Undergrad Research Experience

Fall 2020

Participants

• Eamen Ho: Volunteer research assistant
• Ramandeep Singh: BIOL 48002
• Desiree Pante: BIOL 48001
• Afsana Rahman: Volunteer research assistant
• Roman Shimonov: BIOL 48002
• Justin Hiraldo: BIOL 48002
• Zaheen Hossain: Volunteer research assistant
• Jerry Sebastian: Volunteer research assistant
• Ariel Cebelinski: Volunteer research assistant

Schedule

• Tuesdays at 12 noon - 2pm by Zoom
• Sept 1, 2020. Week 1. Meet & Greet; Intro to projects
• Sept 8, 2020. Week 2. Presentations (background, data, and methods), based on assigned readings

Project 1. Structure & evolution of multipartite genome of Lyme disease bacteria

• Participants: Desiree & Ramon (Summer 2020), Jerry
• Readings
  • Review: deCenzo & Finan (2017).
• Data set: lp54 & cp26 plasmids
• TO DO:
  • Week 1. 9/8/2020, 12 noon: 5-slides presentation on multipartite bacterial genome evolution (based on the paper above)
  • Week 2. 9/15, 12 noon: Use prorgram codonO to calculate codon bias (SCUO) for replicons (n=23) on Borrelia burgdorferi B31 genome
  • Week 3. 9/22, 12 noon: codonO paper presentation (Jerry)

Project 2. OspC Cross-reactivity analysis

• Participants: Justin, Roman
• Readings: Ivanova et al (2009)
• Tool: ImageJ
• Data set (to be sent)
• To Do
  • Week 1. 9/8/2020 12 noon: 5-slide presentation on background, material & methods, and data capture using ImageJ
  • Week 2. 9/15: Create Excel sheet to capture immunoblot intensities on C3H mice & P.lucus. Capture background for each serum. Getting ready to makes plots in R/Rstudio

Project 3. Clostridium transcriptome analysis

• Participants: Eaman, Zaheen
• Readings
  • SPARTA pipeline
  • Fletcher et al (2018).
  • Gu et al (2018)
• Data set: posted on "genometracker.org"
  • Wild type transcriptome at 12 hour, paired-end read files:
  • /home/azureuser/18134XR-29-01_S0_L001_R1_001.fastq.gz
  • /home/azureuser/18134XR-29-01_S0_L001_R2_001.fastq.gz
• To Do
  • Week 1. 9/8/2020 12 noon:
    • A short presentation on C. diff transcriptome (one of the 2 papers above)
    • Demo on read quality using FastQC and mapping reads to reference genomes with bowtie
  • Week 2. Use HT-Seq to quantify RNA abundance for C. diff genes.
    • HTSeq installed
    • Try this protocol first
  • Commands

According to: reference; Bowtie website

bioseq -i'genbank' R20291.gb > ref.fa # make FASTA file
bowtie2-build ref.fa index # build index
# -S: sam output (otherwise bam) 
bowtie2 -x index -S 18134XR.sam -1 ../18134XR-29-01_S0_L001_R1_001.fastq.gz -2 ../18134XR-29-01_S0_L001_R2_001.fastq.gz
# ref.gff3: need to run sed "s/Chromosome/FN545816/"
# need to use "-i"; default is "gene_id"
conda activate qiulab # change environment to access htseq
htseq-count -m union --stranded=yes 18134XR-29-01.sam ~/xingmin-cdiff/ref.gff3 -i=Parent > 18134XR-29-01.counts
samtools view -b 18134XR-29-01.sam -o 18134XR-29-01.bam # compress sam file into bam file

Project 4. Protein classification using natural language processing

• Participants: Afsana & Ariel
• Goal: Classify protein sequences
• Week 1. 9/8/2020 Readings:
  • Rives et al (2019)
  • Lan et al (2019)
• Week 2. Find/Explore ALBERT resources & Tutorials
• Code from Hansaim Lim
• Transformer: Pretrained models in natural language processing
• DNAbert paper

DNAbert: github code

• Including Albert
• Google albert library: github

Sample BioPython script:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import json
from Bio import SeqIO

alnFile = sys.argv[1] # read file as the first argument
seqList = [] # initialize a list
for record in SeqIO.parse(alnFile, "fasta"):
    seqList.append({"id": record.id,
                    "seq": str(record[0:3].seq) # use the str() function to convert object to string
                }) # get residue2 1-3

print(json.dumps(seqList)) # print to JSON format
exit