News

FastQC

FastQC aims to provide a simple way to do some quality control checks on raw sequence data coming from high throughput sequencing pipelines. It provides a modular set of analyses which you can use to give a quick impression of whether your data has any problems of which you should be aware before doing any further analysis.

The main functions of FastQC are:

  • Import of data from BAM, SAM or FastQ files (any variant)
  • Providing a quick overview to tell you in which areas there may be problems
  • Summary graphs and tables to quickly assess your data
  • Export of results to an HTML based permanent report
  • Offline operation to allow automated generation of reports without running the interactive application

Software Details

Visit their website and view the support site

License: GPL v3

Application: Bioinformatics

Platform:

Citation: n/a

Cufflinks

Cufflinks assembles transcripts, estimates their abundances, and tests for differential expression and regulation in RNA-Seq samples. It accepts aligned RNA-Seq reads and assembles the alignments into a parsimonious set of transcripts. Cufflinks then estimates the relative abundances of these transcripts based on how many reads support each one, taking into account biases in library preparation protocols.

Software Details

Visit their website and view the support site

License: Boost Software License

Application: Bioinformatics

Platform: Linux-64

Citation: n/a

Crystal14

The CRYSTAL Team is pleased to announce the release of CRYSTAL14 (current version: v1.0.3). CRYSTAL14 is a major release and the most relevant new features are:

  • Static first- and second-hyperpolarizability and the corresponding electric susceptibilities tensors through a Coupled Perturbed HF/KS scheme
  • Improved phonon dispersion calculation (phonon band structure and DOSs, ADPs and Debye-Waller factors, …)
  • Raman and IR intensities through a CPHF/KS approach
  • Automated calculation of the piezoelectric and photoelastic tensors of crystalline systems
  • New DFT functionals: mGGA, Range-separated hybrids and Double-hybrids
  • Automatic generation of fullerene-like structures
  • New tools to model low-dimensionality systems (nanorods, nanoparticles, …)
  • New tools for the treatment of solid solutions
  • Improved Massive-parallel version (MPPcrystal – distributed memory)
  • Internal interface to CRYSCOR for electronic structure calculations of 1D,- 2D- and 3D-periodic non-conducting systems at the L-MP2 correlated level and Double-Hybrids
  • Internal interface to TOPOND for topological analysis of the charge density

Software Details

Visit their website and view the support site

License: University-Wide Commercial Site License

Application: Quantum chemistry, Molecular mechanics

Platform: Linux-64

Citation: R. Dovesi, V.R. Saunders, C. Roetti, R. Orlando, C. M. Zicovich-Wilson, F. Pascale, B. Civalleri, K. Doll, N.M. Harrison, I.J. Bush, Ph. D’Arco, M. Llunell, M. Causa, Y. NoelCRYSTAL14 User’s Manual, University of Torino, Torino, 2014

BWA (Burrows-Wheeler Aligner)

BWA is a software package for mapping low-divergent sequences against a large reference genome, such as the human genome. It consists of three algorithms: BWA-backtrack, BWA-SW and BWA-MEM. The first algorithm is designed for Illumina sequence reads up to 100bp, while the rest two for longer sequences ranged from 70bp to 1Mbp. BWA-MEM and BWA-SW share similar features such as long-read support and split alignment, but BWA-MEM, which is the latest, is generally recommended for high-quality queries as it is faster and more accurate. BWA-MEM also has better performance than BWA-backtrack for 70-100bp Illumina reads.

Software Details

Visit their website and view the support site

License: GPL v3

Application: Bioinformatics

Platform: Linux-64

Citation: If you use the BWA-backtrack algorithm, please cite the following paper: Li H. and Durbin R. (2009) Fast and accurate short read alignment with Burrows-Wheeler transform. Bioinformatics, 25, 1754-1760. [PMID: 19451168]

* If you use the BWA-SW algorithm, please cite: Li H. and Durbin R. (2010) Fast and accurate long-read alignment with Burrows-Wheeler transform. Bioinformatics, 26, 589-595. [PMID: 20080505]

* If you use the fastmap component of BWA, please cite: Li H. (2012) Exploring single-sample SNP and INDEL calling with whole-genome de novo assembly. Bioinformatics, 28, 1838-1844. [PMID: 22569178] * Li H. (2013) Aligning sequence reads, clone sequences and assembly contigs with BWA-M

Bowtie 2

Bowtie 2 is an ultrafast and memory-efficient tool for aligning sequencing reads to long reference sequences. It is particularly good at aligning reads of about 50 up to 100s or 1,000s of characters, and particularly good at aligning to relatively long (e.g. mammalian) genomes. Bowtie 2 indexes the genome with an FM Index to keep its memory footprint small: for the human genome, its memory footprint is typically around 3.2 GB. Bowtie 2 supports gapped, local, and paired-end alignment modes.

