Debian Med Cloud packages

Alien_hunter is an application for the prediction of putative Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) events with the implementation of Interpolated Variable Order Motifs (IVOMs). An IVOM approach exploits compositional biases using variable order motif distributions and captures more reliably the local composition of a sequence compared to fixed-order methods. Optionally the predictions can be parsed into a 2-state 2nd order Hidden Markov Model (HMM), in a change-point detection framework, to optimize the localization of the boundaries of the predicted regions. The predictions (embl format) can be automatically loaded into Artemis genome viewer freely available at: http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Software/Artemis/.

The manuscript describing the alien_hunter algorithm is available from Bioinformatics: Interpolated variable order motifs for identification of horizontally acquired DNA: revisiting the Salmonella pathogenicity islands. Vernikos GS, Parkhill J Bioinformatics. 2006;. PMID: 16837528

ALTree was designed to perform association detection and localization of susceptibility sites using haplotype phylogenetic trees: first, it allows the detection of an association between a candidate gene and a disease, and second, it enables to make hypothesis about the susceptibility loci.

AutoDock is a prime representative of the programs addressing the simulation of the docking of fairly small chemical ligands to rather big protein receptors. Earlier versions had all flexibility in the ligands while the protein was kept rather ridgid. This latest version 4 also allows for a flexibility of selected sidechains of surface residues, i.e., takes the rotamers into account.

The AutoDock program performs the docking of the ligand to a set of grids describing the target protein. AutoGrid pre-calculates these grids.

The BEDTools utilities allow one to address common genomics tasks such as finding feature overlaps and computing coverage. The utilities are largely based on four widely-used file formats: BED, GFF/GTF, VCF, and SAM/BAM. Using BEDTools, one can develop sophisticated pipelines that answer complicated research questions by streaming several BEDTools together.

The groupBy utility is distribued in the filo package.

Burrows-Wheeler Aligner (BWA) is a program that aligns relatively short nucleotide sequences against a long reference sequence such as the human genome. It implements two algorithms, bwa-short and BWA-SW. The former works for query sequences shorter than 200 bp and the latter for longer sequences up to around 100 kbp. Both algorithms do gapped alignment. They are usually more accurate and faster on queries with low error rates.

This program performs an alignment of multiple nucleotide or amino acid sequences. It recognizes the format of input sequences and whether the sequences are nucleic acid (DNA/RNA) or amino acid (proteins). The output format may be selected from in various formats for multiple alignments such as Phylip or FASTA. Clustal W is very well accepted.

The output of Clustal W can be edited manually but preferably with an alignment editor like SeaView or within its companion Clustal X. When building a model from your alignment, this can be applied for improved database searches. The Debian package hmmer creates such in form of an HMM.

The DOMAINATRIX programs were developed by Jon Ison and colleagues at MRC HGMP for their protein domain research. They are included as an EMBASSY package as a work in progress.

Applications in the current domainatrix release are cathparse (generates DCF file from raw CATH files), domainnr (removes redundant domains from a DCF file), domainreso (removes low resolution domains from a DCF file), domainseqs (adds sequence records to a DCF file), domainsse (adds secondary structure records to a DCF file), scopparse (generates DCF file from raw SCOP files) and ssematch (searches a DCF file for secondary structure matches).

The DOMALIGN programs were developed by Jon Ison and colleagues at MRC HGMP for their protein domain research. They are included as an EMBASSY package as a work in progress.

Applications in the current domalign release are allversusall (sequence similarity data from all-versus-all comparison), domainalign (generates alignments (DAF file) for nodes in a DCF file), domainrep (reorders DCF file to identify representative structures) and seqalign (extend alignments (DAF file) with sequences (DHF file)).

The DOMSEARCH programs were developed by Jon Ison and colleagues at MRC HGMP for their protein domain research. They are included as an EMBASSY package as a work in progress.

