LANGMEAD LAB @ JHU

A pan-genomics study “Efficient Construction of a Complete Index for Pan-Genomics Read Alignment” that we worked on with many collaborators — University of Florida (Boucher Lab), CeBiB and Diego Portales University (Travis Gagie), and University of Eastern Piedmond (Giovanni Manzini) — was accepted at the RECOMB2019 conference in Washington DC. Congratulations to Taher Mun, who…

Student Daniel Baker posted a preprint describing Dashing (https://github.com/dnbaker/dashing), a fast and accurate software tool for estimating similarities of genomes or sequencing datasets. It uses the HyperLogLog sketch together with cardinality estimation methods that specialize in set unions and intersections. Dashing sketches genomes more rapidly than previous MinHash-based methods such as Mash or BinDash while…

Jonathan Ling, together with Langmead lab members Chris Wilks and Rone Charles and collaborator Seth Blackshaw, posted a preprint describing ASCOT (http://ascot.cs.jhu.edu). The preprint is available at: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/20/501882. ASCOT a new resource — building on the Snaptron (http://snaptron.cs.jhu.edu) tool and resource — allowing researchers to visualize and query alternative splicing patterns in public RNA-Seq data….

There has been a lot of interest in methods for building and aligning to graph genomes.  Graph genomes differ from typical “linear” reference genomes because they additionally take genetic variation into account. But basic questions remain: Which variants should we include in the reference? Is including more variants always better? How close these promising new…

In collaboration with groups at University of Florida (Boucher Lab), CeBiB and Diego Portales University (Travis Gagie), and University of Eastern Piedmond (Giovanni Manzini), Taher Mun and Ben Langmead released two preprints describing recent work on indexing and querying highly repetitive sequence collections. Both of the preprints — named “Prefix-Free Parsing for Building Big BWTs”…

Our work on improving thread-scaling in Bowtie, Bowtie 2 and HISAT appeared in Bioinformatics: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/bty648. While work on efficient genomics software has generally focused on speed on a fixed, small number of threads, general-purpose processors are now capable of running hundreds of threads of execution simultaneously in parallel. Intel’s Xeon Phi Knights Landing architecture for…

The study describing the Bowtie 2 read alignment tool has been cited over 10,000 times since it first appeared in April 2012, according to Google Scholar. The Langmead Lab continues its hard work improving and maintaining this open source software. We thank our funders for making this possible, especially the Intel Parallel Computing Program and…

From Ben: I had the honor of attending this year’s schoolwide convocation yesterday, where I received the Professor Joel Dean Excellence in Teaching Award from the CS department, as well as the William H. Huggins Award Excellence in Teaching Award from the Whiting School of Engineering.  Many thanks to all my students — your excellence and passion…

There has been much interest in methods for building and aligning to “graph genomes,” which take variants into account when aligning sequencing reads. But basic questions remain: Which variants should we include in the reference? Is including more variants always better? How close these promising new methods come to the ideal of aligning to a…

Charlotte Darby, a joint PhD student in the Langmead and Schatz labs, was highlighted in a recent news release for her work designing and teaching a course on complexity theory. The course is taught as part of the Hopkins Engineering Applications & Research Tutorials (HEART) program. HEART courses are small and taught by advanced graduate…