BOL: Related items

Alien_Hunter : prediction of putative Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) events

Jit — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 19:11:18 -0600

Alien_hunter is an application for the prediction of putative Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) events with the implementation of Interpolated Variable Order Motifs (IVOMs).

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

GenomeThreader: Gene Prediction Software

Neel — Wed, 03 Oct 2018 15:34:08 -0500

GenomeThreader is a software tool to compute gene structure predictions. The gene structure predictions are calculated using a similarity-based approach where additional cDNA/EST and/or protein sequences are used to predict gene structures via spliced alignments. GenomeThreader was motivated by disabling limitations in GeneSeqer, a popular gene prediction program which is widely used for plant genome annotation.

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

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

DarkHorse: a method for genome-wide prediction of horizontal gene transfer

Jit — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 07:58:35 -0500

A new approach to rapid, genome-wide identification and ranking of horizontal transfer candidate proteins is presented. The method is quantitative, reproducible, and computationally undemanding. It can be combined with genomic signature and/or phylogenetic tree-building procedures to improve accuracy and efficiency. The method is also useful for retrospective assessments of horizontal transfer prediction reliability, recognizing orthologous sequences that may have been previously overlooked or unavailable. These features are demonstrated in bacterial, archaeal, and eukaryotic examples.

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

GeNeCK (Gene Network Construction Kit) is a comprehensive online tool kit that integrate various statistical methods to construct gene networks

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 09:39:30 -0600

GeNeCK (Gene Network Construction Kit) is a comprehensive online tool kit that integrate various statistical methods to construct gene networks based on gene expression data and optional hub gene information.

It efficiently constructs gene networks from expression data. It allows the user to use ten different network construction methods (such as partial correlation-, likelihood-, Bayesian- and mutual information-based methods) and integrates the resulting networks from multiple methods. Hub gene information, if available, can be incorporated to enhance performance.

GeNeCK is an efficient and easy-to-use web application for gene regulatory network construction. It can be accessed at http://lce.biohpc.swmed.edu/geneck

Address of the bookmark: http://lce.biohpc.swmed.edu/geneck/

PyParanoid: a pipeline for rapid identification of homologous gene families in a set of genomes

BioStar — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 10:06:19 -0500

PyParanoid is a pipeline for rapid identification of homologous gene families in a set of genomes - a central task of any comparative genomics analysis. The "gold standard" for identifying homologs is to use reciprocal best hits (RBHs) which depends on performing a all-vs-all sequence comparison, usually using BLAST, to determine homology. However, these methods are computationally expensive, requiring O(n2) resources to identify RBHs. This is problematic, as the modern deluge of sequencing data means that comparative genomics analyses could be performed on datasets of thousands of strains.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ryanmelnyk/PyParanoid

OMArk: software for proteome (protein-coding gene repertoire) quality assessment

LEGE — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 15:01:20 -0600

OMArk is a software for proteome (protein-coding gene repertoire) quality assessment. It provides measures of proteome completeness, characterizes the consistency of all protein coding genes with regard to their homologs, and identifies the presence of contamination from other species. OMArk relies on the OMA orthology database, from which it exploits orthology relationships, and on the OMAmer software for fast placement of all proteins into gene families.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/DessimozLab/OMArk

WhatsHap: fast and accurate read-based phasing

Jit — Mon, 28 May 2018 09:52:16 -0500

WhatsHap is a software for phasing genomic variants using DNA sequencing reads, also called read-based phasing or haplotype assembly. It is especially suitable for long reads, but works also well with short reads.

Features

Very accurate results (Martin et al., WhatsHap: fast and accurate read-based phasing)

Works well with Illumina, PacBio, Oxford Nanopore and other types of reads

It phases SNVs, indels and even “complex” variants (such as TCG → AGAA)

Pedigree phasing mode uses reads from related individuals (such as trios) to improve results and to reduce coverage requirements (Garg et al., Read-Based Phasing of Related Individuals).

WhatsHap is easy to install

It is easy to use: Pass in a VCF and one or more BAM files, get out a phased VCF. Supports multi-sample VCFs.

It produces standard-compliant VCF output by default

If desired, get output that is compatible with ReadBackedPhasing

Open Source (MIT license)

Address of the bookmark: https://whatshap.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

RAMI: a tool for identification and characterization of phylogenetic clusters in microbial communities

Jit — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 18:49:27 -0500

RAMI, which clusters related nodes in a phylogenetic tree based on the patristic distance. RAMI also produces indices of cluster properties and other indices used in population and community studies on-the-fly.

Availability: RAMI is licensed under GNU GPL and can be run or downloaded from http://www.acgt.se/online.html.

Address of the bookmark: https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/bioinformatics/btp051

MCMCTREE: a phylogenetic program for Bayesian estimation of species divergence times

Poonam Mahapatra — Sat, 02 Jun 2018 07:40:06 -0500

MCMCTREE is a phylogenetic program for Bayesian estimation of species divergence times using soft fossil constraints under various molecular clock models. This is part of the PAML package. In this tutorial I will analyze an easy example modified from dataset of Inoue et al. (2010). Here we conduct a commonly used time estimation method, "Approximate Likelihood Method", for the datasets including more than 10 species.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.fish-evol.com/mcmctreeExampleVert6/text1Eng.html