BOL: Related items

How Genes are Regulated: Transcription Factors

Thu, 05 Sep 2013 16:54:19 -0500

Each cell in our body inherits the same master copy of DNA, but different cell types use it differently. Transcription Factors help influence which genes are used in which cell. Understanding how these dynamic proteins physically interact with DNA allows us to better understand and model their binding to DNA and their regulation of gene expression. Scientific Direction by the Wasserman Lab at the University of British Columbia: http://www.cmmt.ubc.ca/research/investigators/wasserman/lab Animation and editing by Blair Lyons of Stroma Studios: http://www.stromastudios.com

Molecular Genetics Lecture

Rahul Agarwal — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 04:24:45 -0500

"Robert Sapolsky makes interdisciplinary connections between behavioral biology and molecular genetic influences. He relates protein synthesis and point mutations to microevolutionary change, and discusses conflicting theories of gradualism and punctuated equilibrium and the influence of epigenetics on development theories."

"Robert Sapolsky is an American neuroendocrinologist, professor of biology, neuroscience, and neurosurgery at Stanford University, researcher and author" ----Wikipedia

Address of the bookmark: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dRXA1_e30o

Edit DNA !!!

Jit — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 02:27:54 -0600

A genome-engineering tool known as Crispr may allow scientists to alter the DNA of humans, animals and plants, a research breakthrough that promises to make a significant impact on science and fighting diseases, according to a March 3 story in the New York Times. Scientists hope Crispr might also be used for genomic surgery, as it were, to correct errant genes that cause disease.

A rescently publication paper ( http://jb.asm.org/content/169/12/5429.long )shows significance of an unusual repeated DNA sequences next to a gene in a common bacterium, and their scientific significance. The sequences, it turns out, are part of a sophisticated immune system that bacteria use to fight viruses. And that system, whose very existence was unknown until about seven years ago, may provide scientists with unprecedented power to rewrite the code of life. This means a genome can be edited, much as a writer might change words or fix spelling errors. It allows “customizing the genome of any cell or any species at will,”.

Reference:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/03/prweb11636031.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/health/a-powerful-new-way-to-edit-dna.html?hpw&rref=health

http://jb.asm.org/content/169/12/5429.long

Scripted DNA !!!

Jit — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 17:44:04 -0500

As per bioinformatician DNA is partially scripted ;) You dont believe in it. Please have a look at image carefully:)

FSA: Fast Statistical Alignment

Jit — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 04:26:01 -0600

FSA is a probabilistic multiple sequence alignment algorithm which uses a "distance-based" approach to aligning homologous protein, RNA or DNA sequences. Much as distance-based phylogenetic reconstruction methods like Neighbor-Joining build a phylogeny using only pairwise divergence estimates, FSA builds a multiple alignment using only pairwise estimations of homology. This is made possible by the sequence annealing technique for constructing a multiple alignment from pairwise comparisons, developed by Ariel Schwartz in "Posterior Decoding Methods for Optimization and Control of Multiple Alignments."

FSA brings the high accuracies previously available only for small-scale analyses of proteins or RNAs to large-scale problems such as aligning thousands of sequences or megabase-long sequences. FSA introduces several novel methods for constructing better alignments:

FSA uses machine-learning techniques to estimate gap and substitution parameters on the fly for each set of input sequences. This "query-specific learning" alignment method makes FSA very robust: it can produce superior alignments of sets of homologous sequences which are subject to very different evolutionary constraints.
FSA is capable of aligning hundreds or even thousands of sequences using a randomized inference algorithm to reduce the computational cost of multiple alignment. This randomized inference can be over ten times faster than a direct approach with little loss of accuracy.
FSA can quickly align very long sequences using the "anchor annealing" technique for resolving anchors and projecting them with transitive anchoring. It then stitches together the alignment between the anchors using the methods described above.
The included GUI, MAD (Multiple Alignment Display), can display the intermediate alignments produced by FSA, where each character is colored according to the probability that it is correctly aligned (see the picture and movie at the top of the page).

You can see more information on the FAQ.

