Genome Intelligence

Mapping short sequence reads to a reference sequence is a common task in genomics. Many different results can be extracted from a mapped sequence, depending on the original experimental design that produced the sequence reads and on the analysis that follows the mapping. For example: a genomic consensus for an individual (against the reference genome for that species) location of SNPs and other variations in one genome relative to the other location of expressed transcripts (coding mRNAs, noncoding RNAs such…

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PanX is a program for pangenome analysis and production of core genome phylogenies. The PanX analysis tools are available as a github package for custom genome analyses, and also as a web server. The PanX authors make a collection of precomputed comparisons available here. One of the demonstration datasets available at the PanX site is a collection of prochlorococcus marinus genomes sequenced by Biller et al (2014). In lecture last week, we also looked at a study of prochlorococcus by…

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There are many ways to compare genomes, and these comparisons provide different kinds of information about evolutionary history and shared function. First, how do you decide which genes are “the same” across multiple genomes, i.e. orthologs, genes having a common ancestor and related by speciation. Second, which parts of the nucleotide sequence of multiple genomes align, irrespective of gene boundaries and orthology relationships. Finally, how do we decide what genes “are” and what they do to help interpret the meaning…

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Genome browsers are designed to get different types of genome track data together using the common reference system of genomic coordinates. Often you’re more interested in manipulating whole sets of data, rather than just looking at one region at a time manually, so there are tools available both online and at the command line that will help you with genome track math. The purpose of today’s lab is to get you familiar with genome browsers and track types, and experienced…

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DNA Sequencing is a continually evolving technology, with new platforms becoming available each year, all designed with the aim of reducing the cost and increasing the speed of large sequencing projects. As you can see from the figure below, certain types of sequencing dominate the current market. The top three instruments shown are established high and moderate capacity Illumina sequencing instruments, the next two are Ion Torrent instruments, and the two below that are newer Illumina instruments. Beyond that there is a…

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This tutorial makes use of the data from the NC Urban Microbiome Project, a collaboration seeded by the Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics and involving participants from our department as well as Civil Engineering, Biology, and Geography and Earth Science. Many thanks to Kevin Lambirth, who created the original version of this tutorial for our lab interns. This tutorial uses QIIME 1.9 — there is a newer QIIME and we are all in the process of learning it, but it…

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Mapping short sequence reads to a reference sequence is a common task in genomics. Many different results can be extracted from a mapped sequence, depending on the original experimental design that produced the sequence reads and on the analysis that follows the mapping. For example: a genomic consensus for an individual (against the reference genome for that species) location of SNPs and other variations in one genome relative to the other location of expressed transcripts (coding mRNAs, noncoding RNAs such…

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In previous iterations of this course, we’ve used the RAST/SEED servers to perform annotation. RAST is a highly regarded genome annotation pipeline, and you will easily be able to justify using it to reviewers if you are ever writing a bacterial genome paper. However, it can be cumbersome to use the myRAST interface, the command line tools are not particularly well documented, and it can take a day or more to run. So this year we’re going to try a newer…

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