BOL: Related items

The Gene Detectives: How a New Computational Tool Is Helping Us Read the History Written in Our Genes

BioStar — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:23:42 -0500

Imagine opening an ancient family album with no names, dates, or captions. Some photographs are missing, others have been copied, and a few show people who look almost identical. Your challenge is to discover who is related to whom and reconstruct the family story. In evolutionary biology, scientists face a similar mystery when they study genes. Every genome contains clues about its past, but genes can be duplicated, lost, and changed over millions of years, making their history difficult to trace.

A recent study published in PLOS Computational Biology introduces REvolutionH-tl 2.0 (https://pypi.org/project/revolutionhtl/), a computational tool designed to help solve this mystery. The software analyzes protein sequences and identifies evolutionary relationships between genes. It can help researchers detect important events such as gene duplication, gene loss, and speciation, allowing them to reconstruct how genes evolved across different organisms.

What makes the tool especially interesting is its focus on both speed and interpretation. The researchers compared REvolutionH-tl 2.0 with several existing computational tools and reported that it achieved competitive accuracy while requiring less computational time in their tests. The tool also includes visualization features, helping researchers turn complicated genetic data into evolutionary stories that are easier to explore.

Genes are more than simple sequences of DNA; they are records of life’s long history. Each surviving gene carries traces of the changes that shaped it. By bringing together computational analysis and visualization, REvolutionH-tl 2.0 acts like a detective, helping scientists uncover these hidden stories. Ultimately, tools like this can improve our understanding of how genomes evolved and how genes acquired the roles they perform today.

More at https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013017

FQC Dashboard: Integrates FastQC results into a web-based, interactive, and extensible FASTQ quality control tool

Shruti Paniwala — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 01:30:22 -0600

FQC is software that facilitates quality control of FASTQ files by carrying out a QC protocol using FastQC, parsing results, and aggregating quality metrics into an interactive dashboard designed to richly summarize individual sequencing runs. The dashboard groups samples in dropdowns for navigation among the data sets, utilizes human-readable configuration files to manipulate the pages and tabs, and is extensible with CSV data.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/pnnl/fqc

Perlbrew: admin-free perl installation management tool.

Jit — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 03:53:08 -0500

perlbrew is an admin-free perl installation management tool. The latest version is 0.79, read the release note: Release 0.79.

Copy & Paste this line into your terminal:

\curl -L https://install.perlbrew.pl | bash

Or, if your system does not have curl but something else:

# Linux
\wget -O - https://install.perlbrew.pl | bash

# FreeBSD
\fetch -o- https://install.perlbrew.pl | sh

If you prefer to install with cpan, there are two steps:

sudo cpan App::perlbrew
perlbrew init

If it is installed with cpan, the perlbrew executable should be installed as /usr/bin/perlbrew or /usr/local/bin/perlbrew. For all users who want to use perlbrew, a prior perlbrew init needs to be executed.

The default perlbrew root directory is ~/perl5/perlbrew, which can be changed by setting PERLBREW_ROOTenvironment variable before the installation and initialization. For more advanced installation process, please read the perlbrew document.

Address of the bookmark: https://perlbrew.pl/

PLAST: A fast, accurate and NGS scalable bank-to-bank sequence similarity search tool

Jit — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 04:10:54 -0600

PLAST is a fast, accurate and NGS scalable bank-to-bank sequence similarity search tool providing significant accelerations of seeds-based heuristic comparison methods, such as the Blast suite of algorithms.

Relying on unique software architecture, PLAST takes full advantage of recent multi-core personal computers without requiring any additional hardware devices.

PLAST stands for Parallel Local Sequence Alignment Search Tool and is was published in BMC Bioinformatics.

