bioinformatics
Methods and ProtocolsBEExact: a Metataxonomic Database Tool for High-Resolution Inference of Bee-Associated Microbial CommunitiesThe failure of current universal taxonomic databases to support the rapidly expanding field of bee microbiota research has led to many investigators relying on “in-house” reference sets or manual classification of sequence reads (usually based on BLAST searches), often with vague identity thresholds and subjective taxonomy choices. This time expensive, error- and bias-prone process lacks standardization, cripples the potential for...
Research ArticleGAUGE-Annotated Microbial Transcriptomic Data Facilitate Parallel Mining and High-Throughput Reanalysis To Form Data-Driven HypothesesGEO archives transcriptomic data from over 5,800 microbial experiments and allows researchers to answer questions not directly addressed in published papers. However, less than 4% of the microbial data sets include the sample group annotations required for high-throughput reanalysis.
Research ArticleEMPress Enables Tree-Guided, Interactive, and Exploratory Analyses of Multi-omic Data SetsPhylogenetic trees are integral data structures for the analysis of microbial communities. Recent work has also shown the utility of trees constructed from certain metabolomic data sets, further highlighting their importance in microbiome research.
Minireview | Applied and Environmental ScienceComputational Analysis of Microbial Flow Cytometry DataFlow cytometry is an important technology for the study of microbial communities. It grants the ability to rapidly generate phenotypic single-cell data that are both quantitative, multivariate and of high temporal resolution.
Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesA Simplified and Efficient Method for Himar-1 Transposon Sequencing in Bacteria, Demonstrated by Creation and Analysis of a Saturated Transposon-Mutant Library in Mycobacterium abscessusTransposon insertion sequencing is a powerful tool, but many researchers are discouraged by the apparent technical complexity of preparing the genomic library for deep sequencing and by the complicated computational analysis needed for insertion site identification. Our proposed method makes the preparation of the library easy and straightforward, relying on well-known molecular biology techniques. In addition, the results obtained from...
Research Article | Novel Systems Biology TechniquesRRE-Finder: a Genome-Mining Tool for Class-Independent RiPP DiscoveryBioinformatics-powered discovery of novel ribosomal natural products (RiPPs) has historically been hindered by the lack of a common genetic feature across RiPP classes. Herein, we introduce RRE-Finder, a method for identifying RRE domains, which are present in a majority of prokaryotic RiPP biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). RRE-Finder identifies RRE domains 3,000 times faster than current methods, which rely on time-consuming secondary...
Methods and Protocols | Molecular Biology and PhysiologyBenchmarking Bacterial Promoter Prediction Tools: Potentialities and LimitationsThe correct mapping of promoter elements is a crucial step in microbial genomics. Also, when combining new DNA elements into synthetic sequences, predicting the potential generation of new promoter sequences is critical. Over the last years, many bioinformatics tools have been created to allow users to predict promoter elements in a sequence or genome of interest. Here, we assess the predictive power of some of the main prediction tools...
Research Article | Therapeutics and PreventionComputational Basis for On-Demand Production of Diversified Therapeutic Phage CocktailsThe antibiotic resistance crisis has led to renewed interest in phage therapy as an alternative means of treating infection. However, conventional methods for isolating pathogen-specific phage are slow, labor-intensive, and frequently unsuccessful. We have demonstrated that computationally identified prophages carried by near-neighbor bacteria can serve as starting material for production of engineered phages that kill the target...
Methods and Protocols | Novel Systems Biology Techniquesmanta: a Clustering Algorithm for Weighted Ecological Networksmanta comes with unique strengths, such as the abilities to identify nodes that represent an intermediate between clusters, to exploit negative edges, and to assess the robustness of cluster membership. manta does not require parameter tuning, is straightforward to install and run, and can be easily combined with existing microbial network inference tools.
