Computational biology and genomics
Transposons have the ability to “jump” around in genomes and sometimes transposons jump into genomic sites occupied by other repetitive elements; these cases are what I refer to as “composite repetitive elements” for the purpose of this post. While almost all DNA transposons and the majority of retrotransposons have lost the ability to move around…
Updated 2015 February 8th to include some scatter plots of genome size versus repeat content. I was writing about the make up of genomes today and was looking up statistics on repetitive elements in vertebrate genomes. While I could find individual papers with repetitive element statistics for a particular genome, I was unable to find…
If you’ve ever wondered how mappable a specific repeat is, here’s a quick post on creating a plot showing the mappability of a repetitive element along its consensus sequence. Specifically, the consensus sequence of a repeat was taken and sub-sequences were created by a sliding window approach (i.e. moving along the sequence) at 1 bp…
Updated 10th September 2013 to include LAST I previously looked at mapping repeats with respect to sequencing errors in high throughput sequencing and as one would expect, the accuracy of the mapping decreased when sequencing errors were introduced. I then looked at aligning to unique regions of the genome to get an idea of how…
The ENCODE mappability tracks can be visualised on the UCSC Genome Browser and they provide a sense of how mappable a region of the genome is in terms of short reads or k-mers. On a side note, it seems some people use “mapability” and some use “mappability”; I was taught the CVC rule, so I’m…
Most eukaryotic genomes are interspersed with repetitive elements and some of these elements have transcriptional activity, hence they appear when we sequence the RNA population. From the trend of things, some of these elements seem to be important. One strategy for analysing these repeats is to map them to the genome, to see where they…
Updated on the 31st May 2013 and updated again on the 25th March 2015 in light of Chris’s comment. RepeatMasker is a program that screens DNA sequences for interspersed repeats and low complexity DNA sequences. Results of RepeatMasker performed on the human and mouse genomes are provided via the UCSC Table Browser tool. In the…