Applications in this DOMSEARCH release are seqfraggle (removes fragment sequences from DHF files), seqnr (removes redundancy from DHF files), seqsearch (generates PSI-BLAST hits (DHF file) from a DAF file), seqsort (Remove ambiguous classified sequences from DHF files) and seqwords (Generates DHF files from keyword search of UniProt).

EMBOSS is a free Open Source software analysis package specially developed for the needs of the molecular biology (e.g. EMBnet) user community. The software automatically copes with data in a variety of formats and even allows transparent retrieval of sequence data from the web. Also, as extensive libraries are provided with the package, it is a platform to allow other scientists to develop and release software in true open source spirit. EMBOSS also integrates a range of currently available packages and tools for sequence analysis into a seamless whole. EMBOSS breaks the historical trend towards commercial software packages.

fastDNAml is a program derived from Joseph Felsenstein's version 3.3 DNAML (part of his PHYLIP package). Users should consult the documentation for DNAML before using this program.

fastDNAml is an attempt to solve the same problem as DNAML, but to do so faster and using less memory, so that larger trees and/or more bootstrap replicates become tractable. Much of fastDNAml is merely a recoding of the PHYLIP 3.3 DNAML program from PASCAL to C.

Note that the homepage of this program is not available any more and so this program will probably not see any further updates.

Genetic linkage analysis is a statistical technique used to map genes and find the approximate location of disease genes. There was a standard software package for genetic linkage called LINKAGE. FASTLINK is a significantly modified and improved version of the main programs of LINKAGE that runs much faster sequentially, can run in parallel, allows the user to recover gracefully from a computer crash, and provides abundant new documentation. FASTLINK has been used in over 1000 published genetic linkage studies.

This package contains the following programs:

 ilink:    GEMINI optimization procedure to find a locally
           optimal value of the theta vector of recombination
           fractions
 linkmap:  calculates location scores of one locus against a
           fixed map of other loci
 lodscore: compares likelihoods at locally optimal theta
 mlink:    calculates lod scores and risk with two of more loci
 unknown:  identify possible genotypes for unknowns

The following tools are available as part of the filo package:

groupBy – mimics the “groupBy” clause in database systems.

shuffle – randomize the order of lines in a file.

stats – computes descriptive statistic on a given column of a tab-delimited file or stream.

Because their name is too generic, ‘shuffle’ and ‘stats’ are relocated in /usr/lib/filo.

Infernal ("INFERence of RNA ALignment") searches DNA sequence databases for RNA structure and sequence similarities. It provides an implementation of a special variant of profile stochastic context-free grammars called covariance models (CMs). A CM is like a sequence profile, but it scores a combination of sequence consensus and RNA secondary structure consensus, so in many cases, it is more capable of identifying RNA homologs that conserve their secondary structure more than their primary sequence.

The tool is an integral component of the Rfam database.

LAST is software for comparing and aligning sequences, typically DNA or protein sequences. LAST is similar to BLAST, but it copes better with very large amounts of sequence data. Here are two things LAST is good at:

• Comparing large (e.g. mammalian) genomes.
• Mapping lots of sequence tags onto a genome.

The main technical innovation is that LAST finds initial matches based on their multiplicity, instead of using a fixed size (e.g. BLAST uses 10-mers). This allows one to map tags to genomes without repeat-masking, without becoming overwhelmed by repetitive hits. To find these variable-sized matches, it uses a suffix array (inspired by Vmatch). To achieve high sensitivity, it uses a discontiguous suffix array, analogous to spaced seeds.

Performs Markov chain Monte Carlo multipoint linkage analysis on large, complex pedigrees. The current package supports analyses on quantitative traits only, although this restriction will be lifted in later versions. Joint estimation of QTL number, position and effects uses Reversible Jump MCMC. It is also possible to perform affected only IBD sharing analyses.

The homepage of this project used to be at http://loki.homeunix.net but the project is dead now and the homepage vanished. The Homepage field above points to the web archive.

