BOL: Related items

EAGER

Jit — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 18:07:23 -0600

The automated reconstruction of genome sequences in ancient genome analysis is a multifaceted process.

EAGER encompasses both state-of-the-art tools for each step as well as new complementary tools tailored for ancient DNA data within a single integrated solution in an easily accessible format.

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-0918-z

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/apeltzer/EAGER-GUI

BIMA V3: an aligner customized for mate pair library sequencing

Abhimanyu Singh — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:20:00 -0600

Summary: Mate pair library sequencing is an effective and economical method for detecting genomic structural variants and chromosomal abnormalities. Unfortunately, the mapping and alignment of mate pair read pairs to a reference genome is a challenging and
time consuming process for most NGS alignment programs. Large insert sizes, introduction of library preparation protocol artifacts (biotin junction reads, paired-end read contamination, chimeras, etc.), and presence of structural variant breakpoints within reads increases mapping and alignment complexity. We describe an algorithm that is up to 20 times faster and 25% more accurate than popular NGS alignment programs when processing mate pair sequencing.
Availability: http://bioinformaticstools.mayo.edu/research/bima/
Contact: vasmatzis.george@mayo.edu

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/02/12/bioinformatics.btu078.full.pdf

GARM:Genome Assembly, Reconciliation and Merging

Jit — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 06:03:02 -0600

The pipeline is based mainly implemented using Perl scripts and modules and third-party open source software like the AMOS (Myers et al., 2000) and MUMmer (Kurtz et al., 2004) packages. The pipeline was tested on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and BioLinux distributions. The method merges contigs or scaffolds from different assemblers using the same or different sequencing technologies. When scaffolds are provided, a process of finding probable compressions or extensions (CE) problems in the assemblies can be per-formed; contigs are joined back into scaffolds after gap recalculation

Address of the bookmark: http://garm-meta-assem.sourceforge.net/

quickmerge: A simple and fast metassembler and assembly gap filler designed for long molecule based assemblies.

Jit — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 10:23:36 -0600

quickmerge uses a simple concept to improve contiguity of genome assemblies based on long molecule sequences, often with dramatic outcomes. The program uses information from assemblies made with illumina short reads and PacBio long reads to improve contiguities of an assembly generated with PacBio long reads alone. This is counterintuitive because illumina short reads are not typically considered to cover genomic regions which PacBio long reads cannot. Although we have not evaluated this program for assemblies generated with Oxford nanopore sequences, the program should work with ONP-assemblies too.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/mahulchak/quickmerge

Progressive Cactus

Jit — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 03:40:06 -0600

v0.0 by Glenn Hickey (hickey@soe.ucsc.edu)

Progressive Cactus is a whole-genome alignment package.

Requirements

git
gcc 4.2 or newer
python 2.7
wget
64bit processor and build environment
150GB+ of memory on at least one machine when aligning mammal-sized genomes; less memory is needed for smaller genomes.
Parasol or SGE for cluster support.
750M disk space

Instructions

IMPORTANT NOTE: Progressive Cactus does not presently support installation into paths that contain spaces. Until this is resolved, you can use a softlink as a workaround: ln -s "path with spaces" "installation path without spaces"

In the parent directory of where you want Progressive Cactus installed:

git clone git://github.com/glennhickey/progressiveCactus.git
cd progressiveCactus
git pull
git submodule update --init
make

It is also convenient to add the location of progressiveCactus/bin to your PATH environment variable. In order to run the included tools (ex hal2maf) in the submodules/ directory structure, first source progressiveCactus/environment to load the installed environment.

If any errors occur during the build process, you are unlikely to be able to use the tool. Please submit a GitHub issue so we can help out: not only will you help yourself, but others who wish to use the tool as well.

Note that all dependencies are also built and included in the submodules/ directory. This increases the size and build time but greatly simplifies installation and version management. The installation does not create or modify any files outside the progressiveCactus/ directory.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/glennhickey/progressiveCactus

PANDASEQ

Shruti Paniwala — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 04:54:32 -0600

PANDASEQ assembles paired-end Illumina reads into sequences, trying to correct for errors and uncalled bases. The assembler reads two files in FASTQ format with quality information. If amplification primers were used (e.g., to isolate a variable region of the 16S gene, or the constant regions around zinc finger binding residues), they can be removed from the sequence during assembly. The final sequence will correct any uncalled bases in the overlapping region using the complementary strand. When mismatches occur in the overlapping region, the base with the better quality score is chosen.
The algorithm is as follows:

