otb: an Automated HiC/HiFi Pipeline Assembles the Prosapia bicincta Genome.

The implementation of a new genomic assembly pipeline named only the best (otb) has effectively addressed various challenges associated with data management during the development and storage of genome assemblies. otb, which incorporates a comprehensive pipeline involving a setup layer, quality checks, templating, and the integration of Nextflow and Singularity. The primary objective of otb is to streamline the process of creating a HiFi/HiC genome, aiming to minimize the manual intervention required in the genome assembly process. The Two-lined spittlebug, (Prosapia bicincta, Hemiptera: Cercopidae), a true bug insect herbivore, serves as a practical test case for evaluating otb. The two-lined spittlebug is both a crucial agricultural pest and a genomically understudied insect belonging to the order Hemiptera. This insect is a significant threat to grasslands and pastures, leading to plant wilting and phytotoxemia when infested. Its presence in tropical and subtropical regions around the world poses a long-term threat to the composition of plant communities in grassland landscapes, impacting rangelands, and posing a substantial risk to cattle production.

FAIR Header Reference genome: a TRUSTworthy standard.

The lack of interoperable data standards among reference genome data-sharing platforms inhibits cross-platform analysis while increasing the risk of data provenance loss. Here, we describe the FAIR bioHeaders Reference genome (FHR), a metadata standard guided by the principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reuse (FAIR) in addition to the principles of Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainability and Technology. The objective of FHR is to provide an extensive set of data serialisation methods and minimum data field requirements while still maintaining extensibility, flexibility and expressivity in an increasingly decentralised genomic data ecosystem. The effort needed to implement FHR is low; FHR's design philosophy ensures easy implementation while retaining the benefits gained from recording both machine and human-readable provenance.

DATA RESOURCES AND ANALYSES FAIR Header Reference genome: A TRUSTworthy standard.

The lack of interoperable data standards among reference genome data-sharing platforms inhibits cross-platform analysis while increasing the risk of data provenance loss. Here, we describe the FAIR-bioHeaders Reference genome (FHR), a metadata standard guided by the principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse (FAIR) in addition to the principles of Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainability, and Technology (TRUST). The objective of FHR is to provide an extensive set of data serialisation methods and minimum data field requirements while still maintaining extensibility, flexibility, and expressivity in an increasingly decentralised genomic data ecosystem. The effort needed to implement FHR is low; FHR's design philosophy ensures easy implementation while retaining the benefits gained from recording both machine and human-readable provenance.

Vesicular Stomatitis Virus Elicits Early Transcriptome Response in Culicoides sonorensis Cells.

Viruses that are transmitted by arthropods, or arboviruses, have evolved to successfully navigate both the invertebrate and vertebrate hosts, including their immune systems. Biting midges transmit several arboviruses including vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). To study the interaction between VSV and midges, we characterized the transcriptomic responses of VSV-infected and mock-infected Culicoides sonorensis cells at 1, 8, 24, and 96 h post inoculation (HPI). The transcriptomic response of VSV-infected cells at 1 HPI was significant, but by 8 HPI there were no detectable differences between the transcriptome profiles of VSV-infected and mock-infected cells. Several genes involved in immunity were upregulated (ATG2B and TRAF4) or downregulated (SMAD6 and TOLL7) in VSV-treated cells at 1 HPI. These results indicate that VSV infection in midge cells produces an early immune response that quickly wanes, giving insight into in vivo C. sonorensis VSV tolerance that may underlie their permissiveness as vectors for this virus.

The third international hackathon for applying insights into large-scale genomic composition to use cases in a wide range of organisms.

In October 2021, 59 scientists from 14 countries and 13 U.S. states collaborated virtually in the Third Annual Baylor College of Medicine & DNANexus Structural Variation hackathon. The goal of the hackathon was to advance research on structural variants (SVs) by prototyping and iterating on open-source software. This led to nine hackathon projects focused on diverse genomics research interests, including various SV discovery and genotyping methods, SV sequence reconstruction, and clinically relevant structural variation, including SARS-CoV-2 variants. Repositories for the projects that participated in the hackathon are available at https://github.com/collaborativebioinformatics.

An Outsider's Perspective on Why We Climb Mountains and Why Projects Like the i5k Matter.

Initiatives like the i5k are creating evermore genome assemblies. These initiatives are resource heavy, and their justifications and economics deserve attention. Scientifically, these initiatives are important, paving the way for cross-species analysis, requiring the building of new computational analysis and tools, and creating other new resources. However, an open question remains of how we quantitively measure the impact of genomes, and by extension these initiatives. This forum article discusses one such method which is to look at the publications about a species over time, however, this method does not show any signal from a published genome, leaving an open question of how to measure impact.

met v1: expanding on old estimations of biodiversity from eDNA with a new database framework.

A long-standing problem in environmental DNA has been the inability to compute across large number of datasets. Here we introduce an open-source software framework that can store a large number of environmental DNA datasets, as well as provide a platform for analysis, in an easily customizable way. We show the utility of such an approach by analyzing over 1400 arthropod metabarcode datasets. This article introduces a new software framework, met, which utilizes large numbers of metabarcode datasets to draw conclusions about patterns of diversity at large spatial scales. Given more accurate estimations on the distribution of variance in metabarcode datasets, this software framework could facilitate novel analyses that are outside the scope of currently available similar platforms. Database URL https://osf.io/spb8v/.

