Biology subjects

Thanki, A. S.

Publications and source records attributed to Thanki, A. S..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2019

TGAC Browser: an open-source genome browser for non-model organisms

Genome browsers play a vital role to provide visualisation for genomic data. It is often the case that bespoke genome browser customisations are required between different research groups, with an obvious necessity to update, upgrade and tailor tracks and features on a potentially frequent basis. However, most of the current genome browsers require highly curated data held in public repositories. Besides, these genome browsers often rely on particular dependencies, where writing plug-in or modifying existing code can be troublesome and resource expensive.\n\nWe present TGAC Browser, a new open-source web-based genome browser designed to overcome shortcomings in available approaches. It uses a locally installed Ensembl Core Database schema and is also able to visualise data from well-known NGS data formats. We also added simple analysis functionality to perform BLAST searches within TGAC Browser. TGAC Browser also allows uploading your genomic data. TGAC Browser is an open-source, easy to set up, and user-friendly genome browser with minimal, lightweight configuration details.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2019

Convergent gene loss in aquatic plants predicts new components of plant immunity and drought response

Plant innate immunity relies on NLR receptors that recognize pathogen derived molecules and activate downstream signalling pathways. We analyzed the variation in copy number of NLR genes across flowering plants, and identified a number of species with a low number of NLRs relative to sister species. Two distinct lineages, one monocot (Lentibulariaceae) and one dicot (Alismatales) encapsulate four species with particularly few NLR genes. In these lineages, loss of NLRs coincided with loss of the well-known downstream immune signalling complex (EDS1-PAD4). When we expanded our analysis across the whole proteomes, we were able to identify other characterized immune genes absent only in Lentibulariaceae and Alismatales. Additionally, we identified a small subset of genes with unknown function convergently lost in all four species. We predicted that some of these genes may have a role in plant immunity. Gene expression analyses confirmed that a group of these genes was differentially expressed under pathogen infection. Another subset of these genes was differentially expressed upon drought providing further evidence of a link between the drought and plant immunity.

plant biology↗

bioRxiv2016

GeneSeqToFamily: the Ensembl Compara GeneTrees pipeline as a Galaxy workflow

BackgroundGene duplication is a major factor contributing to evolutionary novelty, and the contraction or expansion of gene families has often been associated with morphological, physiological and environmental adaptations. The study of homologous genes helps us to understand the evolution of gene families. It plays a vital role in finding ancestral gene duplication events as well as identifying genes that have diverged from a common ancestor under positive selection. There are various tools available, such as MSOAR, OrthoMCL and HomoloGene, to identify gene families and visualise syntenic information between species, providing an overview of syntenic regions evolution at the family level. Unfortunately, none of them provide information about structural changes within genes, such as the conservation of ancestral exon boundaries amongst multiple genomes. The Ensembl GeneTrees computational pipeline generates gene trees based on coding sequences and provides details about exon conservation, and is used in the Ensembl Compara project to discover gene families.\n\nFindingsA certain amount of expertise is required to configure and run the Ensembl Compara GeneTrees pipeline via command line. Therefore, we have converted the command line Ensembl Compara GeneTrees pipeline into a Galaxy workflow, called GeneSeqToFamily, and provided additional functionality. This workflow uses existing tools from the Galaxy ToolShed, as well as providing additional wrappers and tools that are required to run the workflow.\n\nConclusionsGeneSeqToFamily represents the Ensembl Compara pipeline as a set of interconnected Galaxy tools, so they can be run interactively within the Galaxys user-friendly workflow environment while still providing the flexibility to tailor the analysis by changing configurations and tools if necessary. Additional tools allow users to subsequently visualise the gene families produced by the workflow, using the Aequatus.js interactive tool, which has been developed as part of the Aequatus software project.

bioinformatics↗