What’s the best way of identifying pseudo-genes in bacterial genomes?

TL;DR Pseudofinder run using the bakta database has a good sensitivity and decent postive predictive value for detecting pseudogenes. Pseudofinder run with the bakta database can differentiate between gastrointestinal and extraintestinal Salmonella when you look at degradation of the central anaerobic metabolism genes. Main I’m interested in identifying pseudogenes (also, and maybe more properly, known…

How to find extended-spectrum beta-lactamase genes?

I recently ran RGI on some gut microbiome samples, and I wanted to compare the prevalence of extended spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) genes between some of the groups in my study. This wasn’t listed directly in the RGI output, so I needed to add that info in. I asked around and found 3 solutions: The information…

Microbiome & infection inequities

Subtitle: a series of sickening facts I’m interested in the role of the gut microbiome in infection, especially in countries with a high burden of infectious diseases such as Malawi. Therefore, I did a literature search on PubMed for papers on the microbiome from these kinds of country (full text of the search here). The…

Comparison of autoresearcher and ChatGPT-4 for literature review

I’m having a play around with some AI tools for literature searching and I came across the autoresearcher tool (link). Here is a comparison of the output of autoresearcher with ChatGPT4. TL;DR autoresearcher will include literature citations for its output, which is nice because ChatGPT currently cannot do this. However, based on my subjective view…

How to setup conda (April 2023 version)

There have been some recent changes to the conda/mamba ecosystem, see obligatory xkcd. This is my current way of creating a fresh install of conda. Setting libmamba as the conda solver should allow you mamba-like speed, while at the same time letting you just install programs like `conda install`. wget https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh bash Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh conda update…

Which pre-print servers accept narrative reviews?

This is a “blog it so I don’t have to ask again on twitter post”. We have a narrative review that we want to post as a pre-print, but Medrxiv/Biorxiv don’t accept them. I asked for pre-print servers that do accept narrative reviews on twitter, and these are the sites that were recommended: SciELO OSF…

Validation of SKA analysis for genomic epidemiology

TL;DR SKA is a high quality bioinformatics tool which enables you to rapidly do genomic epidemiology of very closely related isolates. SKA shows good correlation with traditional SNP calling techniques (BWA + GATK) SKA shows a consistent trend of identifying around 10 more SNPs between a sub-set of pairs of isolates than traditional method, I’m…

Basic options for bioinformatics data analysis

This post is written in the spirit of “if you write it in an email to more than one person, turn it into a blog”. It’s for beginners who are just starting out in bioinformatics and who need information about which path to go down for which programming language. ————————— Firstly, you will need to…