BOL: Related items

Aurora: A New Detective for Bacterial Genomes

BioStar — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:31:00 -0500

Imagine trying to solve a mystery with thousands of clues—but some of the clues are labelled incorrectly.

That is the challenge researchers face when studying how bacteria adapt to different environments. A bacterial gene may appear to be linked to a particular habitat, when the real reason is simply that closely related bacteria happen to live there.

In their 2025 Genome Biology paper, Bujdoš, Walter, and O’Toole introduce aurora, a machine-learning tool designed to tackle this problem.

Aurora identifies potentially mislabeled or unusual bacterial strains before performing genome-wide association studies (GWAS). By cleaning up the dataset and accounting for bacterial evolutionary relationships, it can help researchers find genetic features that are more genuinely connected to habitat adaptation.

The researchers tested aurora using simulated and real bacterial datasets and found that it could recover important genetic associations even when datasets contained misleading labels.

The bigger lesson is simple: better biological discoveries often begin with better data.

Aurora gives researchers a new way to separate real genetic clues from misleading ones—and could help us better understand how bacteria adapt, survive, and evolve in the environments they call home.

Based on Bujdoš et al., “aurora: a machine learning GWAS tool for analyzing microbial habitat adaptation,” Genome Biology (2025).[Read the original paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-025-03524-7?)

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

MECAT: fast mapping, error correction, and de novo assembly for single-molecule sequencing reads

Rahul Nayak — Fri, 11 May 2018 05:07:45 -0500

MECAT is an ultra-fast Mapping, Error Correction and de novo Assembly Tools for single molecula sequencing (SMRT) reads. MECAT employs novel alignment and error correction algorithms that are much more efficient than the state of art of aligners and error correction tools. MECAT can be used for effectively de novo assemblying large genomes. For example, on a 32-thread computer with 2.0 GHz CPU , MECAT takes 9.5 days to assemble a human genome based on 54x SMRT data, which is 40 times faster than the current PBcR-Mhap pipeline. MECAT performance were compared with PBcR-Mhap pipeline, FALCON and Canu(v1.3) in five real datasets. The quality of assembled contigs produced by MECAT is the same or better than that of the PBcR-Mhap pipeline and FALCON.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.4432

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/xiaochuanle/MECAT

ChopStitch: exon annotation and splice graph construction using transcriptome assembly and whole genome sequencing data

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 04:14:52 -0500

ChopStitch is a new method for finding putative exons and constructing splice graphs using an assembled transcriptome and whole genome shotgun sequencing (WGSS) data. ChopStitch identifies exon-exon boundaries in de novo assembled RNA-seq data with the help of a Bloom filter that represents the k-mer spectrum of WGSS reads. The algorithm also detects base substitutions in transcript sequences corresponding to sequencing or assembly errors, haplotype variations, or putative RNA editing events. The primary output of our tool is a FASTA file containing putative exons. Further, exon edges are interrogated for alternative exon-exon boundaries to detect transcript isoforms, which are reported as splice graphs in dot output format.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/bcgsc/ChopStitch

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

Genobuntu: A software package containing more than 70 software and packages oriented towards NGS and genome assembly

BioStar — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 05:15:57 -0600

Genobuntu is a software package containing more than 70 software and packages oriented towards NGS. In its current version, Genobuntu supports pre assembly tools, genome assemblers as well as post assembly tools.

Commonly used biological software and example script files for different assembly pipelines have also been provided, where the example script files can be updated to suit one’s experimental needs. Genobuntu attempts to reduce the amount of time and energy needed to build software workstations and it can also act as a good teaching source for a class room setting.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/genobuntu/

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

Genome assembly tutorial "Genome Assembly for short and long reads"

Jit — Sat, 19 Jan 2019 17:29:53 -0600

In this lab we will perform de novo genome assembly of a bacterial genome. You will be guided through the genome assembly starting with data quality control, through to building contigs and analysis of the results. At the end of the lab you will know:

How to perform basic quality checks on the input data
How to run a short read assembler on Illumina data
How to run a long read assembler on Pacific Biosciences or Oxford Nanopore data
How to improve the accuracy of a long read assembly using short reads
How to assess the quality of an assembly

https://bioinformaticsdotca.github.io/high-throughput_biology_2017

Address of the bookmark: https://bioinformaticsdotca.github.io/high-throughput_biology_2017_module6_lab

Genome assembly forensics: finding the elusive mis-assembly

Jit — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 18:02:01 -0600

We present the first collection of tools aimed at automated genome assembly validation. This work formalizes several mechanisms for detecting mis-assemblies, and describes their implementation in our automated validation pipeline, called amosvalidate. We demonstrate the application of our pipeline in both bacterial and eukaryotic genome assemblies, and highlight several assembly errors in both draft and finished genomes. The software described is compatible with common assembly formats and is released, open-source, at http://amos.sourceforge.net.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2397507/

http://amos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/AMOS

Address of the bookmark: http://amos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/AMOS

BlobToolKit: A toolkit for genome assembly QC

Jit — Fri, 21 Feb 2020 00:17:50 -0600

Filtering raw genomic datasets is essential to avoid chimeric assemblies and to increase the validity of sequence-based biological inference. BlobToolKit extends the BlobTools1/Blobology2 approach to simplify interactive and reproducible filtering.

BlobToolKit is comprised of four components:

BlobToolKit Viewer allows browser-based interactive visualisation and filtering of preliminary or published genomic datasets even for highly fragmented assemblies.
BlobTools2 is a command-line program to convert assemblies and analysis results into datasets that can be further processed using BlobTools2 and/or visualised in the Viewer.
The BlobToolKit Specification features a formal schema and validator for the JSON-based BlobDir format used by BlobTools2 and the Viewer.
The BlobToolKit Pipeline is a configurable Snakemake pipeline that automates all steps from retrieving public datasets through running analyses and generating a BlobDir dataset with BlobTools2, ready for visualisation in the Viewer.

Paper https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/844852v1.full.pdf

Address of the bookmark: https://blobtoolkit.genomehubs.org/

Genome assembly training tutorial at Galaxy !

Jit — Sun, 27 Dec 2020 05:25:45 -0600

In this tutorial we assemble and annotate the genome of E. coli strain C-1. This strain is routinely used in experimental evolution studies involving bacteriophages. For instance, now classic works by Holly Wichman and Jim Bull (Bull 1997, Bull 1998, Wichman 1999) have been performed using this strain and bacteriophage phiX174.

Address of the bookmark: https://training.galaxyproject.org/training-material/topics/assembly/tutorials/unicycler-assembly/tutorial.html