Single Author Bioinformatics Paper - 'I' or 'We'?
Few recent examples:
Accelerated Profile HMM Searches - Sean R. Eddy
It is safe to categorize it under ‘I’.
Profile hidden Markov models (profile HMMs) and probabilistic inference methods have made important contributions to the theory of sequence database homology search. However, practical use of profile HMM methods has been hindered by the computational expense of existing software implementations. Here I describe an acceleration heuristic for profile HMMs, the multiple segment Viterbi (MSV) algorithm. The MSV algorithm computes an optimal sum of multiple ungapped local alignment segments using a striped vector-parallel approach previously described for fast Smith/Waterman alignment. MSV scores follow the same statistical distribution as gapped optimal local alignment scores, allowing rapid evaluation of significance of an MSV score and thus facilitating its use as a heuristic filter. I also describe a 20-fold acceleration of the standard profile HMM Forward/Backward algorithms using a method I call sparse rescaling. These methods are assembled in a pipeline in which high-scoring MSV hits are passed on for reanalysis with the full HMM Forward/Backward algorithm. This accelerated pipeline is implemented in the freely available HMMER3 software package. Performance benchmarks show that the use of the heuristic MSV filter sacrifices negligible sensitivity compared to unaccelerated profile HMM searches. HMMER3 is substantially more sensitive and 100- to 1000-fold faster than HMMER2. HMMER3 is now about as fast as BLAST for protein searches.
Aligning sequence reads, clone sequences and assembly contigs with BWA-MEM - Heng Li
We bordering on ‘passive’.
BWA-MEM is a new alignment algorithm for aligning sequence reads or assembly contigs against a large reference genome such as human. It automatically chooses between local and end-to-end alignments, supports paired-end reads and performs chimeric alignment. The algorithm is robust to sequencing errors and applicable to a wide range of sequence lengths from 70bp to a few megabases. For mapping 100bp sequences, BWA-MEM shows better performance than several state-of-art read aligners to date.
Exploring Genome Characteristics and Sequence Quality Without a Reference - Jared T. Simpson
We paper with only one ‘my’.
The availability of inexpensive DNA sequence data has led to a vast increase in the number of genome projects. For example, the Genome10K project [1] aims to sequence 10,000 vertebrate genomes in the upcoming years. Despite the advances in the production of DNA sequence data, performing de novo assembly remains a signi cant challenge. This challenge was highlighted by the recent Assemblathon2 project [2]. In this competition sequence data was obtained for three vertebrate genomes. Twenty-one teams contributed assemblies of the three genomes, producing 43 assemblies in total. The quality of the assemblies were highly variable both between submissions for the same genome and within individual software packages across the three species. In my view, this variability stems from the practical diculty of designing an assembly strategy (for instance, selecting software and its parameters) when little is known about the structure of the underlying genome and the quality of the available data. This paper aims to address this uncertainty.
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