BOL: Related items

Explore taxdump files !

Jit — Sat, 08 Feb 2020 04:44:55 -0600

This is an extract of taxdump-readme.txt to be found at 
ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/pub/taxonomy/

The content of the archive
--------------------------

It may look like this:

delnodes.dmp
division.dmp
gencode.dmp
merged.dmp
names.dmp
nodes.dmp
readme.txt

The readme.txt file gives a brief description of *.dmp files. These files
contain taxonomic information and are briefly described below. Each of the
files store one record in the single line that are delimited by "\t|\n"
(tab, vertical bar, and newline) characters. Each record consists of one 
or more fields delimited by "\t|\t" (tab, vertical bar, and tab) characters.
The brief description of field position and meaning for each file follows.

nodes.dmp
---------

This file represents taxonomy nodes. The description for each node includes 
the following fields:

	tax_id					-- node id in GenBank taxonomy database
 	parent tax_id				-- parent node id in GenBank taxonomy database
 	rank					-- rank of this node (superkingdom, kingdom, ...) 
 	embl code				-- locus-name prefix; not unique
 	division id				-- see division.dmp file
 	inherited div flag  (1 or 0)		-- 1 if node inherits division from parent
 	genetic code id				-- see gencode.dmp file
 	inherited GC  flag  (1 or 0)		-- 1 if node inherits genetic code from parent
 	mitochondrial genetic code id		-- see gencode.dmp file
 	inherited MGC flag  (1 or 0)		-- 1 if node inherits mitochondrial gencode from parent
 	GenBank hidden flag (1 or 0)            -- 1 if name is suppressed in GenBank entry lineage
 	hidden subtree root flag (1 or 0)       -- 1 if this subtree has no sequence data yet
 	comments				-- free-text comments and citations

names.dmp
---------
Taxonomy names file has these fields:

	tax_id					-- the id of node associated with this name
	name_txt				-- name itself
	unique name				-- the unique variant of this name if name not unique
	name class				-- (synonym, common name, ...)

division.dmp
------------
Divisions file has these fields:
	division id				-- taxonomy database division id
	division cde				-- GenBank division code (three characters)
	division name				-- e.g. BCT, PLN, VRT, MAM, PRI...
	comments

gencode.dmp
-----------
Genetic codes file:

	genetic code id				-- GenBank genetic code id
	abbreviation				-- genetic code name abbreviation
	name					-- genetic code name
	cde					-- translation table for this genetic code
	starts					-- start codons for this genetic code

delnodes.dmp
------------
Deleted nodes (nodes that existed but were deleted) file field:

	tax_id					-- deleted node id

merged.dmp
----------
Merged nodes file fields:

	old_tax_id                              -- id of nodes which has been merged
	new_tax_id                              -- id of nodes which is result of merging

PubMed opens for comment

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 12:40:17 -0500

The informal conversations that researchers have at scientific meetings look set to move online, if a new initiative by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has its way. On 22 October, the NCBI of Bethesda, Maryland, launched the pilot phase of a programme called PubMed Commons. This will allow users to comment on published abstracts on the PubMed website, which indexes some 22 million papers.

For now, only a select group of researchers and their invited guests can use the system. But the NCBI's director David Lipman, who helped to develop the programme, says that soon any PubMed author will be allowed to comment under his or her real name and anyone will be able to read the comments.

More @ http://www.nature.com/news/pubmed-opens-for-comment-1.14023

News source Nature.

Webinar: BLAST in the Cloud

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 17:29:32 -0500

Presented July 30, 2014 and covering: an NCBI BLAST AMI at Amazon Web Services; introduction to AWS and setting up an instance; running command line BLAST and using the BLAST URL API via the AMI; and answers to attendee questions.

ORFfinder with smart BLAST

Jit — Tue, 17 May 2016 01:43:15 -0500

ORF Finder

ORFfinder is a graphical analysis tool for finding open reading frames (ORFs). We’ve been working on a few updates, and we’d like to find out what you think about them. Read on to find out what you can do with the new ORFfinder.

Smart BLAST (https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2015/07/29/smartblast/)

Select one or a group of ORFs and BLAST several databases at once, and use the newly developed SmartBLAST to verify protein names. Looking for the traditional results from BLAST? They’re there too.