Maq (short for Mapping and Assembly with Quality) builds mapping assemblies from short reads generated by the next-generation sequencing machines. It was particularly designed for Illumina-Solexa 1G Genetic Analyzer, and has a preliminary functionality to handle ABI SOLiD data. Maq is previously known as mapass2.

Developmemt of Maq stopped in 2008. Its successors are BWA and SAMtools.

PhyML is a software that estimates maximum likelihood phylogenies from alignments of nucleotide or amino acid sequences. It provides a wide range of options that were designed to facilitate standard phylogenetic analyses. The main strengths of PhyML lies in the large number of substitution models coupled to various options to search the space of phylogenetic tree topologies, going from very fast and efficient methods to slower but generally more accurate approaches. It also implements two methods to evaluate branch supports in a sound statistical framework (the non-parametric bootstrap and the approximate likelihood ratio test).

PhyML was designed to process moderate to large data sets. In theory, alignments with up to 4,000 sequences 2,000,000 character-long can be analyzed. In practice however, the amount of memory required to process a data set is proportional of the product of the number of sequences by their length. Hence, a large number of sequences can only be processed provided that they are short. Also, PhyML can handle long sequences provided that they are not numerous. With most standard personal computers, the “comfort zone” for PhyML generally lies around 3 to 500 sequences less than 2,000 character long.

This pakcage also includes PhyTime.

SAM (Sequence Alignment/Map) format is a generic format for storing large nucleotide sequence alignments. Picard Tools includes these utilities to manipulate SAM and BAM files: BamToBfq IlluminaBasecallsToSam BuildBamIndex MarkDuplicates CalculateHsMetrics MeanQualityByCycle CleanSam MergeBamAlignment CollectAlignmentSummaryMetrics MergeSamFiles CollectGcBiasMetrics NormalizeFasta CollectInsertSizeMetrics QualityScoreDistribution CollectRnaSeqMetrics ReplaceSamHeader CompareSAMs RevertSam CreateSequenceDictionary SamFormatConverter ExtractIlluminaBarcodes SamToFastq EstimateLibraryComplexity SortSam FastqToSam ValidateSamFile FixMateInformation ViewSam

plink expects as input the data from SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) chips of many individuals and their phenotypical description of a disease. It finds associations of single or pairs of DNA variations with a phenotype and can retrieve SNP annotation from an online source.

SNPs can evaluated individually or as pairs for their association with the disease phenotypes. The joint investigation of copy number variations is supported. A variety of statistical tests have been implemented.

Please note: The executable was renamed to p-link because of a name clash. Please read more about this in /usr/share/doc/README.Debian.

PyCogent is a software library for genomic biology. It is a fully integrated and thoroughly tested framework for:

• controlling third-party applications,
• devising workflows; querying databases,
• conducting novel probabilistic analyses of biological sequence evolution, and
• generating publication quality graphics. It is distinguished by many unique built-in capabilities (such as true codon alignment) and the frequent addition of entirely new methods for the analysis of genomic data.

This tool allows one to display very long data vectors in a space-efficient manner, by organising it along a 2D Hilbert curve. The user can then visually judge the large scale structure and distribution of features simultaenously with the rough shape and intensity of individual features.

In bioinformatics, a typical use case is ChIP-Chip and ChIP-Seq, or basically all the kinds of genomic data, that are conventionally displayed as quantitative track ("wiggle data") in genome browsers such as those provided by Ensembl or UCSC.

R/qtl is an extensible, interactive environment for mapping quantitative trait loci (QTLs) in experimental crosses. It is implemented as an add-on-package for the freely available and widely used statistical language/software R (see http://www.r-project.org).

The development of this software as an add-on to R allows one to take advantage of the basic mathematical and statistical functions, and powerful graphics capabilities, that are provided with R. Further, the user will benefit by the seamless integration of the QTL mapping software into a general statistical analysis program. The goal is to make complex QTL mapping methods widely accessible and allow users to focus on modeling rather than computing.

