Motivation: The study of immunoglobulins and T cell receptors using next-generation sequencing has finally allowed exploring immune repertoires and responses in their immense variability and complexity. Unsurprisingly, their analysis and interpretation is a highly convoluted task. Results: We thus implemented ARResT/Interrogate, a web-based, interactive application. It can organize and filter large amounts of immunogenetic data by numerous criteria, calculate several relevant statistics, and present results in the form of multiple interconnected visualizations. Availability and Implementation: ARResT/Interrogate is implemented primarily in R, and is freely available at http://bat.infspire.org/arrest/interrogate/ Contact: [email protected] Supplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

MOTIVATION: Sanger sequencing is still being employed for sequence variant detection by many laboratories, especially in a clinical setting. However, chromatogram interpretation often requires manual inspection and in some cases, considerable expertise. RESULTS: We present GLASS, a web-based Sanger sequence trace viewer, editor, aligner and variant caller, built to assist with the assessment of variations in 'curated' or user-provided genes. Critically, it produces a standardized variant output as recommended by the Human Genome Variation Society. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: GLASS is freely available at http://bat.infspire.org/genomepd/glass/ with source code at https://github.com/infspiredBAT/GLASS. CONTACT: [email protected] or [email protected]. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

MOTIVATION: An ever-increasing body of evidence supports the importance of B cell receptor immunoglobulin (BcR IG) sequence restriction, alias stereotypy, in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). This phenomenon accounts for ∼30% of studied cases, one in eight of which belong to major subsets, and extends beyond restricted sequence patterns to shared biologic and clinical characteristics and, generally, outcome. Thus, the robust assignment of new cases to major CLL subsets is a critical, and yet unmet, requirement. RESULTS: We introduce a novel application, ARResT/AssignSubsets, which enables the robust assignment of BcR IG sequences from CLL patients to major stereotyped subsets. ARResT/AssignSubsets uniquely combines expert immunogenetic sequence annotation from IMGT/V-QUEST with curation to safeguard quality, statistical modeling of sequence features from more than 7500 CLL patients, and results from multiple perspectives to allow for both objective and subjective assessment. We validated our approach on the learning set, and evaluated its real-world applicability on a new representative dataset comprising 459 sequences from a single institution. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: ARResT/AssignSubsets is freely available on the web at http://bat.infspire.org/arrest/assignsubsets/ CONTACT: [email protected]. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

SUMMARY: We present Circoletto, an online visualization tool based on Circos, which provides a fast, aesthetically pleasing and informative overview of sequence similarity search results. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Online version and downloadable software package for offline use (source code in PERL) freely available at http://bat.ina.certh.gr/tools/circoletto/ CONTACT: [email protected]

UNLABELLED: We present MASiVE, an expertly built tool for the large-scale, yet sensitive and highly accurate, discovery, preliminary analysis and insertion age estimation of intact Sirevirus LTR-retrotransposons in plant genomic sequences. Validation was based on the recently available and annotated large maize chromosome one. Results show a considerable improvement in the annotation of Sireviruses, and support our approach as an important addition to the bioinformatics toolbox of plant biologists. AVAILABILITY: PERL source code and essential files are available online at http://bat.ina.certh.gr/tools/masive/. The freely available Vmatch, LTRharvest, Wise2, and MAFFT algorithms are required.

MOTIVATION: Biomedical literature is the principal repository of biomedical knowledge, with PubMed being the most complete database collecting, organizing and analyzing such textual knowledge. There are numerous efforts that attempt to exploit this information by using text mining and machine learning techniques. We developed a novel approach, called PuReD-MCL (Pubmed Related Documents-MCL), which is based on the graph clustering algorithm MCL and relevant resources from PubMed. METHODS: PuReD-MCL avoids using natural language processing (NLP) techniques directly; instead, it takes advantage of existing resources, available from PubMed. PuReD-MCL then clusters documents efficiently using the MCL graph clustering algorithm, which is based on graph flow simulation. This process allows users to analyse the results by highlighting important clues, and finally to visualize the clusters and all relevant information using an interactive graph layout algorithm, for instance BioLayout Express 3D. RESULTS: The methodology was applied to two different datasets, previously used for the validation of the document clustering tool TextQuest. The first dataset involves the organisms Escherichia coli and yeast, whereas the second is related to Drosophila development. PuReD-MCL successfully reproduces the annotated results obtained from TextQuest, while at the same time provides additional insights into the clusters and the corresponding documents. AVAILABILITY: Source code in perl and R are available from http://tartara.csd.auth.gr/~theodos/

MOTIVATION: CoGenT++ is a data environment for computational research in comparative and functional genomics, designed to address issues of consistency, reproducibility, scalability and accessibility. DESCRIPTION: CoGenT++ facilitates the re-distribution of all fully sequenced and published genomes, storing information about species, gene names and protein sequences. We describe our scalable implementation of ProXSim, a continually updated all-against-all similarity database, which stores pairwise relationships between all genome sequences. Based on these similarities, derived databases are generated for gene fusions--AllFuse, putative orthologs--OFAM, protein families--TRIBES, phylogenetic profiles--ProfUse and phylogenetic trees. Extensions based on the CoGenT++ environment include disease gene prediction, pattern discovery, automated domain detection, genome annotation and ancestral reconstruction. CONCLUSION: CoGenT++ provides a comprehensive environment for computational genomics, accessible primarily for large-scale analyses as well as manual browsing.