BACKGROUND: Bacteriocins are defined as thermolabile peptides produced by bacteria with biological activity against taxonomically related species. These antimicrobial peptides have a wide application including disease treatment, food conservation, and probiotics. However, even with a large industrial and biotechnological application potential, these peptides are still poorly studied and explored. BADASS is software with a user-friendly graphical interface applied to the search and analysis of bacteriocin diversity in whole-metagenome shotgun sequencing data. RESULTS: The search for bacteriocin sequences is performed with tools such as BLAST or DIAMOND using the BAGEL4 database as a reference. The putative bacteriocin sequences identified are used to determine the abundance and richness of the three classes of bacteriocins. Abundance is calculated by comparing the reads identified as bacteriocins to the reads identified as 16S rRNA gene using SILVA database as a reference. BADASS has a complete pipeline that starts with the quality assessment of the raw data. At the end of the analysis, BADASS generates several plots of richness and abundance automatically as well as tabular files containing information about the main bacteriocins detected. The user is able to change the main parameters of the analysis in the graphical interface. To demonstrate how the software works, we used four datasets from WMS studies using default parameters. Lantibiotics were the most abundant bacteriocins in the four datasets. This class of bacteriocin is commonly produced by Streptomyces sp. CONCLUSIONS: With a user-friendly graphical interface and a complete pipeline, BADASS proved to be a powerful tool for prospecting bacteriocin sequences in Whole-Metagenome Shotgun Sequencing (WMS) data. This tool is publicly available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/badass/ .

Motivation: Epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS) generate big epidemiological datasets. They aim for detecting differentially methylated DNA regions that are likely to influence transcriptional gene activity and, thus, the regulation of metabolic processes. The by far most widely used technology is the Illumina Methylation BeadChip, which measures the methylation levels of 450 (850) thousand cytosines, in the CpG dinucleotide context in a set of patients compared to a control group. Many bioinformatics tools exist for raw data analysis. However, most of them require some knowledge in the programming language R, have no user interface, and do not offer all necessary steps to guide users from raw data all the way down to statistically significant differentially methylated regions (DMRs) and the associated genes. Results: Here, we present DiMmeR (Discovery of Multiple Differentially Methylated Regions), the first free standalone software that interactively guides with a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) scientists the whole way through EWAS data analysis. It offers parallelized statistical methods for efficiently identifying DMRs in both Illumina 450K and 850K EPIC chip data. DiMmeR computes empirical P -values through randomization tests, even for big datasets of hundreds of patients and thousands of permutations within a few minutes on a standard desktop PC. It is independent of any third-party libraries, computes regression coefficients, P -values and empirical P -values, and it corrects for multiple testing. Availability and Implementation: DiMmeR is publicly available at http://dimmer.compbio.sdu.dk . Contact: [email protected]. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

BACKGROUND: The evolution of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) has considerably reduced the cost per sequenced-base, allowing a significant rise of sequencing projects, mainly in prokaryotes. However, the range of available NGS platforms requires different strategies and software to correctly assemble genomes. Different strategies are necessary to properly complete an assembly project, in addition to the installation or modification of various software. This requires users to have significant expertise in these software and command line scripting experience on Unix platforms, besides possessing the basic expertise on methodologies and techniques for genome assembly. These difficulties often delay the complete genome assembly projects. RESULTS: In order to overcome this, we developed SIMBA (SImple Manager for Bacterial Assemblies), a freely available web tool that integrates several component tools for assembling and finishing bacterial genomes. SIMBA provides a friendly and intuitive user interface so bioinformaticians, even with low computational expertise, can work under a centralized administrative control system of assemblies managed by the assembly center head. SIMBA guides the users to execute assembly process through simple and interactive pages. SIMBA workflow was divided in three modules: (i) projects: allows a general vision of genome sequencing projects, in addition to data quality analysis and data format conversions; (ii) assemblies: allows de novo assemblies with the software Mira, Minia, Newbler and SPAdes, also assembly quality validations using QUAST software; and (iii) curation: presents methods to finishing assemblies through tools for scaffolding contigs and close gaps. We also presented a case study that validated the efficacy of SIMBA to manage bacterial assemblies projects sequenced using Ion Torrent PGM. CONCLUSION: Besides to be a web tool for genome assembly, SIMBA is a complete genome assemblies project management system, which can be useful for managing of several projects in laboratories. SIMBA source code is available to download and install in local webservers at http://ufmg-simba.sourceforge.net .

This paper presents a multi-standard reconflgurable sigma-delta modulator, which is able to support the predictable standards of fourth generation of mobile communication systems (4G). Furthermore, the proposed architecture halves the number of required analog-to-digital converters in parallel receivers, by processing concurrently two different signals. The major design issues are outlined and operation modes are detailed. A system-level simulation is performed to demonstrate the feasibility of the presented solution. The modulator is implemented into switched-capacitor circuits and device level simulations demonstrate the performance of the converter.