BOL: Related items

10 Books to Kickstart (and Level Up) Your Bioinformatics Journey

Neel — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 03:50:11 -0500

If you’re starting out in bioinformatics or looking to sharpen your computational biology skills, having the right learning resources makes all the difference.
Here’s my curated list of 10 must-read books — from beginner-friendly introductions to advanced computational genomics.

1️⃣ Data Analysis for the Life Sciences
A fantastic starting point to learn statistics, R programming, and exploratory data analysis in the context of biology. The best part? It’s available free online from HarvardX.

2️⃣ Practical Computing for Biologists
The very first book I picked up when I started learning computational biology. It’s beginner-friendly and focuses on essential computing skills every biologist needs.

3️⃣ A Primer for Computational Biology
An open-access, hands-on introduction to computational biology concepts and coding techniques. Perfect if you want to learn through real examples.

4️⃣ Computational Genomics with R
For those who already know R and want to dive deeper into genome-scale data analysis, from sequence alignment to gene expression.

5️⃣ The Biologist’s Guide to Computing
Bridges the gap between biological problems and computational thinking, making it easier for life scientists to approach programming and data analysis.

6️⃣ Bioinformatics Data Skills
A must-read to sharpen your bioinformatics toolkit — from command-line skills to reproducible research workflows. Ideal once you’ve covered the basics.

7️⃣ Bioinformatics Workbook
A practical tutorial series to help scientists design bioinformatics projects, analyze data, and understand best practices.

8️⃣ Modern Statistics for Modern Biology
An essential guide to modern statistical methods applied to biology, blending theory with hands-on examples in R.

9️⃣ Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences by Dan Gusfield
A classic reference for anyone wanting to understand the algorithms behind sequence alignment, genome assembly, and biological data structures.

RITA: Rapid identification of high-confidence taxonomic assignments for metagenomic data

Jit — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 08:25:33 -0600

RITA is a standalone software package and Web server for taxonomic assignment of metagenomic sequence reads. By combining homology predictions from BLAST or UBLAST with compositional classifications from a Naive Bayes classifier, RITA is able to achieve very high accuracy on short reads. Unlike other hybrid approaches which combine these predictions for all sequences to be classified, RITA uses a pipeline to first identify cases where both types of classifier are in agreement, which constitute the highest-confidence set. Sequences not classified in this manner are subjected to a series of downstream classification steps.

This work has been accepted for publication:

MacDonald NJ, Parks DH, and Beiko RG. Rapid identification of taxonomic assignments. Accepted to Nucleic Acids Research April 4, 2012.

If you have any questions or bug reports, please let us know at .

Address of the bookmark: http://kiwi.cs.dal.ca/Software/RITA

Heap: a highly sensitive and accurate SNP detection tool for low-coverage high-throughput sequencing data

Jit — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 08:06:03 -0500

Heap, that enables robustly sensitive and accurate calling of SNPs, particularly with a low coverage NGS data, which must be aligned to the reference genome sequences in advance. To reduce false positive SNPs, Heap determines genotypes and calls SNPs at each site except for sites at the both end of reads or containing a minor allele supported by only one read. Performance comparison with existing tools showed that Heap achieved the highest F-scores with low coverage (7X) restriction-site associated DNA sequencing reads of sorghum and rice individuals. This will facilitate cost-effective GWAS and GP studies in this NGS era. Code and documentation of Heap are freely available from https://github.com/meiji-bioinf/heap and our web site (http://bioinf.mind.meiji.ac.jp/lab/en/tools.html).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/meiji-bioinf/heap

Epiviz: an interactive visualization tool for functional genomics data.

Jit — Mon, 09 Jul 2018 05:27:39 -0500

Epiviz is an interactive visualization tool for functional genomics data. It supports genome navigation like other genome browsers, but allows multiple visualizations of data within genomic regions using scatterplots, heatmaps and other user-supplied visualizations. It also includes data from the Gene Expression Barcode project for transcriptome visualization. It has a flexible plugin framework so users can addd3 visualizations. You can see a video tour here.

https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/epivizr.html

https://github.com/epiviz

https://github.com/epiviz/epiviz

Address of the bookmark: https://epiviz.github.io/

VariantBam: Filtering and profiling of next-generational sequencing data using region-specific rules

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 16:30:44 -0500

VariantBam is a tool to extract/count specific sets of sequencing reads from next-generational sequencing files. To save money, disk space and I/O, one may not want to store an entire BAM on disk. In many cases, it would be more efficient to store only those read-pairs or reads who intersect some region around the variant locations. Alternatively, if your scientific question is focused on only one aspect of the data (e.g. breakpoints), many reads can be removed without losing the information relevant to the problem.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/broadinstitute/VariantBam

EXCAVATOR: detecting copy number variants from whole-exome sequencing data

Radha Agarkar — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 10:10:48 -0600

EXCAVATOR, for the detection of copy number variants (CNVs) from whole-exome sequencing data. EXCAVATOR combines a three-step normalization procedure with a novel heterogeneous hidden Markov model algorithm and a calling method that classifies genomic regions into five copy number states. We validate EXCAVATOR on three datasets and compare the results with three other methods. These analyses show that EXCAVATOR outperforms the other methods and is therefore a valuable tool for the investigation of CNVs in largescale projects, as well as in clinical research and diagnostics. EXCAVATOR is freely available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/excavatortool/.

