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We blog about genomics. We also make a platform for open-source analysis of next generation data in the cloud. Hello.

De novo transcriptome assembly with RNA-seq data: Using Trinity to examine Caribbean Millepora

Despite the abundance of the hydrocoral genus Millepora, which consists of 19 species distributed in warm waters around the globe, the milleporids have received limited attention in coral reef studies. However, Millepora act as an important component of the reef framework and thus are geologically important. We recently hosted a …

Written by carol

Ion Proton RNA-Seq: in search of the best alignment method

Each sequencing technology comes with a unique and unavoidable error profile due to the chemistry, biology, and hardware involved [1,2,3]. If we want avoid analysis artifacts and arrive safely at the biological reality underlying the data, we must to account for these errors during informatic analysis. Recently, researchers have begun tackling …

Written by Kate Blair

Better sequences (and fewer homopolymer errors) for Ion Torrent

The short read files that Ion Torrent’s sequencing machines give us still contain many homopolymer errors: errors in the number of bases called when a single nucleotide occurs more than once in sequence. This makes alignment harder and drowns real indels in a sea of noise. These homopolymer errors arise …

Written by Nate

A mystery muscle lincRNA

We know that our whole genome is distributed to (almost) every cell of our bodies. This fact can be used both to surprise introductory biology students and to usefully refine a fundamental scientific question. Instead of merely asking how it comes to be that different parts of our bodies have …

Written by Nate

RNA-Seq Interactive Literature Review

RNA-Seq is fast becoming the top method for examining the transcriptional activity of genomes. In the five years since the first publications described the technology, RNA-Seq has enabled the discovery of new transcripts in well-studied genomes, challenged our views of imprinting, offered insights into the biology of cancer, and transformed new …

Written by Kate Blair

Short read alignment: seeding

In my last post I explained some of the basics of short read alignment algorithms. Go read it if you like; if not, recall that: Many modern alignment algorithms rely on what is called seeding and extending. “Seeding” is finding exact matches of part of the read with part of the …

Written by Nate

Short read alignment: an introduction

Biologists today often find themselves with lots of–say, 10^6–short sequences of DNA from a sample, and their ability to do scientifically useful things with those sequences depends on their ability to align those sequences to a reference sequence. Many of the hard and important projects in genomics either are alignment …

Written by Nate

Unicorn genome sequence announced

A landmark genome announcement was made by the Equid Sequencing Consortium today. Scientists hope that the new data will explain origins of the horn and help identify key genes that drive horn development. A high-quality draft of unicorn genome was published today and will be submitted to GenBank later this spring.

Written by brandi

RNA-Seq: The first wave of papers

A flurry of papers in May of 2008 introduced the world to RNA-Seq. This new technology provided a higher resolution picture of transcription than was possible ever before. Nearly five years on, we look back at the publications that upset the microarray industry and sent tweed-clad professors scrambling for the …

Written by Kate Blair

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