• Using state of the art tools, easily extended for other viruses

• Tool and database updates for critical components via Conda

• Built using modern design patterns with Conda and Snakemake

• Extensible and easy to customize

• Submission Ready Genomes

• Customizable reporting with comprehensive visualization

https://ikim-essen.github.io/uncovar/

Github https://github.com/IKIM-Essen/uncovar

Address of the bookmark: https://ikim-essen.github.io/uncovar/

Bioinformatics
Cancer
Epigenetics

More at http://liulab.dfci.harvard.edu/

The Power of Evo 2: AI Meets DNA

Evo 2 is the largest AI model for biology ever created, trained on an astonishing 9.3 trillion DNA "letters" (nucleotides) carefully selected from genomes spanning the entire tree of life. This massive dataset ensures that Evo 2 can recognize patterns and relationships in genetic sequences at an unparalleled scale.

For the first time, scientists can design DNA with AI, moving beyond simple sequence analysis to active DNA generation. Evo 2 enables researchers to predict, modify, and even create entire genetic sequences, opening new possibilities in medicine, agriculture, and synthetic biology.

Decoding the Dark Genome

One of the biggest challenges in genetics is understanding the non-coding regions of DNA—vast stretches of the genome that do not code for proteins but play crucial roles in regulating gene expression. These regions control when and how genes are activated, influencing everything from development to disease.

Evo 2 is designed to decode these non-coding elements, helping researchers uncover their functions and use this knowledge to develop gene-based therapies, synthetic life forms, and precision agriculture solutions.

From Reading DNA to Writing It

To put Evo 2’s impact into perspective:

• Previous AI models could "read" DNA like a book, analyzing genetic sequences and identifying patterns.
• Evo 2 can "write" entirely new DNA, designing functional genes, chromosomes, and even full genomes from scratch.

This means scientists can now engineer biological systems with AI, designing new proteins, metabolic pathways, and genetic circuits to address real-world challenges.

A Step Toward Generative Biology

The Arc Institute describes Evo 2 as a major step toward "generative biology"—a revolutionary approach where AI is used to create novel biological structures rather than just analyzing existing ones. This could lead to breakthroughs such as:

• New medicines: AI-generated enzymes and proteins tailored for targeted therapies.
• Disease-resistant crops: Genetically optimized plants for higher yield and climate resilience.
• Synthetic organisms: Custom-designed microbes for bioremediation, biofuel production, and industrial applications.

An Open-Source Revolution

Unlike many proprietary AI models, Evo 2 is open source, making its capabilities accessible to researchers worldwide. This democratization of AI-driven biology means that scientists from different disciplines can collaborate, experiment, and innovate, accelerating discoveries in genetic engineering and synthetic biology.

With Evo 2, the boundaries of what’s possible in DNA design, genetic engineering, and biological innovation are being redrawn. The future of life sciences is no longer just about understanding life’s code—it’s about writing it.

That is the challenge researchers face when studying how bacteria adapt to different environments. A bacterial gene may appear to be linked to a particular habitat, when the real reason is simply that closely related bacteria happen to live there.

In their 2025 Genome Biology paper, Bujdoš, Walter, and O’Toole introduce aurora, a machine-learning tool designed to tackle this problem.

Aurora identifies potentially mislabeled or unusual bacterial strains before performing genome-wide association studies (GWAS). By cleaning up the dataset and accounting for bacterial evolutionary relationships, it can help researchers find genetic features that are more genuinely connected to habitat adaptation.

The researchers tested aurora using simulated and real bacterial datasets and found that it could recover important genetic associations even when datasets contained misleading labels.

The bigger lesson is simple: better biological discoveries often begin with better data.

Aurora gives researchers a new way to separate real genetic clues from misleading ones—and could help us better understand how bacteria adapt, survive, and evolve in the environments they call home.

Based on Bujdoš et al., “aurora: a machine learning GWAS tool for analyzing microbial habitat adaptation,” Genome Biology (2025).[Read the original paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-025-03524-7?)

Research Directions

Stony corals: evolution of novelty and photosymbiosis

Symbiotic acoels: cell type evolution and photosymbiosis

Animal genomes: structural evolution and gene regulation

https://sgel.biodiv.tw/home

Alternatively, use one liner perl script:

perl -ne 'if(/^>(\S+)/){$c=$i{$1}}$c?print:chomp;$i{$_}=1 if @ARGV' GIs.txt >sequence.fasta

where GIs.txt contains a list of GIs or accession IDs.

(from :http://edwards.sdsu.edu/labsite/index.php/robert?start=5)

Address of the bookmark: http://edwards.sdsu.edu/labsite/index.php/robert/380-ncbi-sequence-or-fasta-batch-download-using-entrez

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

News source Nature.

    1. Support for the new FWR4 annotation feature in the AIRR format, both in standard format and in the AIRR alignment format.

    2. The previous “-penalty” parameter was renamed as -V_penalty to be consistent with other IgBLAST penalty options.

    3. Restored constant internal BLAST search parameters for domain annotation (i.e., FWR/CDR) such that this process is not influenced by user parameters.

    4. Corrected FWR/CDR annotations for certain mouse VK and rat VH germline genes. 

IgBLAST 1.15.0 is available for download from the BLAST FTP area. See the the new manual on GitHub for information about setting up and running IgBLAST.

 If you have any questions or concerns, please contact blast-help@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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