EXCAVATOR is a novel software package for the detection of copy number variants (CNVs) from whole-exome sequencing data.
EXCAVATOR has been published on Genome Biology (http://genomebiology.com/2013/14/10/R120/abstract).

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

nQuire: A statistical framework for ploidy estimation using NGS short-read data

Jit — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 05:12:19 -0600

nQuire implements a set of commands to estimate ploidy level of individuals from species, where recent polyploidization occurred and intraspecific ploidy variation is observed. Specifically, nQuire uses next-generation sequencing data to distinguish between diploids, triploids and tetraploids, on the basis of frequency distributions at variant sites where only two bases are segregating.

For more background see also the publication at BMC Bioinformatics.

https://github.com/clwgg/nQuire

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/clwgg/nQuire

pbmm2:A minimap2 frontend for PacBio native data formats

BioStar — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 03:36:22 -0600

pbmm2 is a SMRT C++ wrapper for minimap2's C API. Its purpose is to support native PacBio in- and output, provide sets of recommended parameters, generate sorted output on-the-fly, and postprocess alignments. Sorted output can be used directly for polishing using GenomicConsensus, if BAM has been used as input to pbmm2. Benchmarks show that pbmm2 outperforms BLASR in sequence identity, number of mapped bases, and especially runtime. pbmm2 is the official replacement for BLASR.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/pbmm2

Useful links to therapy, disease, drug and drug-target network data:

Jit — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 11:47:51 -0500

Useful links to therapy, disease, drug and drug-target network data:

DrugBank:

a bioinformatics- cheminformatics resource combining detailed drug data with comprehensive drug target information with >4900 drug (~3500 experimental) and >1500 non-redundant protein entries http://www.drugbank.ca/

Drug-Target Network:

network data of 890 drugs and 394 target human proteins http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v25/ n10/suppinfo/nbt1338_S1.html

Drug-Therapy Network:

three layers of drug-therapy networks according to the ATC classification http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2210/8/5/additional/

FDA Orange Book:

approved drug products with therapeutic equivalence evaluations http://www.fda.gov/cder/ob/HIDdb: Thomson Investigational drugs database including information on 107000 patents, 25000 investigational drugs and 80000 chemical structures http://scientific.thomson.com/products/iddb/HOMIM: a knowledgebase of human genes and genetic disorders http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ sites/entrez?db=omim

PDTD:

3D drug target structure database with a target identification option http://www.dddc.ac.cn/pdtd/

Predicted drug targets:

a set of 1383 predicted drug targets http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/8/353/additional/ [25] Protein ligand network: a network of 4208 ligands and ~15000 binding sites http://pbil.kaist.ac.kr/~parkkw/Lnet/

TDR Targets Database:

identification and ranking targets against neglected tropical diseases http://tdrtargets.org/

Therapeutic Target Database:

lists >1500 therapeutic targets, disease conditions and corresponding drugs http://xin.cz3.nus.edu.sg/group/cjttd/ttd.asp

MAGIC: A tool for predicting transcription factors and cofactors driving gene sets using ENCODE data

BioStar — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 11:05:04 -0600

The algorithm presented herein, Mining Algorithm for GenetIc Controllers (MAGIC), uses ENCODE ChIP-seq data to look for statistical enrichment of TFs and cofactors in gene bodies and flanking regions in gene lists without an a priori binary classification of genes as targets or non-targets. When compared to other TF mining resources, MAGIC displayed favourable performance in predicting TFs and cofactors that drive gene changes in 4 settings:

1) A cell line expressing or lacking single TF,

2) Breast tumors divided along PAM50 designations

3) Whole brain samples from WT mice or mice lacking a single TF in a particular neuronal subtype

4) Single cell RNAseq analysis of neurons divided by Immediate Early Gene expression levels.

In summary, MAGIC is a standalone application that produces meaningful predictions of TFs and cofactors in transcriptomic experiments.

More at https://uwmadison.app.box.com/s/8j90e5h2rjrsz3bacaxnq8kor2o64vyg

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/asroopra/MAGIC