Like other indel callers, Scalpel works by performing de novo assembly of regions of interest, so that misalignment to the reference genome cannot obscure the presence of an insertion or deletion. Scalpel's innovation is to repeatedly check its assembly before comparing to the reference genome, to account for simple sequence repeats that are a regular source of error in indel calling. When Scalpel assembles an exon, it collects reads that map to that exon (including partial matches), splits them into k-mers, and creates a de Bruijn graph to span the exon; however, if it detects repeats in the map, it iteratively increases the size of the k-mers by one base until the repeats are eliminated. This ensures that the final assembly of the exon is highly accurate while minimizing compute time.

The Cold Spring Harbor team's validation of Scalpel, published over the weekend in Nature Methods, compares Scalpel's performance on a live whole exome against HaplotypeCaller and SOAPindel. The donor is an individual with serious neurological disorders, which may be linked to a high incidence of indels. One thousand indels from this individual's exome, called by one or more of the informatics pipelines, were selected for focused resequencing. This resequencing revealed a 77% true positive rate for Scalpel calls, dramatically better than the rates for either of the competing tools; Scalpel performed especially well with indels longer than five base pairs, a traditional weak point for indel callers.

Finally, the authors demonstrate Scalpel's use on a large set of genetic data from nearly 600 families who donated samples to the Simons Simplex Collection, a project of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. Scalpel found a very high enrichment for indels in children affected by autism, compared with their unaffected siblings, a pattern that persisted even after excluding common variants.

Note that the information on this page is targeted at end-users. For developers, the source code, building instructions and implementation/development resources are available on GitHub.

The Picard toolkit is open-source under the MIT license and free for all uses.

Enjoy!

Address of the bookmark: http://broadinstitute.github.io/picard/

This readme covers all necessary instructions for the impatient to get andi up and running. For extensive instructions please consult the manual.

More at https://github.com/evolbioinf/andi/

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/01/13/bioinformatics.btu815.full

• January 20th, 2016 - New! Bpipe 0.9.9 released!
• Download latest, all
• Documentation
• Mailing List (Google Group)

Bpipe has been published in Bioinformatics! If you use Bpipe, please cite:

Sadedin S, Pope B & Oshlack A, Bpipe: A Tool for Running and Managing Bioinformatics Pipelines, Bioinformatics

Address of the bookmark: http://docs.bpipe.org/

Calculate how much sequencing you need to hit a target depth of coverage (or vice versa).

Instructions: set the read length/configuration and genome size, then select what you want to calculate.

Written by Stephen Turner, based on the Lander-Waterman formula, inspired by a similar calculator written by James Hadfield. Coverage is calculated as C=LN/G and reads as N=CG/L where C = Coverage (X),L = Read length (bp), G = Haploid genome size (bp), and N = Number of reads. Source code on GitHub.

Address of the bookmark: http://apps.bioconnector.virginia.edu/covcalc/

Tool at https://github.com/kbseah/genome-bin-tools

Address of the bookmark: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fmicb.2015.01451/full

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgufqYMHCvM

Address of the bookmark: http://www.atgc.org/PhyloGrapher/PhyloGrapher_Welcome.html

SynVisio requires two files to run:

• The simplified gff file that was used as an input for a McScanX query.
• The collinearity file generated as an output by McScanX for the same input query.
• Optional track file in bedgraph format to annotate the generated charts.

SynVisio offers different types of visualizations such as Linear Parallel plots, Hive plots, Stacked Parallel Plots and Dot plots. Users can configure the type of plots required and then choose the source and the target chromosomes that need to be mapped. Users also have option to download the generated visualizations in publication ready SVG or PNG formats.

Address of the bookmark: https://synvisio.github.io/#/

panacus supports the following calculations:

• coverage histogram
• pangenome growth statistics
• path-/group-resolved coverage table

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/marschall-lab/panacus

Suddenly, a technical error can look like a biological difference.

This is the problem Kenneth A. Barr and Yoav Gilad tackle with CrossFilt, a new computational tool introduced in Genome Biology journal.

CrossFilt acts like a careful referee. It keeps only sequencing reads that can be reliably compared across species, filtering out reads that could create alignment bias.

When tested on human, chimpanzee, and rhesus macaque data, CrossFilt reduced false discoveries and produced more reliable cross-species comparisons.

The message is simple: before asking what makes species different, we need to make sure our methods aren't creating those differences.

In genomics, sometimes the most important discovery is finding—and removing—the bias hiding in the data.

Read more at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-026-04082-2?