New Bioinformatics Blog to Keep an Eye on - James Knight

James Knight (@knightjimr) joined Yale as a research scientist and director of bioinformatics, and also started a blog, where you can find a lot of useful information. For those, who do not know him, he developed the Newbler assembler for 454 reads and also collaborated with Eugene Myers in the 90s, before Myers became world famous (or rather made Craig Venter world famous).

Graphs, Alignments, Variants and Annotations, pt. 1

Note: This post, and following posts, were triggered by the recent post by Heng Li, describing his proposed GFA format for assembly graph data. After a twitter request for comments, my first tweet was that this was the right person to do the format. My second tweet, after reading the post, was that the format was a miss Heng rightly asked me to explain, and this begins that explanation.

In recent years, there has been a growing trend toward developing a standard file format for assemblies, specifically a graph-based format (since all of the assemblers internal data structures hold a graph of one sort or another). A number of years ago, it was the AMOS project that made the attempt, two to three years ago, it was FASTG, and now this GFA format proposal.

When the FASTG format was really being talked about at the several conferences two years ago, where by luck or by happenstance most of the lead authors of the major NGS assemblers were present, I came really close to commenting on the format, but refrained. The main reason is that I didnt see anything wrong with the format itselfit does a very good job capturing the structure that nearly all of the assemblers build, and is a usable format for organizing the assemblies data. The thoughts in my mind were all about who was doing the design, and, in a related way, why the FASTA format that we all know and love (or dont love) is called the FASTA format.

Graphs, Alignments, Variants and Annotations, pt. 2

Instead of heading towards the more theoretic graph design, the day after writing part 1 of what is turning out to be a series, I focused on concrete software changes that might answer the first question I posed in the previous post (If you recast the problem as that of calling annotated variants, can you speed up the current pipelines?), and that is what this post will be about. The more theoretic graph design will be coming, but Im still thinking through Heng Lis update describing previous work on graph algorithms, as well as a recent slide deck he presented (the picture of where he is coming from is becoming clearer).