BOL: Related items

HiBC: Human Intestinal Bacteria Collection

BioStar — Wed, 07 May 2025 05:49:19 -0500

The human gut is home to trillions of microorganisms, forming one of the most complex and dynamic microbial ecosystems known to science. The Human Intestinal Bacteria Collection (HiBC) is a pioneering initiative aimed at cataloging, preserving, and studying the diverse bacterial species that inhabit the human gastrointestinal tract. This curated collection serves as a critical resource for researchers working on microbiome-related health, disease, and therapeutics.

What is HiBC?

The Human Intestinal Bacteria Collection (HiBC) is a comprehensive, high-quality reference repository of bacterial isolates derived from human fecal samples. It focuses on anaerobic and facultative anaerobic bacteria that play pivotal roles in digestion, immune modulation, vitamin synthesis, and pathogen resistance. The collection includes both culturable strains and genomic data from unculturable taxa, bridging the gap between culture-dependent and -independent microbiome studies.

Why is HiBC Important?

Understanding Microbiome-Host Interactions
HiBC enables deeper insight into the functions of specific bacterial taxa in the gut. With well-characterized isolates, researchers can conduct mechanistic studies to explore how certain bacteria influence metabolism, inflammation, or mental health.
Precision Probiotics and Therapeutics
By providing access to native human gut microbes, HiBC supports the development of next-generation probiotics, live biotherapeutic products (LBPs), and fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) alternatives.
Standardization and Reproducibility
With standardized cultivation and genomic protocols, HiBC ensures consistency across microbiome research studies, improving reproducibility and comparability of findings.
Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Surveillance
HiBC includes metadata on antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), helping track the spread of AMR in commensal gut bacteria and understanding its implications for human health.

Key Features of HiBC

Culturable Bacteria Repository: A living collection of anaerobic and facultative strains isolated from healthy and diseased individuals worldwide.
Metadata-rich Entries: Each isolate is annotated with host details (age, health status, diet), geographical origin, phenotypic traits, and antibiotic susceptibility profiles.
Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS): High-quality genome assemblies for most strains to support functional and comparative genomics.
Interactive Database Access: User-friendly search and filtering options for strain selection based on taxonomy, function, or clinical relevance.
Cross-linking with Other Databases: Integration with NCBI, GOLD, and Human Microbiome Project (HMP) data for broader context and validation.

Applications of HiBC

Microbiome-based diagnostics and biomarker discovery
Host-microbe interaction studies in gnotobiotic mouse models
Gut microbiome modulation through diet, drugs, or engineered bacteria
Longitudinal studies of gut flora across age, geography, and lifestyle
Environmental and evolutionary microbiology of human-associated bacteria

Accessing HiBC

Researchers and interested parties can explore the HiBC database through its official website: https://www.hibc.rwth-aachen.de/. The platform offers comprehensive information on bacterial isolates, including taxonomy, cultivation conditions, and genomic data, facilitating advanced research in human gut microbiome studies.

Final Thoughts

The HiBC is a cornerstone resource in the rapidly evolving field of microbiome research. As science moves toward personalized medicine and microbial therapeutics, having a reliable and diverse collection of human gut bacteria is not just useful — it's essential. Whether you're a microbiologist, clinician, computational biologist, or biotechnologist, HiBC offers tools to accelerate discovery and innovation in gut microbiome science.

CONTIGuator !

BioStar — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 01:27:58 -0500

CONTIGuator is a Python script for Linux environments whose purpose is to speed-up the bacterial genome assembly process and to obtain a first insight of the genome structure using the well-known artemis comparison tool (ACT).

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

COCACOLA (binning metagenomic contigs using sequence COmposition, read CoverAge, CO-alignment, and paired-end read LinkAge)

Jit — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 08:50:57 -0600

COCACOLA is a general framework that combines different types of information: sequence COmposition, CoverAge across multiple samples, CO-alignment to reference genomes and paired-end reads LinkAge to automatically bin contigs into OTUs. Furthermore, COCACOLA seamlessly embraces customized prior knowledge to facilitate binning accuracy.

News: Python version of COCACOLA is available now!

