Category: Uncategorized

Guide trees are used to decide the order of sequence alignment in the progressive multiple sequence alignment heuristic. These guide trees are often the limiting factor in making large alignments, and considerable effort has been expended over the years in making these quickly or accurately. In this article we show that, at least for protein families with large numbers of sequences that can be benchmarked with known structures, simple chained guide trees give the most accurate alignments. These also happen to be the fastest and simplest guide trees to construct, computationally. Such guide trees have a striking effect on the accuracy of alignments produced by some of the most widely used alignment packages. There is a marked increase in accuracy and a marked decrease in computational time, once the number of sequences goes much above a few hundred. This is true, even if the order of sequences in the guide tree is random.

Source: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

On July 1, 2014, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) notified the appropriate regulatory agency, the Division of Select Agents and Toxins (DSAT) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), that employees discovered vials labeled ”variola,” commonly known as smallpox, in an unused portion of a storage room in a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) laboratory located on the NIH Bethesda campus.

Source: www.cdc.gov

Oops!

Wild aquatic bird populations have long been considered the natural reservoir for influenza A viruses with virus transmission from these birds seeding other avian and mammalian hosts. While most evidence still supports this dogma, recent studies in bats have suggested other reservoir species may also exist. Extensive surveillance studies coupled with an enhanced awareness in response to H5N1 and pandemic 2009 H1N1 outbreaks is also revealing a growing list of animals susceptible to infection with influenza A viruses. Although in a relatively stable host-pathogen interaction in aquatic birds, antigenic, and genetic evolution of influenza A viruses often accompanies interspecies transmission as the virus adapts to a new host. The evolutionary changes in the new hosts result from a number of processes including mutation, reassortment, and recombination. Depending on host and virus these changes can be accompanied by disease outbreaks impacting wildlife, veterinary, and public health.

Source: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Since the first pandemic outbreak of avian influenza A virus (H5N1 subtype) in 1997, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has provided a large number of influenza virus sequences with well-organized annotations. Using the time-series sequences of influenza A viruses, we developed a simulation tool for influenza virus, named SimFlu, to predict possible future variants of influenza viruses. SimFlu can create variants from a seed nucleotide sequence of influenza A virus using the codon variation parameters included in the SimFlu package. The SimFlu library provides pre-calculated codon variation parameters for the H1N1, H3N2, and H5N1 subtypes of influenza A virus isolated from 2000 to 2011, allowing the users to simulate their own nucleotide sequences by selecting their preferred parameter options. SimFlu supports three operating systems – Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. SimFlu is publicly available at http://lcbb.snu.ac.kr/simflu.

Source: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Gives access to Google Genomics.

Explore genetic variation interactively.Compare entire cohorts in seconds with SQL-like queries. Compute transition/transversion ratios, genome-wide association, allelic frequency and more.

Source: developers.google.com

Generally…   I hate Google…

This blog is compiled from unedited contributions by undergraduate students of the MBIO322 “Marine Microbiology – Ecology & Applications” module with Plymouth University.

Source: mbio322.blogspot.ca

Here’s our 60 look at why Ebola is so deadly. The World Health Organization (WHO) has called for “drastic action” to contain an Ebola outbreak in West Africa that has killed nearly 500 people. 
It is the world’s largest outbreak in terms of cases, deaths and geographical spread.

Source: www.youtube.com

The ISME Journal: Multidisciplinary Journal of Microbial Ecology is the official Journal of the International Society for Microbial Ecology, publishing high-quality, original research papers, short communications, commentary articles and reviews in the rapidly expanding and diverse discipline of microbial ecology.

Source: www.nature.com

Post-translational modifications (PTMs) are important steps in the maturation of proteins. Several models exist to predict specific PTMs, from manually detected patterns to machine learning methods. On one hand, the manual detection of patterns does not provide the most efficient classifiers and requires an important workload, and on the other hand, models built by machine learning methods are hard to interpret and do not increase biological knowledge.

Source: bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org