The OpenHelix Blog

This next post in our continuing semi-regular Guest Post series is from Eric Lyons, of CoGe at the University of California, Berkeley. If you are a provider of a free, publicly available genomics tool, database or resource and would like to convey something to users on our guest post feature, please feel free to contact us at wlathe AT openhelix DOT com.

Thanks both for the prior CoGe post (editors note: a tip of the week on GoGe) and the invitation to write a bit about CoGe.  Since most people are probably not familiar with CoGe, let me begin with how it is designed:

CoGe’s architecture and philosophy:  Solve a problem once

CoGe is a web-based platform for comparative genomics and consists of many interconnected web-based tools.  The entire system is hooked up to a database that can store any version of any genome in any state of assembly from any organism (currently ~9000 genomes from ~8000 organisms). Each of CoGe’s tools is designed to do one task (e.g. search and display information about a genome, compare two genomes and generate syntenic dotplots, search any number of genomes for similar sequence, manage a list of genes, etc.), and are linked to one another. This means that there is no predefined analysis workflow. Instead, people can begin exploring a genome of interest, compare it to what they want, find something interesting, explore that, finding something else, explore that, etc.) People anywhere in the world can perform computationally intense analyses by clicking a few buttons on a web-page, and letting our servers crunch away on whatever genomes we have currently loaded in our system .  Since each tool is web-based, links are used to move from tool to tool which creates an easy way to save an analysis for future work or to send to a colleague. This also has the benefit that as we develop new tools to solve a specific problem, we can generalize the solution, and plug it into CoGe’s database and connect it to its pre-existing tool set. Overall, this allows an easy way for us to expand CoGe’s functionality.

Today’s tip is on Genomicus. Genomicus is a great tool to visualize gene duplication, synteny and genome evolution. The search and display interfaces are quite straightforward, and there are lots of great features (viewing ancestral gene information, links out to resources, different views of phylogenies, etc) in the tool. This video is only a short introduction. You can delve deeper into the tool with the help and documentation, including an 11 minute video.

There is also a recent (advance access) paper in the journal “Bioinformatics” that will give you a lot more detail on how the database and tool works and what is there.

Muffato, M., Louis, A., Poisnel, C., & Roest Crollius, H. (2010). Genomicus: a database and a browser to study gene synteny in modern and ancestral genomes Bioinformatics DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btq079

You will also notice today the video is a SciVee embed. We are trying out a new way to post and share our tips. SciVee allows us to not only post on our blog, but for you to share the tip with others and also for scientists in the SciVee community to view the tips. This is only a test. We will be working with this for the next couple weeks to find the best way to post and share. Eventually, soon, we hope to share these on Facebook and Youtube also. If the video is not high enough quality for you (SciVee and other video sharing sites by necessity reduce size, you can try out the entire mpeg4 version a this link.

International Darwin Day Foundation.

Can’t let the day go by without acknowledging the 200th anniversary of the day Charles Darwin was born. Arguably one of the most brilliant scientists ever to grace this planet. I have to agree with Razib, I just recently reread Origin of the Species and like every time I’ve read it (4th now I think), I am struck by how amazingly perceptive and prescient the man was.

Though I know it was fictionalized and there are of course some quibbles with the portrayal, I enjoyed the new movie, Creation, about the writing of that book. If anything, it’s spurred me on to learn more about the man and his life and read Voyage of the Beagle. WHich, surprisingly since I’ve read others like Descent of Man, Variation under Domestication, and Expression of Emotions, I’ve never read.

In the movie, Darwin tells his children, particularly his daughter, different stories about his voyage and adventures as bedtime stories. Listening to those and watching the reenactments got me interested in reading the book. And I have a vague idea about rewriting it as a children’s adventure book, I think my daughter would like it. I’ll just chalk that up to one of those “in the future” projects (or maybe someone already did it?)

I had a Basset Hound growing up. His name was Useless, Useless S. Grunt. Well, actually it was formally Ulysses S. Grant because the US Kennel Club wouldn’t accept Useless S. Grunt as a name as they felt it was too demeaning. Not sure if they felt it was demeaning to the dog or to the president, but that’s neither here nor there is it?

So,you ask, what made me think of that long-passed sweet dog that tripped over it’s too-long ears with it’s too-short legs? It turns out that they found out what genetic cause there was for those short legs in Basset Hounds (and Dachshunds and other breeds).

As NHGRI’s press release states:

In a study published in the advance online edition of the journal Science, the researchers led by NHGRI’s Elaine Ostrander, Ph.D., examined DNA samples from 835 dogs, including 95 with short legs. Their survey of more than 40,000 markers of DNA variation uncovered a genetic signature exclusive to short-legged breeds. Through follow-up DNA sequencing and computational analyses, the researchers determined the dogs’ disproportionately short limbs can be traced to one mutational event in the canine genome – a DNA insertion – that occurred early in the evolution of domestic dogs.

The insertion turns out to be a retrogene, which of course I also find interesting in that I studied retrotransposable elements. Reverse transcriptase has this habit of reverse transcribing RNA into DNA which can get reinserted back into the genome (hence processed pseudogenes of course).

