Alkaliphilic Life: Adaptation strategies by Caldalkalibacillus thermarum

Alkaliphiles thrive in environments with a pH of 8.5 or above, while maintaining an internal pH closer to neutral. Thus, alkaliphilic microorganisms have a proton gradient inverted with respect to the normal orientation. Intuitively, this would nullify the potential to generate energy via respiration with regularly oriented respiratory chains...

High-Performance Cluster-Scalable Computational Methods for Genomics Applications

The ever increasing pace of advancements in sequencing technologies has enabled rapid DNA/genome sequencing to become much more accessible. In particular, next (second) and third generation sequencing technologies offer high throughput, massively parallel and cost effective sequencing solutions. Individual sample sequencing data volumes as well...

Communication-Efficient Cluster Scalable Genomics Data Processing Using Apache Arrow Flight

Current cluster scaled genomics data processing solutions rely on big data frameworks like Apache Spark, Hadoop and HDFS for data scheduling, processing and storage. These frameworks come with additional computation and memory overheads by default. It has been observed that scaling genomics dataset processing beyond 32 nodes is not efficient on...

Estimating Algorithmic Information Using Quantum Computing for Genomics Applications

Inferring algorithmic structure in data is essential for discovering causal generative models. In this research, we present a quantum computing framework using the circuit model, for estimating algorithmic information metrics. The canonical computation model of the Turing machine is restricted in time and space resources, to make the target...

ArrowSAM: In-Memory Genomics Data Processing Using Apache Arrow

The rapidly growing size of genomics data bases, driven by advances in sequencing technologies, demands fast and cost-effective processing. However, processing this data creates many challenges, particularly in selecting appropriate algorithms and computing platforms. Computing systems need data closer to the processor for fast processing....

Optimizing performance of GATK workflows using Apache Arrow In-Memory data framework

Background: Immense improvements in sequencing technologies enable producing large amounts of high throughput and cost effective next-generation sequencing (NGS) data. This data needs to be processed efficiently for further downstream analyses. Computing systems need this large amounts of data closer to the processor (with low latency) for...

GPU acceleration of Darwin read overlapper for de novo assembly of long DNA reads

BACKGROUND: In Overlap-Layout-Consensus (OLC) based de novo assembly, all reads must be compared with every other read to find overlaps. This makes the process rather slow and limits the practicality of using de novo assembly methods at a large scale in the field. Darwin is a fast and accurate read overlapper that can be used for de novo...

GASAL2: a GPU accelerated sequence alignment library for high-throughput NGS data

BACKGROUND: Due the computational complexity of sequence alignment algorithms, various accelerated solutions have been proposed to speedup this analysis. NVBIO is the only available GPU library that accelerates sequence alignment of high-throughput NGS data, but has limited performance. In this article we present GASAL2, a GPU library for...

Genetic factors associated with a poor outcome in head and neck cancer patients receiving definitive chemoradiotherapy

About half of advanced stage head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) patients can be cured by chemoradiotherapy. Patient outcome may be partially determined by the genetic alterations in HNSCC, rendering these alterations promising candidate prognostic factors and/or therapeutic targets. However, their relevance in patient outcome...

Proteomic analysis of methanonatronarchaeum thermophilum AMET1, a representative of a putative new class of euryarchaeota, “methanonatronarchaeia”

The recently discovered Methanonatronarchaeia are extremely halophilic and moderately thermophilic methyl-reducing methanogens representing a novel class-level lineage in the phylum Euryarchaeota related to the class Halobacteria. Here we present a detailed analysis of 1D-nano liquid chromatography–electrospray ionization tandem mass...

Predicting variant deleteriousness in non-human species: Applying the CADD approach in mouse

Background: Predicting the deleteriousness of observed genomic variants has taken a step forward with the introduction of the Combined Annotation Dependent Depletion (CADD) approach, which trains a classifier on the wealth of available human genomic information. This raises the question whether it can be done with less data for non-human...

A Comparison of Seed-and-Extend Techniques in Modern DNA Read Alignment Algorithms

DNA read alignment is a major step in genome analysis. However, as DNA reads continue to become longer, new approaches need to be developed to effectively use these longer reads in the alignment process. Modern aligners commonly use a two-step approach for read alignment: 1. seeding, 2. extension. In this paper, we have investigated various...

An FPGA-based systolic array to accelerate the BWA-MEM genomic mapping algorithm

We present the first accelerated implementation of BWA-MEM, a popular genome sequence alignment algorithm widely used in next generation sequencing genomics pipelines. The Smith-Waterman-like sequence alignment kernel requires a significant portion of overall execution time. We propose and evaluate a number of FPGA-based systolic array...

Studying genomic processes at the single-molecule level: introducing the tools and applications

To understand genomic processes such as transcription, translation or splicing, we need to be able to study their spatial and temporal organization at the molecular level. Single-molecule approaches provide this opportunity, allowing researchers to monitor molecular conformations, interactions or diffusion quantitatively and in real time in...