BOL: Related items

Basics of BLAST Programs !

BioStar — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 06:04:26 -0500

The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) is a powerful bioinformatics program used to compare an input sequence (such as DNA, RNA, or protein sequences) against a database of sequences to find regions of similarity. Developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), BLAST is widely used for identifying species, finding functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences, and predicting the function of novel sequences.

Key Features of BLAST:
1. Sequence Comparison: BLAST searches for local alignments between the query sequence and sequences in a database. It identifies regions of similarity, which can help infer functional and evolutionary relationships.

2. Speed and Efficiency: BLAST uses heuristic algorithms, making it faster than exhaustive search methods, suitable for large-scale database searches.

3. Versatility: There are several versions of BLAST for different types of sequence comparisons:
- blastn: Compares a nucleotide query sequence against a nucleotide sequence database.
- blastp: Compares a protein query sequence against a protein sequence database.
- blastx: Compares a nucleotide query sequence translated in all reading frames against a protein sequence database.
- tblastn: Compares a protein query sequence against a nucleotide sequence database translated in all reading frames.
- tblastx: Compares the six-frame translations of a nucleotide query sequence against the six-frame translations of a nucleotide sequence database.

4. Scoring and E-value: BLAST results are scored based on the quality and length of the alignments. The E-value (expect value) indicates the number of alignments one can expect to find by chance, with lower E-values representing more significant matches.

5. Output Formats: BLAST provides results in various formats, including plain text, HTML, XML, and JSON, making it adaptable for different types of analyses and integrations with other tools.

Applications of BLAST:
- Genomic Research: Identifying genes, understanding genetic diversity, and mapping genome sequences.
- Protein Function Prediction: Inferring the function of unknown proteins by comparing them to known protein sequences.
- Evolutionary Studies: Exploring evolutionary relationships between organisms by comparing their genetic material.
- Medical Research: Identifying pathogens, understanding disease mechanisms, and developing treatments by comparing sequences of interest.

Overall, BLAST is an essential tool in bioinformatics, offering a reliable and efficient way to analyze and interpret biological sequence data.

Mugsy: multiple whole genome alignment tool

Jit — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 17:41:14 -0600

Mugsy is a multiple whole genome aligner. Mugsy uses Nucmer for pairwise alignment, a custom graph based segmentation procedure for identifying collinear regions, and the segment-based progressive multiple alignment strategy from Seqan::TCoffee. Mugsy accepts draft genomes in the form of multi-FASTA files and does not require a reference genome.

To cite Mugsy, use:

Angiuoli SV and Salzberg SL. Mugsy: Fast multiple alignment of closely related whole genomes.Bioinformatics 2011 27(3):334-4

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

Mulan: Multiple-sequence local alignment and visualization for studying function and evolution

Jit — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 09:50:01 -0500

Mulan: Multiple-sequence local alignment and visualization for studying function and evolution

Mulan (http://mulan.dcode.org/), a novel method and a network server for comparing multiple draft and finished-quality sequences to identify functional elements conserved over evolutionary time. Mulan brings together several novel algorithms: the TBA multi-aligner program for rapid identification of local sequence conservation, and the multiTF program for detecting evolutionarily conserved transcription factor binding sites in multiple alignments. In addition, Mulan supports two-way communication with the GALA database; alignments of multiple species dynamically generated in GALA can be viewed in Mulan, and conserved transcription factor binding sites identified with Mulan/multiTF can be integrated and overlaid with extensive genome annotation data using GALA.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC540288/

MSAProbs - Parallel and accurate multiple sequence alignment

Neel — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 23:58:44 -0500

MSAProbs is a well-established state-of-the-art multiple sequence alignment algorithm for protein sequences. The design of MSAProbs is based on a combination of pair hidden Markov models and partition functions to calculate posterior probabilities. Assessed using the popular benchmarks: BAliBASE, PREFAB, SABmark and OXBENCH, MSAProbs achieves statistically significant accuracy improvements over the existing top performing aligners, including ClustalW, MAFFT, MUSCLE, ProbCons and Probalign. In addition, MSAProbs is optimized for shared-memory CPUs by employing a multi-threaded design, and further parallelized for distributed-memory systems using MPI to overcome high memory overhead barrier and achieve good parallel and data-size scalability.