Combining natural language processing and metabarcoding to reveal pathogen-environment associations.

Cryptococcus neoformans is responsible for life-threatening infections that primarily affect immunocompromised individuals and has an estimated worldwide burden of 220,000 new cases each year-with 180,000 resulting deaths-mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Surprisingly, little is known about the ecological niches occupied by C. neoformans in nature. To expand our understanding of the distribution and ecological associations of this pathogen we implement a Natural Language Processing approach to better describe the niche of C. neoformans. We use a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model to de novo topic model sets of metagenetic research articles written about varied subjects which either explicitly mention, inadvertently find, or fail to find C. neoformans. These articles are all linked to NCBI Sequence Read Archive datasets of 18S ribosomal RNA and/or Internal Transcribed Spacer gene-regions. The number of topics was determined based on the model coherence score, and articles were assigned to the created topics via a Machine Learning approach with a Random Forest algorithm. Our analysis provides support for a previously suggested linkage between C. neoformans and soils associated with decomposing wood. Our approach, using a search of single-locus metagenetic data, gathering papers connected to the datasets, de novo determination of topics, the number of topics, and assignment of articles to the topics, illustrates how such an analysis pipeline can harness large-scale datasets that are published/available but not necessarily fully analyzed, or whose metadata is not harmonized with other studies. Our approach can be applied to a variety of systems to assert potential evidence of environmental associations.

Yeast grown in continuous culture systems can detect mutagens with improved sensitivity relative to the Ames test.

Continuous culture systems allow for the controlled growth of microorganisms over a long period of time. Here, we develop a novel test for mutagenicity that involves growing yeast in continuous culture systems exposed to low levels of mutagen for a period of approximately 20 days. In contrast, most microorganism-based tests for mutagenicity expose the potential mutagen to the biological reporter at a high concentration of mutagen for a short period of time. Our test improves upon the sensitivity of the well-established Ames test by at least 20-fold for each of two mutagens that act by different mechanisms (the intercalator ethidium bromide and alkylating agent methyl methanesulfonate). To conduct the tests, cultures were grown in small, inexpensive continuous culture systems in media containing (potential) mutagen, and the resulting mutagenicity of the added compound was assessed via two methods: a canavanine-based plate assay and whole genome sequencing. In the canavanine-based plate assay, we were able to detect a clear relationship between the amount of mutagen and the number of canavanine-resistant mutant colonies over a period of one to three weeks of exposure. Whole genome sequencing of yeast grown in continuous culture systems exposed to methyl methanesulfonate demonstrated that quantification of mutations is possible by identifying the number of unique variants across each strain. However, this method had lower sensitivity than the plate-based assay and failed to distinguish the different concentrations of mutagen. In conclusion, we propose that yeast grown in continuous culture systems can provide an improved and more sensitive test for mutagenicity.

Uncovering Effects from the Structure of Metabarcode Sequences for Metagenetic and Microbiome Analysis.

The advent of next-generation sequencing has allowed for higher-throughput determination of which species live within a specific location. Here we establish that three analysis methods for estimating diversity within samples-namely, Operational Taxonomic Units; the newer Amplicon Sequence Variants; and a method commonly found in sequence analysis, minhash-are affected by various properties of these sequence data. Using simulations we show that the presence of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms and the depth of coverage from each species affect the correlations between these approaches. Through this analysis, we provide insights which would affect the decisions on the application of each method. Specifically, the presence of sequence read errors and variability in sequence read coverage deferentially affects these processing methods.

Single-cell RNA-seq analysis identifies markers of resistance to targeted BRAF inhibitors in melanoma cell populations.

Single-cell RNA-seq's (scRNA-seq) unprecedented cellular resolution at a genome-wide scale enables us to address questions about cellular heterogeneity that are inaccessible using methods that average over bulk tissue extracts. However, scRNA-seq data sets also present additional challenges such as high transcript dropout rates, stochastic transcription events, and complex population substructures. Here, we present a single-cell RNA-seq analysis and klustering evaluation (SAKE), a robust method for scRNA-seq analysis that provides quantitative statistical metrics at each step of the analysis pipeline. Comparing SAKE to multiple single-cell analysis methods shows that most methods perform similarly across a wide range of cellular contexts, with SAKE outperforming these methods in the case of large complex populations. We next applied the SAKE algorithms to identify drug-resistant cellular populations as human melanoma cells respond to targeted BRAF inhibitors (BRAFi). Single-cell RNA-seq data from both the Fluidigm C1 and 10x Genomics platforms were analyzed with SAKE to dissect this problem at multiple scales. Data from both platforms indicate that BRAF inhibitor-resistant cells can emerge from rare populations already present before drug application, with SAKE identifying both novel and known markers of resistance. These experimentally validated markers of BRAFi resistance share overlap with previous analyses in different melanoma cell lines, demonstrating the generality of these findings and highlighting the utility of single-cell analysis to elucidate mechanisms of BRAFi resistance.