A key component of computational methods for QTL mapping is the hidden Markov model (HMM) technology for dealing with missing genotype data. The main HMM algorithms were implemented, with allowance for the presence of genotyping errors, for backcrosses, intercrosses, and phase-known four-way crosses.

The current version of R/qtl includes facilities for estimating genetic maps, identifying genotyping errors, and performing single-QTL genome scans and two-QTL, two-dimensional genome scans, by interval mapping (with the EM algorithm), Haley-Knott regression, and multiple imputation. All of this may be done in the presence of covariates (such as sex, age or treatment). One may also fit higher-order QTL models by multiple imputation.

Happy is an R interface into the HAPPY C package for fine-mapping Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) in Heterogenous Stocks (HS). An HS is an advanced intercross between (usually eight) founder inbred strains of mice. HS are suitable for fine-mapping QTL. It uses a multipoint analysis which offers significant improvements in statistical power to detect QTLs over that achieved by single-marker association.

The happy package is an extension of the original C program happy; it uses the C code to compute the probability of descent from each of the founders, at each locus position, but the happy packager allows a much richer range of models to be fit to the data.

Read /usr/share/doc/r-other-mott-happy/README.Debian for a more detailed explanation.

Raster3D is a set of tools for generating high quality raster images of proteins or other molecules. The core program renders spheres, triangles, cylinders, and quadric surfaces with specular highlighting, Phong shading, and shadowing. It uses an efficient software Z-buffer algorithm which is independent of any graphics hardware. Ancillary programs process atomic coordinates from PDB files into rendering descriptions for pictures composed of ribbons, space-filling atoms, bonds, ball+stick, etc. Raster3D can also be used to render pictures composed in other programs such as Molscript in glorious 3D with highlights, shadowing, etc. Output is to pixel image files with 24 bits of color information per pixel.

RNAhybrid is a tool for finding the minimum free energy hybridisation of a long and a short RNA. The hybridisation is performed in a kind of domain mode, ie. The short sequence is hybridised to the best fitting part of the long one. The tool is primarily meant as a means for microRNA target prediction.

Samtools is a set of utilities that manipulate nucleotide sequence alignments in the binary BAM format. It imports from and exports to the ascii SAM (Sequence Alignment/Map) format, does sorting, merging and indexing, and allows to retrieve reads in any regions swiftly. It is designed to work on a stream, and is able to open a BAM (not SAM) file on a remote FTP or HTTP server.

The Short Sequence Assembly by K-mer search and 3′ read Extension (SSAKE) is a genomics application for aggressively assembling millions of short nucleotide sequences by progressively searching for perfect 3′-most k-mers using a DNA prefix tree. SSAKE is designed to help leverage the information from short sequences reads by stringently clustering them into contigs that can be used to characterize novel sequencing targets.

TopHat aligns RNA-Seq reads to mammalian-sized genomes using the ultra high-throughput short read aligner Bowtie, and then analyzes the mapping results to identify splice junctions between exons. TopHat is a collaborative effort between the University of Maryland Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and the University of California, Berkeley Departments of Mathematics and Molecular and Cell Biology.

TREE-PUZZLE (the new name for PUZZLE) is an interactive console program that implements a fast tree search algorithm, quartet puzzling, that allows analysis of large data sets and automatically assigns estimations of support to each internal branch. TREE-PUZZLE also computes pairwise maximum likelihood distances as well as branch lengths for user specified trees. Branch lengths can also be calculated under the clock-assumption. In addition, TREE-PUZZLE offers a novel method, likelihood mapping, to investigate the support of a hypothesized internal branch without computing an overall tree and to visualize the phylogenetic content of a sequence alignment.

This is the parallelized version of tree-puzzle.