Address of the bookmark: http://fsa.sourceforge.net/

Tetra-Nucleotide Analysis

Jit — Thu, 04 May 2017 05:07:41 -0500

A tetra-nucleotide is a fragment of DNA sequence with 4 bases (e.g. AGTC or TTGG). Pride et al. (2003) showed that the frequency of tetra-nucleotides in bacterial genomes contain useful, albeit weak, phylogenetic signals. Even though tetra-nucleotide analysis (TNA) utilizes the information of whole genome, it is evident that it cannot replace other alignment-based phylogenetic methods such as OrthoANI or 16S rRNA phylogeny. However, TNA can be useful for phylogenetic characterization when whole genome or 16S rRNA gene information is not available. For example, a partial genomic fragment obtained from a metagenome can be identified by TNA (Teeling et al., 2004). TNA is also fast enough that it can be used as a search engine against a large genome database.

Address of the bookmark: https://chunlab.wordpress.com/tetra-nucleotide-analysis/

SLIDESORT-BPR

Abhimanyu Singh — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 09:19:52 -0600

Chromosomal rearrangement events are caused by abnormal breaking and rejoining of DNA molecules. They are responsible for many of the cancer related diseases. Detecting the DNA breaking and repairing mechanism, therefore, may offer vital clues about the pathologic causes and diagnostic/therapeutic target of these diseases. But this effort also poses considerable challenges, because the structural variations and the genomes are different from one person to another. Intermediate comparison via reference genome could lead to the loss information. Unlike the current methods which make use the reference genome, we developed a method to detect the breakpoint reads directly from observing the differences between two (or more) NGS short reads samples. Slidesort-BPR is a command line tool implemented in C++.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ewijaya/slidesort-bpr

Ra assembler - a de novo DNA assembler for third generation sequencing data

biogeek — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 20:36:54 -0600

Integration of the Ra assembler - a de novo DNA assembler for third generation sequencing data developed on Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), Ruder Boskovic Institute (RBI) and Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS).

Ra is in development since 2014 in the form of several separate components that used to be run individually.
This project aims to ease the usage of Ra by integrating it into a complete de novo assembly tool.

Unlike other state-of-the-art assemblers, Ra does not have an error correction step. Instead, it relies on detecting overlaps using a very sensitive and specific overlapper ("graphmap -w owler", https://github.com/isovic/graphmap) and constructing and reducing an overlap graph (Ra layout, https://github.com/mariokostelac/ra).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/mariokostelac/ra-integrate/

TAREAN: A computational tool for identification and characterization of satellite DNA from unassembled short reads

Surabhi Chaudhary — Tue, 15 May 2018 02:53:11 -0500

TAndem REpeat ANalyzer -TAREAN – is a computational pipeline for unsupervised identification of satellite repeats from unassembled sequence reads. The pipeline uses low-pass whole genome sequence reads and performs their graph-based clustering. Resulting clusters, representing all types of repeats, are then examined for the presence of circular structures and putative satellite repeats are reported.

How to use TAREAN:

Install a local instance of the pipeline using its source code available from bitbucket repository.
Use public Galaxy-based server at https://repeatexplorer-elixir.cerit-sc.cz/. The server is provided in frame of the Elixir CZ project and is maintained by CESNET and CERIT-SC. Simple registration is required to use this service.

Development of TAREAN was supported by ELIXIR CZ research infrastructure project (MEYS Grant No: LM2015047).

References

Novak, P., Avila Robledillo, L., Koblizkova, A., Vrbova, I., Neumann, P., Macas, J. (2017) – TAREAN: a computational tool for identification and characterization of satellite DNA from unassembled short reads. Nucleic Acids Res., doi:10.1093/nar/gkx257

Address of the bookmark: https://bitbucket.org/petrnovak/repex_tarean

RopeBWT2: Incremental construction of FM-index for DNA sequences

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 04:48:54 -0500

RopeBWT2 is an tool for constructing the FM-index for a collection of DNA sequences. It works by incrementally inserting one or multiple sequences into an existing pseudo-BWT position by position, starting from the end of the sequences. This algorithm can be largely considered a mixture of BCR and dynamic FM-index. Nonetheless, ropeBWT2 is unique in that it may implicitlysort the input into reverse lexicographical order (RLO) or reverse-complement lexicographical order (RCLO) while building the index.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/lh3/ropebwt2