PLAST is a general purpose sequence comparison tool providing the following benefits:

PLAST is a high-performance sequence comparison tool designed to compare two sets of sequences (query vs. reference),
Reduces the processing time of sequences comparisons while providing highest quality results,
Contains a fully integrated data filtering engine capable of selecting relevant hits with user-defined criteria (E-Value, identity, coverage, alignment length, etc.),
Does not require any additional hardware, since it is a software solution. It is easy to install, cost-effective, takes full advantage of multi-core processors and uses a small RAM footprint,
Ready to be used on desktop computer, cluster, cloud as well as within distributed system running Hadoop.

https://plast.inria.fr/

Address of the bookmark: https://plast.inria.fr/

Mugsy: multiple whole genome alignment tool

Jit — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 17:41:14 -0600

Mugsy is a multiple whole genome aligner. Mugsy uses Nucmer for pairwise alignment, a custom graph based segmentation procedure for identifying collinear regions, and the segment-based progressive multiple alignment strategy from Seqan::TCoffee. Mugsy accepts draft genomes in the form of multi-FASTA files and does not require a reference genome.

To cite Mugsy, use:

Angiuoli SV and Salzberg SL. Mugsy: Fast multiple alignment of closely related whole genomes.Bioinformatics 2011 27(3):334-4

Address of the bookmark: http://mugsy.sourceforge.net/

GPOPSIM: a simulation tool for whole-genome genetic data

Jit — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 03:47:46 -0600

GPOPSIM is a simulation tool for pedigree, phenotypes, and genomic data, with a variety of population and genome structures and trait genetic architectures. It provides flexible parameter settings for a wide discipline of users, especially can simulate multiple genetically correlated traits with desired genetic parameters and underlying genetic architectures.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/SCAU-AnimalGenetics/GPOPSIM

%MinMax: A versatile tool for calculating and comparing synonymous codon usage and its impact on protein folding.

Surabhi Chaudhary — Thu, 24 May 2018 02:53:31 -0500

%MM calculates whether a given gene sequence encodes amino acids using the most common codons possible, the least common codons possible, or (most typically) some combination of these extremes. See our PLoS ONE paper for more details on how the %MinMax algorithm works. %MinMax results are averaged over an 18-codon sliding window; hence the result for "codon window = 1" is the average codon usage for codons 1-18, codon window 2 = codons 2-19, etc.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.codons.org/

“One code to find them all”: a perl tool to conveniently parse RepeatMasker output files

Poonam Mahapatra — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 03:45:15 -0500

One code to find them all is a set of perl scripts to extract useful information from RepeatMasker about transposable elements, retrieve their sequences and get some quantitative information. Assemble RepeatMasker hits into complete TE copies, including LTR-retrotransposon Retrieve corresponding TE sequences, and flanking sequences, from the local fasta files Compute summary statistics for each TE family (number of TE copies, genome coverage...) Ambiguous cases such as nested TE can be assembled into copies automatically or manually Allow for working with a TE user-defined library Allow for working with only a user-chosen set of TE families http://doua.prabi.fr/software/one-code-to-find-them-all

Address of the bookmark: http://doua.prabi.fr/software/one-code-to-find-them-all

SALSA: A tool to scaffold long read assemblies with Hi-C

Jit — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 04:01:15 -0500

This code is used to scaffold your assemblies using Hi-C data. This version implements some improvements in the original SALSA algorithm. If you want to use the old version, it can be found in the old_salsa branch. To use the latest version, first run the following commands: cd SALSA make To run the code, you will need Python 2.7, BOOST libraries and Networkx(version lower than 1.2). If you consider using this tool, please cite our publication which describes the methods used for scaffolding. Ghurye, J., Pop, M., Koren, S., Bickhart, D., & Chin, C. S. (2017). Scaffolding of long read assemblies using long range contact information. BMC genomics, 18(1), 527. Link Ghurye, J., Rhie, A., Walenz, B.P., Schmitt, A., Selvaraj, S., Pop, M., Phillippy, A.M. and Koren, S., 2018. Integrating Hi-C links with assembly graphs for chromosome-scale assembly. bioRxiv, p.261149 Link For any queries, please either ask on github issue page or send an email to Jay Ghurye (jayg@cs.umd.edu).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/machinegun/SALSA

gSearch: a fast and flexible general search tool for whole-genome sequencing

Jit — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 17:19:15 -0500

gSearch compares sequence variants in the Genome Variation Format (GVF) or Variant Call Format (VCF) with a pre-compiled annotation or with variants in other genomes. Its search algorithms are subsequently optimized and implemented in a multi-threaded manner.

Address of the bookmark: http://ml.ssu.ac.kr/gSearch/index.html