TREE-PUZZLE (the new name for PUZZLE) is an interactive console program that implements a fast tree search algorithm, quartet puzzling, that allows analysis of large data sets and automatically assigns estimations of support to each internal branch. TREE-PUZZLE also computes pairwise maximum likelihood distances as well as branch lengths for user specified trees. Branch lengths can also be calculated under the clock-assumption. In addition, TREE-PUZZLE offers a novel method, likelihood mapping, to investigate the support of a hypothesized internal branch without computing an overall tree and to visualize the phylogenetic content of a sequence alignment.

Velvet is a de novo genomic assembler specially designed for short read sequencing technologies, such as Solexa or 454, developed by Daniel Zerbino and Ewan Birney at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), near Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

Velvet currently takes in short read sequences, removes errors then produces high quality unique contigs. It then uses paired read information, if available, to retrieve the repeated areas between contigs.

ClustalW is a popular tool for multiple sequence alignment. The alignment is achieved via three steps: pairwise alignment, guide-tree generation and progressive alignment. ClustalW-MPI is an MPI implementation of ClustalW. Based on version 1.82 of the original ClustalW, both the pairwise and progressive alignments are parallelized with MPI, a popular message passing programming standard. The pairwise alignments can be easily parallelized since the many alignments are time independent on each other. However the progressive alignments are essentially not parallelizable because of the time dependencies between each alignment.

Here the recursive parallelism paradigm is applied to the linear space profile-profile alignment algorithm. This approach is more time efficient on computers with distributed memory architecture. Traditional approach that relies on precomputing the profile-profile score matrix has also been implemented. Results shown the latter is indeed more appropriate for shared memory multiprocessor computer.

ClustalX is suggested for its support for local realignments, seaview is a versatile editor of alignments.

The original ClustalW/ClustalX can be found at URL: http://www.clustal.org/download/pre-2/

This package is the adaptation of the PHYLIP package in which its programs can operate with the biological sequence formats and databases of the European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite (EMBOSS). The software packages adapted for EMBOSS are called EMBASSY.

PHYLIP (the PHYLogeny Inference Package) is a package of programs for inferring phylogenies (evolutionary trees). Methods that are available in the package include parsimony, distance matrix, and likelihood methods, including bootstrapping and consensus trees. Data types that can be handled include molecular sequences, gene frequencies, restriction sites and fragments, distance matrices, and discrete characters.

The EMBASSY PHYLIP programs all have the prefix "f" to distinguish them from the original programs and avoid namespace conflict.

Bagpipe is a program for performing genomewide linkage disequilibrium mapping of quantitative trait loci in populations whose genome structure can be accommodated in the HAPPY framework [Mott00]. This includes most diploid crosses where the founders of the individuals have known genotypes.

• Bagpipe is a simplified and streamlined version of Bagphenotype that does not currently include resample model averaging (RMA) capabilities.
• Bagpipe can help fit single locus regression models (with or without random effects) to marker intervals whose genetic ancestry is inferred using the HAPPY software.
• Bagpipe cannot help you decide what is a sensible model to fit.
• Bagpipe does not currently accommodate populations with significant population structure, except through the specification of simple random intercepts based on unpatterned covariance matrices.
• Bagpipe is named after the Scottish wind instrument "the bagpipes" and after Bagphenotype, which in turn was a PIPEline for BAGging-based multiple QTL analysis of phenoTYPEs. Bagphenotype was in turn based on software written by Richard Mott and William Valdar to analyze heterogeneous stock mice in [Valdar06].
• Bagpipe is experimental software, is provided free of charge subject to copyleft restrictions, and comes with no guarantees whatsoever.

[Mott00] Mott R, Talbot CJ, Turri MG, Collins AC, Flint, J (2000) A method for fine mapping quantitative trait loci in outbred animal stocks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 97(23), 12649-54. [Valdar06] Valdar W, Solberg LC, Gaugier D, Burnett S, Klenerman P, Cookson WO, Taylor M, Rawlins JNP, Mott R, Flint J (2006) Genome-wide genetic association of complex traits in outbred mice. Nature Genetics 38(8):879-87. PMID:16832355

mapping QTLs in populations descended from known founders