1.Find the positions where the forward and reverse primers match best above the threshold and discard the ends of the sequence, including the primer.
2.Pick and overlap to maximise the probability of the forward and reverse reads having come from a single piece of DNA.
3.Identify the masking of the end of the read with the quality score B or # as done by CASAVA and adjust the probabilities in this region.
4.Construct an assembled sequence between the primers and calculate the quality.
5.Check for various constraints, including quality, length, uncalled bases, and user-supplied modules.

http://neufeldserver.uwaterloo.ca/~apmasell/pandaseq_man1.html

Address of the bookmark: http://neufeldserver.uwaterloo.ca/~apmasell/pandaseq_man1.html

Harvest

Jit — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 10:57:56 -0600

Harvest is a suite of core-genome alignment and visualization tools for quickly analyzing thousands of intraspecific microbial genomes, including variant calls, recombination detection, and phylogenetic trees.

Tools

Parsnp - Core-genome alignment and analysis
Gingr - Interactive visualization of alignments, trees and variants
HarvestTools - Archiving and postprocessing

Citation

Treangen TJ, Ondov BD, Koren S, Phillippy AM. The Harvest suite for rapid core-genome alignment and visualization of thousands of intraspecific microbial genomes. Genome Biology, 15 (11), 1-15 [PDF]

Address of the bookmark: http://harvest.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

Important Journals, Blogs and Forums for Bioinformaticians

Jit — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 09:15:31 -0600

Journals. Most journals have RSS feeds for their current updates.

Blogs. Some of these blogs are very relevant to bioinfo jobs. Others are more personal interest.

The OpenHelix Blog
Ensembl blog
Galaxy News
Blue Collar Bioinformatics
Homologus
Golden Helix - our 2 SNPs
Genomics Law Report
R-bloggers (aggregates feeds from >350 blogs about R)
Genomes Unzipped
Jason Moore's Epistasis Blog
23andMe - the Spitoon

Variance Explained: David Robinson’s blog (Data Scientist at Stack Overflow, works in R and Python).
Global Biodefense: News on pathogens, outbreaks, and preparedness, with periodic posts on genomics and bioinformatics-related developments and funding opportunities.
In between lines of code: Lex Nederbragt’s blog on biology, sequencing, bioinformatics, …
Simply Statistics: A statistics blog by Rafa Irizarry, Roger Peng, and Jeff Leek.
Bits of DNA: Reviews and commentary on computational biology by Lior Pachter (fair warning: dialogue here can get a bit heated!).
Blue Collar Bioinformatics: articles related tool validation and the open source bioinformatics community.
Microbiome Digest – Bik’s Picks: A daily digest of scientific microbiome papers, by Elisabeth Bik, Science Editor at uBiome.
Living in an Ivory Basement: Titus Brown’s blog on metagenomics, open science, testing, reproducibility, and programming.
Enseqlopedia: James Hadfield’s blog on all things NGS.
Epistasis Blog: Jason Moore’s computational biology blog.
RStudio Blog: announcements about new RStudio functionality, updates about the tidyverse, and more.
nextgenseek.com: Next-Gen Sequencing Blog covering new developments in NGS data & analysis.
RNA-Seq Blog: Transcriptome Research & Industry News.
The Allium: We all need a little humor in our lives. Like The Onion, but for science.

Forums.

BRIG

Jit — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 13:14:25 -0600

BRIG is a free cross-platform (Windows/Mac/Unix) application that can display circular comparisons between a large number of genomes, with a focus on handling genome assembly data. The application is available at:http://sourceforge.net/projects/brig

If you have any questions or comments, post them on one of the trackers on BRIG’s SourceForge page:http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=328245.

Features:

Images show similarity between a central reference sequence and other sequences as concentric rings.
BRIG will perform all BLAST comparisons and file parsing automatically via a simple GUI.
Contig boundaries and read coverage can be displayed for draft genomes; customized graphs and annotations can be displayed.
Using a user-defined set of genes as input, BRIG can display gene presence, absence, truncation or sequence variation in a set of complete genomes, draft genomes or even raw, unassembled sequence data.
BRIG also accepts SAM-formatted read-mapping files enabling genomic regions present in unassembled sequence data from multiple samples to be compared simultaneously

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

J-Circos

Shruti Paniwala — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 09:06:54 -0600

Circos plot tool (J-Circos) that is an interactive visualization tool that can plot Circos figures, as well as being able to dynamically add data to the figure, and providing information for specific data points using mouse hover display and zoom in/out functions. J-Circos uses the Java computer language to enable it to be used on most operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux). Users can input data into J-Circos using flat data formats, as well as from the GUI. J-Circos will enable biologists to better study more complex chromosomal interactions and fusion transcripts that are otherwise difficult to visualize from next-generation sequencing data.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.australianprostatecentre.org/research/software/jcircos