Software Details

Visit their website and view the support site

Licence: Open Source

Application: Bioinformatics

Platform: Linux-64

Citation:

Langmead B., Salzberg S. Fast gapped-read alignment with Bowtie 2. Nature Methods. 2012, 9:357-359, www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v9/n4/full/nmeth.1923.html.

Bowtie

Bowtie is an ultrafast, memory-efficient short read aligner. It aligns short DNA sequences (reads) to the human genome at a rate of over 25 million 35-bp reads per hour. Bowtie indexes the genome with a Burrows-Wheeler index to keep its memory footprint small: typically about 2.2 GB for the human genome (2.9 GB for paired-end).

Software Details

Visit their website and view the support site

License: Open Source

Application: Bioinformatics

Platform: Linux-64

Citation:

Langmead B., Trapnell C., Pop M., Salzberg S.L. Ultrafast and memory-efficient alignment of short DNA sequences to the human genome. Genome Biol 10:R25, genomebiology.com/2009/10/3/r25.

BLAST+

BLAST+ is a new suite of BLAST tools that utilizes the NCBI C++ Toolkit. The BLAST+ applications have a number of performance and feature improvements over the legacy BLAST applications.

Software Details

Visit their website and view the support site

License: Public Domain

Application: Bioinformatics

Platform: Linux-64

Citation:

Camacho C., Coulouris G., Avagyan V., Ma N., Papadopoulos J., Bealer K., & Madden T.L. (2008) “BLAST+: architecture and applications.” BMC Bioinformatics 10:421, link.springer.com/article/10.1186%2F1471-2105-10-421.

BCFtools

Samtools is a suite of programs for interacting with high-throughput sequencing data. It consists of three separate repositories:

  • Samtools – Reading/writing/editing/indexing/viewing SAM/BAM/CRAM format
  • BCFtools – Reading/writing BCF2/VCF/gVCF files and calling/filtering/summarising SNP and short indel sequence variants
  • HTSlib – A C library for reading/writing high-throughput sequencing data

Samtools and BCFtools both use HTSlib internally, but these source packages contain their own copies of HSTlib so they can be built independently.

Software Details

Visit their website and view the support site

License: MIT/Expat License

Application: Bioinformatics

Platform: Linux-64

Citation: Li H., Handsaker B., Wysoker A., Fennell T., Ruan J., Homer N., Marth G., Abecasis G., Durbin R. and 1000 Genome Project Data Processing Subgroup (2009) The Sequence alignment/map (SAM) format and SAMtools. Bioinformatics, 25, 2078-9. [PMID: 19505943]

* Li H. A statistical framework for SNP calling, mutation discovery, association mapping and population genetical parameter estimation from sequencing data. Bioinformatics. 2011 Nov 1;27(21):2987-93. Epub 2011 Sep 8. [PMID: 21903627]

* Danecek P., Schiffels S., Durbin R. Multiallelic calling model in bcftools (-m), samtools.github.io/bcftools/call-m.pdf

* Li H. Improving SNP discovery by base alignment quality. Bioinformatics. 2011 Apr 15;27(8):1157-8. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btr076. Epub 2011 Feb 13. [PMID: 21320865]

* Durbin R. Segregation based metric for variant call QC, samtools.github.io/bcftools/rd-SegBias.pdf

* Li H, Mathematical Notes on SAMtools Algorithms, www.broadinstitute.org/gatk/media/docs/Samtools.pdf

Fall 2016 Colloquies

Learn about Improving Scientific Innovation: A Data Science Perspective from Daniel Acuna and then later in the month Shikha Nangia speaks about Breaking Through the Blood-Brain Barrier.