The study is interesting for two reasons (other than because I had a Basset Hound and studied the evolution of retroelements , it gives us a further clue into evolutionary events that lead to large changes in morphology and the role of retrotranscription and it gives us a clue into possible human conditions.

For more about dog genome, you can read our several posts about the dog genome, go to NCBI’s dog genome home site (or UCSC or Ensembl and other browsers) and read the paper (needs a subscription of course, it’s in Science). It’s an interesting read so far (I want to find some time to read it more fully, perhaps Useless doesn’t live up to his name.. he didn’t really even then ).

So, yesterday was the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. Lots of festivities and NPR stories surrounding that day including a few announcements like UCSC announcing their v200th browser code a day early so as to coincide (they couldn’t resist the coincidence ). Another announcement that was apropos was the announcement that researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have finished the draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome. Since only about 63% of the genome is actually covered (3.7 billion bps covered of the 3.2 billion bp genome, with duplications), when one announces a “draft” can be a bit arbitrary, so the 200th anniversary of the of the man who wrote “The Descent of Man, and selection in relation to Sex” is as good a time as any. And we are learning a few things like, Neanderthal’s might have had the physical ability for language, but couldn’t stand milk as adults (didn’t agree with their digestion). It is expected a draft and research will be published at the end of this year. We’ll report on that of course, and link to any browsers they might be setting up . Ancient genomes are teaching us some things.

Speaking of which, the Exploratorium, an excellent science museum in my fair city, has a great exhibit (on site and online) on the ‘how we know things’ and how science works. This exhibit is specifically on the origins of humans and Neanderthal DNA and the research at Max Planck figures prominently.

NHGRI asks if Darwin is relevant today….and guess what the answer is?

You can go here for a page devoted to the festivities: http://genome.gov/27529500

You can launch the video there if it doesn’t work here:

My favorite part of the video is when Leslie Biesecker takes us from Darwin–>software, of course.  Later on he also talks about how important evolutionary concepts are to our interpretation of health and disease.  I mean, I know you guys get this–but I think it is the piece that makes me craziest about the people who want to deny evolution and its relevance today.

Couldn’t they have found at least 1 woman to interview, though?  I saw them in the background….I know they were there…

A new open access journal, Ideas in Ecology and Evolution, has, well, opened. It’s published at Queen’s College in Canada.

“So?” you ask, “there are lots of journals up starting all the time”.

This one is different. It’s experimenting with a lot of things (ok, so there seem to be a lot of journals experimenting with the model lately). The subject matter is not research per se, but ideas. Having been to my share of ecology and evolution conferences and discussion, I can see this journal has opened itself up to some quite lovely discussions.

As explained by Bob O’hara, there are some interesting review process experiments going on here too. Authors pay to get their ideas published, reviewers are paid, reviewers are not anonymous and they get to publish their views of the article as a companion piece. Bob discusses the issues we’ve all heard about the pros of anonymity (and they are valid ones), but this might work in this case. I also agree with Bob on one point, this structure (reviewers publishing their views) will indeed increase discussion, but I’d too like to see some mechanism for a broader discussion. As it is designed now, it will be like watching TV pundits arguing the finer points of health policy, which I guess is informative, but I’d like to see some mechanism that allows a broader discussion of the article. Something like PLoS has, which I think would actually work better in a journal of ideas like this.

Well, we’ll see. Right now there is nothing there but the editorial. I’ll be watching though.

hat tip: Coturnix

Ok, that got your attention didn’t it? It got mine. It’s not really a genomics post, it’s not really a database post, but like almost every evolutionary biologist I know (and most biologists and a lot of others), a visit to the Galapagos has been something I’ve always wanted to do. Only thing is, it’s expensive to get and stay there, and eco-tourism is having it’s not-so-great side effects. Well, the University of Cincinnati, in order to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” has set up a “Second Life” tour of the Galapagos.

I’ve resisted roaming Second Life, even though Nature has a presence there as “Second Nature.” But for the Galapagos? I’ll go . Now, I wonder if they could do a tour of the Genome in Second Life?

HT: Discovering Biology in a Digital World

A paper published today in PLoS One reports on research that shows the feasibility of taking a gene or genomic region from an extinct species and inserting it into the genome of an extant species and resurrect the extinct species DNA function in the transgenic mice. The extinct species was the Tasmanian tiger or Thylacine (that links to the wikipedia page, anyone want to become the curator for the EOL page which is pretty minimal at this point?) and the ’surrogate’ species was Mus musculus.

And, as the abstract says,

While other studies have examined extinct coding DNA function in vitro, this is the first example of the restoration of extinct non-coding DNA and examination of its function in vivo. Our method using transgenesis can be used to explore the function of regulatory and protein-coding sequences obtained from any extinct species in an in vivo model system, providing important insights into gene evolution and diversity.

It is an fascinating piece of research.

I love my job, databases intersect with my personal interests often. “A blog around the clock” reports on a new open access Sleep Journal and a “Sleep Database.” As someone with sleep apnea (and whose CPAP machine changed his life), I am fascinated by the entire subject. So I’ll be keeping tabs on the journal, and the database (Phylogeny of Sleep) is fascinating. The database’s purpose, as the homepage states: