage

wotan: Bickel and SGE server
64 AMD core
256GB RAM 
200GB of SSD storage 
12TB RAID5 local storage

Filesystem:

/users/$USER
default home directory
full backups nightly 
nfs mount to dhara
should store code, papers, and other highly processed data here

/mnt/data/
globally accessible data
should store common data here
e.g. genomes and indexes, annotations, ENCODE data  
if you dont want this to count towards your quote you must chown

/mnt/lab_data/$LAB/
lab accessible data
should store lab project data here 
e.g. ATAC-seq prediction data, enhancer prediction, motif calls

/srv/scratch/$USER
fast local storage
not backed up, but on raid and data will never be deleted
most analysis should be performed here

/srv/persistent/$USER
fast local storage
synced nightly, but not backed up
       ie if the hard drives fail or you delete something and notice 
       within 24 hours we can recover. Otherwise not. (vs home which is 
       properly backed up )  
intermediate analysis products that would be hard to recover should be stored here 
       e.g. stochastic analysis results that need to be kept so that paper 
       results can be reproduced

/srv/www/$LABNAME/
web accessible from mitra.stanford.edu
*NOT BACKED UP*

Some parallel programming patterns:

# gzip a bunch of files
parallel gzip -- *.FILESTOGZIP

# fork example in python:
(for more detailed examples look at 
 https://github.com/nboley/grit/ grit/lib/multiprocessing_utils.py)

import os
import time
import random

import multiprocessing

class ProcessSafeOPStream( object ):
    def __init__( self, writeable_obj ):
        self.writeable_obj = writeable_obj
        self.lock = multiprocessing.Lock()
        self.name = self.writeable_obj.name
        return
    
    def write( self, data ):
        self.lock.acquire()
        self.writeable_obj.write( data )
        self.writeable_obj.flush()
        self.lock.release()
        return
    
    def close( self ):
        self.writeable_obj.close()

def worker(queue, ofp):
    # Try without this
    random.seed()
    while True:
        i = queue.get()
        if i == 'FINISHED': return
        # simulate an expensive function
        x = random.random()
        time.sleep(x/10)
        print i, x
        ofp.write("%i\t%s\n" % (i, x))

NSIMS = 10000
NPROC = 25

# populate queue
todo = multiprocessing.Queue()
for i in xrange(NSIMS): todo.put(i)
for i in xrange(NPROC): todo.put('FINISHED')

ofp = ProcessSafeOPStream( open("output.txt", "w") )

pids = []
for i in xrange(NPROC):
    pid = os.fork()
    if pid == 0:
       worker(todo, ofp)
       os._exit(0)
    else:
       pids.append(pid)  

for pid in pids:
    os.waitpid(pid, 0)

ofp.close()

print "FINISHED"

For use case 1 we obtained the following ENCODE and ROADMAP datasets https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF446WOD/@@download/ENCFF446WOD.bed.gz, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF546PJU/@@download/ENCFF546PJU.bam, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF059BEU/@@download/ENCFF059BEU.bam. Blacklisted regions were obtained from http://mitra.stanford.edu/kundaje/akundaje/release/blacklists/hg38-human/hg38.blacklist.bed.gz. The human genome version hg38 was obtained from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg38/bigZips/hg38.fa.gz.

For use case 2 we used the set of narrowPeak files summarized in https://github.com/wkopp/janggu_usecases/tree/master/extra/urls.txt (archived version v1.0.1). The human genome version hg19 was obtained from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg19/bigZips/hg19.fa.gz

For use case 3 we used the ENCODE datasets https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF591XCX/@@download/ENCFF591XCX.bam, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF736LHE/@@download/ENCFF736LHE.bigWig, https://www.encodeproject.org/files/ENCFF177HHM/@@download/ENCFF177HHM.bam as we as the GENCODE annotation v29 from ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/gencode/Gencode_human/release_29/gencode.v29.annotation.gtf.gz.

Address of the bookmark: http://mitra.stanford.edu/

DFAST: a flexible prokaryotic genome annotation pipeline for faster genome publication

Jit — Tue, 14 Nov 2017 10:26:16 -0600

We developed a prokaryotic genome annotation pipeline, DFAST, that also supports genome submission to public sequence databases. DFAST was originally started as an on-line annotation server, and to date, over 7,000 jobs have been processed since its first launch in 2016. Here, we present a newly implemented background annotation engine for DFAST, which is also available as a standalone command-line program. The new engine can annotate a typical-sized bacterial genome within 10 minutes, with rich information such as pseudogenes, translation exceptions, and orthologous gene assignment between given reference genomes. In addition, the modular framework of DFAST allows users to customize the annotation workflow easily and will also facilitate extensions for new functions and incorporation of new tools in the future.

