BOL: Related items

The Tree That Learned to Read Genomes

BioStar — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:51:02 -0500

Imagine trying to reconstruct a family tree when many family photographs are missing, some names are unclear, and different relatives remember the past differently. This is similar to the challenge scientists face when trying to understand how organisms are related. Their family records are genomes, and the family tree is a phylogenetic tree. With modern sequencing technologies, scientists now have access to thousands of genomes, but comparing them can be difficult, especially when genomes are incomplete or poorly annotated.

A recent study by Webster and Chapman introduces Buscogeny (https://github.com/Jwebster89/Buscogeny), an open-source bioinformatics pipeline designed to make this process easier. The tool uses BUSCO (Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs), which identifies conserved genes that are expected to occur as single copies in particular groups of organisms. These genes act like evolutionary landmarks, allowing researchers to compare genomes and investigate their relationships.

Buscogeny brings several steps of phylogenomic analysis into one workflow. It identifies BUSCO genes, extracts and aligns their sequences, removes unreliable regions, combines information from multiple genes, and uses the resulting data to construct a phylogenetic tree. It also provides quality-control information, helping researchers identify genomes that may be too incomplete for reliable analysis.

The authors demonstrate the usefulness of Buscogeny with bacterial and fungal genomes, including Alternaria. This is particularly valuable because fungal genomes can vary greatly in quality and annotation. Ultimately, Buscogeny helps transform massive amounts of genomic data into an understandable evolutionary story. Each DNA sequence becomes a clue, each conserved gene becomes a landmark, and together these clues reveal a picture of how life is connected.

More at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10123-025-00752-6?

Understanding pango networks !

Abhi — Sat, 16 Oct 2021 14:02:36 -0500

In the vast majority of instances it is expected that Pango lineage names and designations will conform to the following rules. These rules also act as guidelines for the decisions made by the Lineage Designation Committee.

https://www.pango.network/the-pango-nomenclature-system/statement-of-nomenclature-rules/

https://www.pango.network/how-does-the-system-work/what-are-pango-lineages/

Reference paper

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0770-5

Address of the bookmark: https://www.pango.network/the-pango-nomenclature-system/statement-of-nomenclature-rules/

Rules for Pango Lineage !

Abhi — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 04:40:26 -0600

All the rules to classify a Lineage !

https://www.pango.network/the-pango-nomenclature-system/statement-of-nomenclature-rules/

Address of the bookmark: https://www.pango.network/the-pango-nomenclature-system/statement-of-nomenclature-rules/

DeCoSTAR: Reconstructing the Ancestral Organization of Genes or Genomes Using Reconciled Phylogenies

Shruti Paniwala — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 13:28:19 -0600

DeCoSTAR computes adjacency evolutionary scenarios using a scoring scheme based on a weighted sum of adjacency gains and breakages. Solutions, both optimal and near-optimal, are sampled according to the Boltzmann–Gibbs distribution centered around parsimonious solutions, and statistical supports on ancestral and extant adjacencies are provided. DeCoSTAR supports the features of previously contributed tools that reconstruct ancestral adjacencies, namely DeCo, DeCoLT, ART-DeCo, and DeClone. In a few minutes, DeCoSTAR can reconstruct the evolutionary history of domains inside genes, of gene fusion and fission events, or of gene order along chromosomes, for large data sets including dozens of whole genomes from all kingdoms of life.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/YoannAnselmetti/DeCoSTAR_pipeline

mixtureS: a novel tool for bacterial strain reconstruction from reads

BioStar — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 08:23:19 -0500

mixtureS that can de novo identify bacterial strains from shotgun reads of a clonal or metagenomic sample, without prior knowledge about the strains and their variations. Tested on 243 simulated datasets and 195 experimental datasets, mixtureS reliably identified the strains, their numbers and their abundance. Compared with three tools, mixtureS showed better performance in almost all simulated datasets and the vast majority of experimental datasets.

Availability

The source code and tool mixtureS is available at http://www.cs.ucf.edu/˜xiaoman/mixtureS/.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~xiaoman/mixtureS/

SeqFu: A Suite of Utilities for the Robust and Reproducible Manipulation of Sequence Files

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 03:13:33 -0600

A general-purpose program to manipulate and parse information from FASTA/FASTQ files, supporting gzipped input files. Includes functions to interleave and de-interleave FASTQ files, to rename sequences and to count and print statistics on sequence lengths. SeqFu is available for Linux and MacOS.

A compiled program delivering high performance analyses
Supports FASTA/FASTQ files, also Gzip compressed
A growing collection of handy utilities, also for quick inspection of the datasets

Can be easily installed via conda:

conda install -c bioconda seqfu

Address of the bookmark: https://telatin.github.io/seqfu2/

Platypus: A Haplotype-Based Variant Caller For Next Generation Sequence Data

Shruti Paniwala — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 06:14:55 -0500

Platypus is a tool designed for efficient and accurate variant-detection in high-throughput sequencing data. By using local realignment of reads and local assembly it achieves both high sensitivity and high specificity. Platypus can detect SNPs, MNPs, short indels, replacements and (using the assembly option) deletions up to several kb. It has been extensively tested on whole-genome, exon-capture, and targeted capture data, it has been run on very large datasets as part of the Thousand Genomes and WGS500 projects, and is being used in clinical sequencing trials in the Mainstreaming Cancer Genetics programme.

Tutorial https://github.com/andyrimmer/Platypus/blob/master/misc/README.txt

Address of the bookmark: http://www.well.ox.ac.uk/platypus

Kevler: Reference-free variant discovery in large eukaryotic genomes

Jit — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 03:21:53 -0600

Welcome to kevlar, software for predicting de novo genetic variants without mapping reads to a reference genome! kevlar's k-mer abundance based method calls single nucleotide variants (SNVs), multinucleotide variants (MNVs), insertion/deletion variants (indels), and structural variants (SVs) simultaneously with a single simple model.

More at https://kevlar.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2589-0042(19)30259-7.pdf

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/kevlar-dev/kevlar

truvari: Structural variant comparison tool for VCFs

Jit — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 21:30:44 -0500

Structural variant comparison tool for VCFs

Given benchmark and comparsion sets of SVs, calculate the recall, precision, and f-measure.

Spiral Genetics

Motivation

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/spiralgenetics/truvari

2.4 Mb Genome Size for World's Biggest Virus

Jitendra Narayan — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 10:05:37 -0500

The genome size of new discovered Pandoraviruses have roughly twice the size of the record-holding Megavirus genomic code. Interestingly only 6 percent of its genes resembled the genes other organisms. It is assume that it may come from a different origin.

For detail : http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6143/281

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/07/18/203298244/worlds-biggest-virus-may-have-ancient-roots