MOTIVATION: Human epigenomic data has been generated by large consortia for thousands of cell types to be used as a reference map of normal and disease chromatin states. Since epigenetic data contains potentially identifiable information, similarly to genetic data, most raw files generated by these consortia are stored in controlled-access databases. It is important to protect identifiable information, but this should not hinder secure sharing of these valuable datasets. RESULTS: Guided by the Framework for responsible sharing of genomic and health-related data from the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), we have developed an approach and a tool to facilitate the exploration of epigenomics datasets' aggregate results, while filtering out identifiable information. Specifically, the EpiVar Browser allows a user to navigate an epigenetic dataset from a cohort of individuals and enables direct exploration of genotype-chromatin phenotype relationships. Because individual genotypes and epigenetic signal tracks are not directly accessible, and rather aggregated in the portal output, no identifiable data is released, yet the interface allows for dynamic genotype-epigenome interrogation. This approach has the potential to accelerate analyses that would otherwise require a lengthy multi-step approval process and provides a generalizable strategy to facilitate responsible access to sensitive epigenomics data. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Online portal: https://computationalgenomics.ca/tools/epivar; EpiVar Browser source code: https://github.com/c3g/epivar-browser; bw-merge-window tool source code: https://github.com/c3g/bw-merge-window.

SUMMARY: Large-scale sharing of genomic quantification data requires standardized access interfaces. In this Global Alliance for Genomics and Health project, we developed RNAget, an API for secure access to genomic quantification data in matrix form. RNAget provides for slicing matrices to extract desired subsets of data and is applicable to all expression matrix-format data, including RNA sequencing and microarrays. Further, it generalizes to quantification matrices of other sequence-based genomics such as ATAC-seq and ChIP-seq. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: https://ga4gh-rnaseq.github.io/schema/docs/index.html.

Peak detection in genomic data involves segmenting counts of DNA sequence reads aligned to different locations of a chromosome. The goal is to detect peaks with higher counts, and filter out background noise with lower counts. Most existing algorithms for this problem are unsupervised heuristics tailored to patterns in specific data types. We propose a supervised framework for this problem, using optimal changepoint detection models with learned penalty functions. We propose the first dynamic programming algorithm that is guaranteed to compute the optimal solution to changepoint detection problems with constraints between adjacent segment mean parameters. Implementing this algorithm requires the choice of penalty parameter that determines the number of segments that are estimated. We show how the supervised learning ideas of Rigaill et al. (2013) can be used to choose this penalty. We compare the resulting implementation of our algorithm to several baselines in a benchmark of labeled ChIP-seq data sets with two different patterns (broad H3K36me3 data and sharp H3K4me3 data). Whereas baseline unsupervised methods only provide accurate peak detection for a single pattern, our supervised method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in all data sets. The log-linear timings of our proposed dynamic programming algorithm make it scalable to the large genomic data sets that are now common. Our implementation is available in the PeakSegOptimal R package on CRAN.

Laboratory spectral measurements were conducted to evaluate the potential of hyperspectral technologies, both reflective and emissive, to detect Polychlorinated Biphenyl (PCB) in contaminated soils. Soil sample standards of silt, clay, sand, and mixed textures were contaminated with Polychlorinated Biphenyl (PCB) oil with concentrations varying between 0% and 10% (100 000 ppm) of PCB. An ASD (0.35 to 2.5 microns) and a FSR (1.6 to 12 microns) spectrometers were used to measure the reflectance of pure and contaminated soil. Two spectral regions, one in the SWIR and one in the MWIR were significantly correlated to the soil PCB concentrations. It was shown that 5W30 engine oil and PCB absorb similarly in the two spectral regions. Sand and clay soils did not respond the same way as the other soil type. The MWIR CH absorption band between 3330 and 3630 was found the most promising to detect PCB contaminated soils using hyperspectral remote sensing,

