Category Archives: bioinformatics

Understanding diverse microbial communities: An interview with A. Murat Eren (Meren)

Posted on 2 Aug, 2016 by Kelle Freel

It’s clear that microbes play a crucial role in practically every aspect of ecosystems globally. From the deepest, most remote and unexplored regions of the ocean, to the human oral cavity, there are diverse microbial assemblages driving Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, community ecology, metagenomics, methods | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

What do dolphins, bivalves and algae have in common?

Posted on 15 Jul, 2016 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Collaboration as it turns out, between three scientists interested in vertebrates, invertebrates and algae! A few days before we left for Evolution 2016 in Austin, one of my collaborators, Eric Pante, came to Charleston as the final stop in a North American … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, blogging, career, conferences, DNA barcoding, haploid-diploid, natural history, phylogenetics, phylogeography, population genetics | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

STITCH, in time, could save a lot of array design

Posted on 12 Jul, 2016 by Jeremy Yoder

A new algorithm for processing DNA sequence data, STITCH, could lower costs for studies of genetic variation within species by reconstructing, or “imputing”, the sequences of individual samples within a larger dataset. The ongoing proliferation of high-throughput (or, ugh, “next … Continue reading →

Posted in association genetics, bioinformatics, genomics, methods, next generation sequencing, software | Tagged | Leave a comment

Who’s really riding the subway with you? Characterization of the microbial communities on Boston transport

Posted on 29 Jun, 2016 by Kelle Freel

(Figure modified from Hsu et al., 2016, Boston transport map and wikicommons image of Boston) Understanding the microbes around us is an important challenge to take on. There have been articles covering changes in microbial communities among rural and more … Continue reading →

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The not so singular process of hybridization

Posted on 27 May, 2016 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

What, if anything, are hybrids? Zach Gompert and Alex Buerkle ask this question in a special issue in Evolutionary Applications. Hybrids occur when unrelated individuals mate, but how distant do the taxa need to be to constitute a cross? The varied … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, conservation, domestication, evolution, genomics, natural history, next generation sequencing, plants | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Data, data everywhere and another tool to use: Taxonomer, a web-tool for metagenomics data analysis

Posted on 26 May, 2016 by Kelle Freel

Because sequencing. With all the affordable genome and metagenome sequencing available, we’ve reached an unprecedented point at which we can profile microbial communities more accurately than ever before. For this reason, it’s essential to develop efficient methods for data analysis. … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, community ecology, genomics, metagenomics, methods, microbiology, software | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Steelhead in a random forest: identifying the genetic basis of migration

Posted on 25 May, 2016 by Reid Brennan

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been quite successful in identifying variants associated with various phenotypes (I suppose there is some debate surrounding this statement. For an interesting, if dated, discussion look here). While most of this work was originally conducted … Continue reading →

Posted in association genetics, bioinformatics, conservation, genomics, next generation sequencing | Leave a comment

Poorly updated databases will affect your results

Posted on 24 May, 2016 by Elin Videvall

If you’re anything like me, your research is heavily dependent on the many wonderful database resources available online. NCBI, UniProtKB, Ensembl, Swiss-Prot, EMBL-EBI, and many other sites and organizations offer highly useful (and often curated) molecular information. Can you imagine … Continue reading →

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Opening Pandora's box: PSMC and population structure

Posted on 18 May, 2016 by Patrícia Chrzanová Pečnerová

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. — George Box Publication of the Li and Durbin’s 2011 paper titled “Inference of human population history from individual whole-genome sequences” was a milestone in the inference of demography. By allowing … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, methods, Paleogenomics, population genetics, theory | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Docker: making our bioinformatics easier and more reproducible

Posted on 13 May, 2016 by Jeremy Yoder

This is a guest post by Alicia Mastretta-Yanes, a CONACYT Research Fellow assigned to CONABIO, Mexico. Her research uses molecular ecology and genomic tools to examine the effect of changes on species distributions due to historical climate fluctuations as well … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, software | Tagged , | 1 Comment