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/younglululu/COCACOLA

shovill: Assemble bacterial isolate genomes from Illumina paired-end reads

BioStar — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 07:05:36 -0600

Shovill is a pipeline which uses SPAdes at its core, but alters the steps before and after the primary assembly step to get similar results in less time. Shovill also supports other assemblers like SKESA, Velvet and Megahit, so you can take advantage of the pre- and post-processing the Shovill provides with those too.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/tseemann/shovill

COPE: an accurate k-mer-based pair-end reads connection tool to facilitate genome assembly

Jit — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 02:08:14 -0600

An efficient tool called Connecting Overlapped Pair-End (COPE) reads, to connect overlapping pair-end reads using k-mer frequencies. We evaluated our tool on 30× simulated pair-end reads from Arabidopsis thaliana with 1% base error. COPE connected over 99% of reads with 98.8% accuracy, which is, respectively, 10 and 2% higher than the recently published tool FLASH. When COPE is applied to real reads for genome assembly, the resulting contigs are found to have fewer errors and give a 14-fold improvement in the N50 measurement when compared with the contigs produced using unconnected reads.

Address of the bookmark: ftp://ftp.genomics.org.cn/pub/cope

Reference-free prediction of rearrangement breakpoint reads

Neel — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 05:05:25 -0600

lideSort-BPR ( b reak p oint r eads) is based on a fast algorithm for all-against-all comparisons of short reads and theoretical analyses of the number of neighboring reads. When applied to a dataset with a sequencing depth of 100×, it finds ∼88% of the breakpoints correctly with no false-positive reads. Moreover, evaluation on a real prostate cancer dataset shows that the proposed method predicts more fusion transcripts correctly than previous approaches, and yet produces fewer false-positive reads. To our knowledge, this is the first method to detect breakpoint reads without using a reference genome.

https://github.com/ewijaya/slidesort-bpr

Address of the bookmark: https://code.google.com/archive/p/slidesort-bpr/

MECAT: fast mapping, error correction, and de novo assembly for single-molecule sequencing reads

Rahul Nayak — Fri, 11 May 2018 05:07:45 -0500

MECAT is an ultra-fast Mapping, Error Correction and de novo Assembly Tools for single molecula sequencing (SMRT) reads. MECAT employs novel alignment and error correction algorithms that are much more efficient than the state of art of aligners and error correction tools. MECAT can be used for effectively de novo assemblying large genomes. For example, on a 32-thread computer with 2.0 GHz CPU , MECAT takes 9.5 days to assemble a human genome based on 54x SMRT data, which is 40 times faster than the current PBcR-Mhap pipeline. MECAT performance were compared with PBcR-Mhap pipeline, FALCON and Canu(v1.3) in five real datasets. The quality of assembled contigs produced by MECAT is the same or better than that of the PBcR-Mhap pipeline and FALCON.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.4432

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/xiaochuanle/MECAT

Jvarkit : Java utilities for Bioinformatics

Jit — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 09:31:55 -0500

Collection of Java tool kits for bioinformatics works: Jvarkit : Java utilities for Bioinformatics

Address of the bookmark: http://lindenb.github.io/jvarkit/

GenomeMapper: Simultaneous alignment of short reads against multiple genomes

Jit — Fri, 25 May 2018 09:29:44 -0500

GenomeMapper is a short read mapping tool designed for accurate read alignments. It quickly aligns millions of reads either with ungapped or gapped alignments. It can be used to align against multiple genomes simulanteously or against a single reference. If you are unsure which one is the appropriate GenomeMapper, you might want to use the latter https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2768987/

Address of the bookmark: http://1001genomes.org/software/genomemapper.html

P_RNA_scaffolder: a fast and accurate genome scaffolder using paired-end RNA-sequencing reads

Jit — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 08:14:41 -0500

P_RNA_scaffolder, a fast and accurate tool using paired-end RNA-sequencing reads to scaffold genomes. This tool aims to improve the completeness of both protein-coding and non-coding genes. After this tool was applied to scaffolding human contigs, the structures of both protein-coding genes and circular RNAs were almost completely recovered and equivalent to those in a complete genome, especially for long proteins and long circular RNAs.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.fishbrowser.org/software/P_RNA_scaffolder/