TDNAscan: A Software to Identify Complete and Truncated T-DNA Insertions.

Transfer (T)-DNA insertions in mutants isolated from forward genetic screens are typically identified through thermal asymmetric interlaced polymerase chain reaction (TAIL-PCR), inverse PCR, or plasmid rescue. Despite the popularity and success of these methods, they have limited capabilities, particularly in situations in which the T-DNA is truncated. Here, we present a next generation sequencing (NGS)-based platform to facilitate the identification of complete and truncated T-DNA insertions. Our method enables the detection of the corresponding T-DNA insertion orientation and zygosity as well as insertion annotation. This method, called TDNAscan, was developed to be an open source software. We expect that TDNAscan will be a valuable addition to forward genetics toolkits because it provides a solution to the problem of causal gene identification, particularly genes disrupted by truncated T-DNA insertions. We present a case study in which TDNAscan was used to determine that the recessive Arabidopsis thaliana hypersensitive to latrunculin B (hlb3) mutant isolated in a forward genetic screen of T-DNA mutagenized plants encodes a class II FORMIN.

DiVenn: An Interactive and Integrated Web-Based Visualization Tool for Comparing Gene Lists.

Gene expression data generated from multiple biological samples (mutant, double mutant, and wild-type) are often compared via Venn diagram tools. It is of great interest to know the expression pattern between overlapping genes and their associated gene pathways or gene ontology (GO) terms. We developed DiVenn (Dive into the Venn diagram and create a force directed graph)-a novel web-based tool that compares gene lists from multiple RNA-Seq experiments in a force-directed graph, which shows the gene regulation levels for each gene and integrated KEGG pathway and gene ontology knowledge for the data visualization. DiVenn has four key features: (1) informative force-directed graph with gene expression levels to compare multiple data sets; (2) interactive visualization with biological annotations and integrated pathway and GO databases, which can be used to subset or highlight gene nodes to pathway or GO terms of interest in the graph; (3) Pathway and GO enrichment analysis of all or selected genes in the graph; and (4) high resolution image and gene-associated information export. DiVenn is freely available at http://divenn.noble.org/.

FNBtools: A Software to Identify Homozygous Lesions in Deletion Mutant Populations.

Deletion mutagenesis such as fast neutron bombardment (FNB) has been widely used for forward and reverse genetics studies in functional genomics. Traditionally, the time-consuming map-based cloning is used to locate causal deletions in deletion mutants. In recent years, comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) has been used to speed up and scale up the lesion identification process in deletion mutants. However, limitations of low accuracy and sensitivity for small deletions in the CGH approach are apparent. With the next generation sequencing (NGS) becoming affordable for most users, NGS-based bioinformatics tools are more appealing. Although several deletion callers are available, these tools are not efficient in detecting small deletions. Population-scale deletion callers that can identify both small and large deletions are rare. We were motivated to create a population-scale deletion detection tool, called FNBtools, to identify homozygous causal deletions in mutant populations by using NGS data. FNBtools is a tool to call deletions at a population-scale and to achieve high accuracy at different levels of coverage. In addition, FNBtools can detect both small and large deletions with the ability to identify unique deletions in a mutant pool by filtering deletions that exist in a wild-type or control pool. Furthermore, FNBtools is also able to visualize all identified deletions in a genome-wide scope by using Circos. From simulated data analysis, FNBtools outperforms four existing popular deletion callers in detecting small deletions at different coverage levels. To test the usefulness of FNBtools in real biological applications, we used it to analyze a salt-tolerant mutant in Medicago truncatula and identified the unique deletion locus that is tightly linked with this trait. The causal deletion in the mutant was confirmed by PCR amplification, sequencing and genetic linkage analyses. FNBtools can be used for homozygous deletion identification in any species with reference genome sequences. FNBtools is publicly available at: https://github.com/noble-research-institute/fnbtools.

LegumeGRN: a gene regulatory network prediction server for functional and comparative studies.

Building accurate gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from high-throughput gene expression data is a long-standing challenge. However, with the emergence of new algorithms combined with the increase of transcriptomic data availability, it is now reachable. To help biologists to investigate gene regulatory relationships, we developed a web-based computational service to build, analyze and visualize GRNs that govern various biological processes. The web server is preloaded with all available Affymetrix GeneChip-based transcriptomic and annotation data from the three model legume species, i.e., Medicago truncatula, Lotus japonicus and Glycine max. Users can also upload their own transcriptomic and transcription factor datasets from any other species/organisms to analyze their in-house experiments. Users are able to select which experiments, genes and algorithms they will consider to perform their GRN analysis. To achieve this flexibility and improve prediction performance, we have implemented multiple mainstream GRN prediction algorithms including co-expression, Graphical Gaussian Models (GGMs), Context Likelihood of Relatedness (CLR), and parallelized versions of TIGRESS and GENIE3. Besides these existing algorithms, we also proposed a parallel Bayesian network learning algorithm, which can infer causal relationships (i.e., directionality of interaction) and scale up to several thousands of genes. Moreover, this web server also provides tools to allow integrative and comparative analysis between predicted GRNs obtained from different algorithms or experiments, as well as comparisons between legume species. The web site is available at http://legumegrn.noble.org.