BioDownloader

Surabhi Chaudhary — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 17:52:33 -0600

BioDownloader is a program for downloading and/or updating files from ftp/http servers. The program has unique features that are specifically designed to deal with bioinformatics data files and servers:

optimized to work with vast amount of data and very large file sets (~ 10,000 - 100,000).
allows the selective retrieval of only the required files (file masks, ls-lR parsing, recursive search, updates)
has a built-in repository containing the settings for the most common bioinformatics download needs
built-in wizard for batch post-processing of downloaded files (archive extraction, file conversion, etc.)
capable of performing multiple download or update tasks simultaneously

BioDownloader has a built-in repository containing the settings for common bioinformatics file-synchronization needs, including the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) databases. It can post-process downloaded files, including archive extraction and file conversions.

http://dunbrack.fccc.edu/BioDownloader/

Address of the bookmark: http://dunbrack.fccc.edu/BioDownloader/

NCBI Magic-BLAST

Jit — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 18:11:11 -0500

Magic-BLAST is a tool for mapping large next-generation RNA or DNA sequencing runs against a whole genome or transcriptome. Each alignment optimizes a composite score, taking into account simultaneously the two reads of a pair, and in case of RNA-seq, locating the candidate introns and adding up the score of all exons. This is very different from other versions of BLAST, where each exon is scored as a separate hit and read-pairing is ignored.

Magic-BLAST incorporates within the NCBI BLAST code framework ideas developed in the NCBI Magic pipeline, in particular hit extensions by local walk and jump (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26109056), and recursive clipping of mismatches near the edges of the reads, which avoids accumulating artefactual mismatches near splice sites and is needed to distinguish short indels from substitutions near the edges.

Address of the bookmark: https://ncbi.github.io/magicblast/

Magic-BLAST

Shruti Paniwala — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 15:18:36 -0500

Address of the bookmark: https://ncbi.github.io/magicblast/

NCBIBLAST+ 2.14.1 now available

Neel — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 02:36:13 -0500

#NCBIBLAST+ 2.14.1 now available with improved documentation, faster and more reliable database downloads, and some bug fixes.

Check out the changes they made.

They added the cleanup-blastdb-volumes.py script to remove unused BLAST database volumes. Read the documentation here.

They also switched the protocol from ftp to https to access BLAST databases for increased performance and reliability when downloading data from the NCBI with the update_blastdb.pl script.

And fixed a few bugs related to downloading data from the NCBI, and mt_mode crashing blastn and blastx.

Check out the release notes.

Download BLAST+ 2.14.1

Questions or comments? Please write the BLAST help desk.

More info and download: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/doc/blast-news/2023-BLAST-News.html

PHD SCHOLARSHIP DENMARK

Fri, 13 Jun 2014 13:44:07 -0500

ne PhD position is available at the Bioinformatics Center, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The PhD position concerns protein structure prediction, and will be in the Structural Bioinformatics group of Associate professor Thomas Hamelryck. The group is an integrated part of the Bioinformatics Center, which is headed by Professor Anders Krogh, employs around sixty scientists (including PhD students) and focuses on non-coding RNA, eukaryotic gene regulation and protein structure prediction. The center provides a modern, pleasant, international working environment with excellent modern facilities, in the heart of Copenhagen.
The project will be supervised by Associate Professor Thomas Hamelryck.

The protein folding problem is of enormous practical, theoretical and medical importance - and in addition forms a fascinating intellectual challenge. The aim of this project is to develop and implement a probabilistic method to infer the structure of proteins, building on various probabilistic models of protein structure developed by the Hamelryck group. The method will also take the dynamic nature of proteins into account, and involves a close collaboration with the statistics department at the university within the interdisciplinary project "Dynamical Systems: Mathematical Modeling and Statistical Methods for the Social, Health, and Natural Sciences" (http://dsin.ku.dk/).

Qualifications
Knowledge of programming (C++) and statistics or machine learning. Knowledge of biology, physics or biophysics is a plus, but not a requirement.

The deadline for applications is June 15, 2014

More at : https://job.jobnet.dk/CV/FindJob/details.aspx/3695051%20

Gblocks: eliminates poorly aligned positions and divergent regions of a DNA or protein alignment

Poonam Mahapatra — Sat, 02 Jun 2018 07:36:05 -0500

Gblocks eliminates poorly aligned positions and divergent regions of a DNA or protein alignment so that it becomes more suitable for phylogenetic analysis. This server implements the most important features of the Gblocks program to make its use as simple as possible without loosing the functionality that it is necessary in most of the cases. Other options can be changed in the stand-alone program. You can see here an example output file showing the blocks selected from a protein alignment. Further information can be found in the online documentation.

Address of the bookmark: http://molevol.cmima.csic.es/castresana/Gblocks_server.html