SUMMARY: The Illumina Infinium EPIC BeadChip is a new high-throughput array for DNA methylation analysis, extending the earlier 450k array by over 400 000 new sites. Previously, a method named eFORGE was developed to provide insights into cell type-specific and cell-composition effects for 450k data. Here, we present a significantly updated and improved version of eFORGE that can analyze both EPIC and 450k array data. New features include analysis of chromatin states, transcription factor motifs and DNase I footprints, providing tools for epigenome-wide association study interpretation and epigenome editing. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: eFORGE v2.0 is implemented as a web tool available from https://eforge.altiusinstitute.org and https://eforge-tf.altiusinstitute.org/. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

SUMMARY: In recent years, major initiatives such as the International Human Epigenome Consortium have generated thousands of high-quality genome-wide datasets for a large variety of assays and cell types. This data can be used as a reference to assess whether the signal from a user-provided dataset corresponds to its expected experiment, as well as to help reveal unexpected biological associations. We have developed the epiGenomic Efficient Correlator (epiGeEC) tool to enable genome-wide comparisons of very large numbers of datasets. A public Galaxy implementation of epiGeEC allows comparison of user datasets with thousands of public datasets in a few minutes. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The source code is available at https://bitbucket.org/labjacquespe/epigeec and the Galaxy implementation at http://epigeec.genap.ca. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Motivation: Many peak detection algorithms have been proposed for ChIP-seq data analysis, but it is not obvious which algorithm and what parameters are optimal for any given dataset. In contrast, regions with and without obvious peaks can be easily labeled by visual inspection of aligned read counts in a genome browser. We propose a supervised machine learning approach for ChIP-seq data analysis, using labels that encode qualitative judgments about which genomic regions contain or do not contain peaks. The main idea is to manually label a small subset of the genome, and then learn a model that makes consistent peak predictions on the rest of the genome. Results: We created 7 new histone mark datasets with 12 826 visually determined labels, and analyzed 3 existing transcription factor datasets. We observed that default peak detection parameters yield high false positive rates, which can be reduced by learning parameters using a relatively small training set of labeled data from the same experiment type. We also observed that labels from different people are highly consistent. Overall, these data indicate that our supervised labeling method is useful for quantitatively training and testing peak detection algorithms. Availability and Implementation: Labeled histone mark data http://cbio.ensmp.fr/~thocking/chip-seq-chunk-db/ , R package to compute the label error of predicted peaks https://github.com/tdhock/PeakError. Contacts: [email protected] or [email protected]. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Peak detection is a central problem in genomic data analysis, and current algorithms for this task are unsupervised and mostly effective for a single data type and pattern (e.g. H3K4me3 data with a sharp peak pattern). We propose PeakSeg, a new constrained maximum likelihood segmentation model for peak detection with an efficient inference algorithm: constrained dynamic programming. We investigate unsupervised and supervised learning of penalties for the critical model selection problem. We show that the supervised method has state-of-the-art peak detection across all data sets in a benchmark that includes both sharp H3K4me3 and broad H3K36me3 patterns.

Applications of next-generation sequencing technologies have the potential to bring revolutionary changes to medicine and biology. However, coverage bias can pose a challenge to short read data analysis tools, which rely on high coverage. To address this issue we have developed a support vector machine (SVM) based method for predicting low coverage prone (LCP) regions on a given genome. The developed SVM-based prediction of LCP regions on a given genome can assist data processing procedures based on Illumina sequencing technology, such as de novo sequencing and transcriptome analysis.

SUMMARY: The algorithm MGR enables the reconstruction of rearrangement phylogenies based on gene or synteny block order in multiple genomes. Although MGR has been successfully applied to study the evolution of different sets of species, its utilization has been hampered by the prohibitive running time for some applications. In the current work, we have designed new heuristics that significantly speed up the tool without compromising its accuracy. Moreover, we have developed a web server (webMGR) that includes elaborate web output to facilitate navigation through the results. AVAILABILITY: webMGR can be accessed via http://www.gis.a-star.edu.sg/~bourque. The source code of the improved standalone version of MGR is also freely available from the web site. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.