Address of the bookmark: http://msaprobs.sourceforge.net/homepage.htm#latest

UniAligner: a parameter-free framework for fast sequence alignment

Abhi — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 23:36:12 -0600

UniAligner (formerly, TandemAligner) is the first parameter-free algorithm for sequence alignment that introduces a sequence-dependent alignment scoring that automatically changes for any pair of compared sequences. Classical alignment approaches, such as the Smith-Waterman algorithm, that work well for most sequences, fail to construct biologically adequate alignments of extra-long tandem repeats (ETRs), such as human centromeres and immunoglobulin loci. This limitation was overlooked in the previous studies since the sequences of the centromeres and other ETRs across multiple genomes only became available recently.

More at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-023-01970-4

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/seryrzu/unialigner

Alvis: a tool for contig and read ALignment VISualisation and chimera detection

LEGE — Wed, 08 May 2024 07:02:55 -0500

Alvis, a simple command line tool that can generate visualisations for a number of common alignment analysis tasks. Alvis is a fast and portable tool that accepts input in a variety of alignment formats and will output production ready vector images. Additionally, Alvis will highlight potentially chimeric reads or contigs, a common source of misassemblies.

More at https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-021-04056-0

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/SR-Martin/alvis

Blobsplorer

Jit — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 10:28:58 -0500

Blobsplorer is a tool for interactive visualization of assembled DNA sequence data ("contigs") derived from (often unintentionally) mixed-species pools. It allows the simultaneous display of GC content, coverage, and taxonomic annotation for collections of contigs with a view to separating out those belonging to different taxa.

Blobsplorer is unlikely to be of use on its own as it requires contig data to be supplied in a format that involves considerable preprocessing (see below for a description). The easiest way to use Blobsplorer is as part of a workflow using scripts from here.

Address of the bookmark: http://nematodes.org/martin/blobsplorer/blobsplorer.html

I-PV: Interactive Protein Sequence Visualization

Jit — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 07:52:51 -0500

I-PV is a interactive data visualization software designed for inspection of protein sequences and mutation information. It is mainly used for Genetics and Bioinformatics. So what exactly makes it standout?

http://i-pv.org/ipv_rec

Address of the bookmark: http://i-pv.org/

SeqMonk:A tool to visualise and analyse high throughput mapped sequence data

Jit — Tue, 11 Sep 2018 04:39:38 -0500

SeqMonk is a program to enable the visualisation and analysis of mapped sequence data. It was written for use with mapped next generation sequence data but can in theory be used for any dataset which can be expressed as a series of genomic positions. It's main features are:

Import of mapped data from mapped data (BAM/SAM/bowtie etc)
Creation of data groups for visualisation and analysis
Visualisation of mapped regions against an annotated genome.
Flexible quantitation of the mapped data to allow comparisons between data sets
Statistical analysis of data to find regions of interest
Creation of reports containing data and genome annotation

Address of the bookmark: http://www.bioinformatics.babraham.ac.uk/projects/seqmonk/

VICUNA: a software tool that enables consensus assembly of ultra-deep sequence derived from diverse viral or other heterogeneous populations.

biogeek — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 03:40:17 -0500

VICUNA is a de novo assembly program targeting populations with high mutation rates. It creates a single linear representation of the mixed population on which intra-host variants can be mapped. For clinical samples rich in contamination (e.g., >95%), VICUNA can leverage existing genomes, if available, to assemble only target-alike reads. After initial assembly, it can also use existing genomes to perform guided merging of contigs. For each data set (e.g., Illumina paired read, 454), VICUNA outputs consensus sequence(s) and the corresponding multiple sequence alignment of constituent reads. VICUNA efficiently handles ultra-deep sequence data with tens of thousands fold coverage.

http://software.broadinstitute.org/viral/docs/vicuna_v1.0.pdf

Address of the bookmark: https://www.broadinstitute.org/viral-genomics/vicuna