Availability and Implementation

The software is implemented in Python 3 and runs in both Python 2.7 and 3.4– on Macintosh and Linux systems. It is freely available at https://github.com/nigyta/dfast_core/ under the GPLv3 license with external binaries bundled in the software distribution. An on-line version is also available at https://dfast.nig.ac.jp/.

Address of the bookmark: https://dfast.nig.ac.jp/

mScaffolder: A comparative genome scaffolding tool

Jit — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 04:48:01 -0500

A comparative genome scaffolding tool based on MUMmer

mScaffolder scaffolds a genome using an existing high quality genome as the reference. It aligns the two genomes using nucmer utility from MUMmer and then orders and orients the contigs of the candidate genome guided by their alignments to the reference genome. Please send your questions and comments to mchakrab@uci.edu.

Citation https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-017-0010-y

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/mahulchak/mscaffolder

GRSR: a tool for deriving genome rearrangement scenarios from multiple unichromosomal genome sequences

Jit — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 09:35:10 -0500

GRSR is a Tool for Deriving Genome Rearrangement Scenarios for Multiple Uni-chromosomal Genomes. This tool will do the following steps:

Step 1. Run mugsy to get multiple sequence alignment results.
Step 2 & 3. Extraction of the Coordinates of Core Blocks, Construction of Synteny Blocks and Generating Signed Permutations.
Step 4. Generate pairwise genome rearrangement scenarios and find repeats at the breakpoints of each rearrangement events.

https://github.com/DanwangJessica/GRSR

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/DanwangJessica/GRSR

Biological databases !

BioStar — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 01:16:29 -0600

Now a days there are a lots of genomics databases available around the world. This bookmark is created to provide all links in one place ...

ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genomes/

https://hgdownload.soe.ucsc.edu/downloads.html

Address of the bookmark: ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genomes/

PLAR: Pipeline for lncRNA annotation from RNA-seq data

Abhi — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 06:18:01 -0600

Due to several requests, we are releasing an assingment of orthologs, determined using the same methods used in Hezroni et al. (BLAST, Whole Genome Alignment (WGA), and synteny). One is comparing human GENCODE genes (from GENCODE v30) to lncRNAs from other species identified by PLAR. Available here.

Species	Assembly	Code	Transcriptome	lncRNAs	Protein-coding
Human	hg19	hg19	Download	Download	Download
Rhesus	rheMac3	rm3	Download	Download	Download
Marmoset	calJac3	cj3	Download	Download	Download
Mouse	mm9	mm9	Download	Download	Download
Rabbit	oryCun2	oc2	Download	Download	Download
Dog	canFam3	cf3	Download	Download	Download
Ferret	musFur1	oa3	Download	Download	Download
Opossum	monDom5	md5	Download	Download	Download
Chicken	galGal4	gg4	Download	Download	Download
Lizard	anoCar2	ac2	Download	Download	Download
Coelacanth	latCha1	lc1	Download	Download	Download
Zebrafish	danRer7	dr7	Download	Download	Download
Stickleback	gasAcu1	ga1	Download	Download	Download
Nile tilapia	oreNil2	ot2	Download	Download	Download
Spotted gar	lepOcu1	lo1	Download	Download	Download
Elephant shark	calMil1	cm1	Download	Download	Download
Sea urchin	strPur4	sp4	Download	Download	Download

Address of the bookmark: http://www.weizmann.ac.il/Biological_Regulation/IgorUlitsky/PLAR

odgi: optimized dynamic genome/graph implementation

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 23:42:21 -0600

odgi provides an efficient and succinct dynamic DNA sequence graph model, as well as a host of algorithms that allow the use of such graphs in bioinformatic analyses.

Careful encoding of graph entities allows odgi to efficiently compute and transform pangenomes with minimal overheads. odgi implements a dynamic data structure that leveraged multi-core CPUs and can be updated on the fly.

The edges and path steps are recorded as deltas between the current node id and the target node id, where the node id corresponds to the rank in the global array of nodes. Graphs built from biological data sets tend to have local partial order and, when sorted, the deltas be small. This allows them to be compressed with a variable length integer representation, resulting in a small in-memory footprint at the cost of packing and unpacking.

The RAM and computational savings are substantial. In partially ordered regions of the graph, most deltas will require only a single byte.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/pangenome/odgi