MAMLE is a novel segmentation method for detecting cells within dense clusters. MAMLE executes cell segmentation in two main stages. The first relies on state of the art filtering technique, edge detection in multi resolution with morphological operator and threshold decomposition for adaptive thresholding. From this, a correction procedure is applied that exploits maximum likelihood estimate as an objective function. Also, it acquires morphological features from the initial segmentation for constructing the likelihood parameter, after which the final segmentation results are obtained.
RASTA-Bacteria is an automated method allowing quick and reliable identification of TA loci in sequenced prokaryotic genomes, whether they are annotated open reading frames or not.
nocoRNAc (non-coding RNA characterization) is a Java program for the prediction and characterization of ncRNA transcripts in bacteria. nocoRNAc takes the coordinates of putative ncRNA loci as input and annotates them with transcriptional features to conduct strand-specific transcript predictions. Our approach is not limited to intergenic regions but also applied to predict cis-encoded asRNA transcripts. For the detection of the transcript’s 3′ end nocoRNAc integrates the program TransTermHP (Kingsford et al., 2007) to predict Rho-independent terminator signals. The 5′ start is predicted by the detection of destabilized regions in the genomic DNA. For this purpose we implemented the so-called SIDD model (Benham, Bi, 2004), which has been shown to be applicable to the detection of promoter regions in microbial genomes. Therefore, nocoRNAc does not have to rely on information about known TFBS. The putative transcriptional features are then combined to classify ncRNA loci into either being an ncRNA transcript or not. For ncRNAs that are classified as transcripts the strand is automatically specified, and its boundaries are derived from the SIDD sites and the Rho-independent transcription termination signal. Those loci that are classified not to be a transcript might be false positive predictions or they contain cis-regulatory motifs. For the latter, nocoRNAc incorporates other functionalities for the further analysis of the ncRNA loci such as the search for known RNA motifs from the Rfam database. Furthermore, nocoRNAc provides methods for the prediction of RNA-RNA interactions between ncRNAs and mRNAs. All results can be studied in detail in nocoRNAc’s integrated interactive R environment.
ClonalOrigin is a tool for recombination detection in bacteria. ClonalOrigin performs a comparative analysis of the sequences of a sample of bacterial genomes in order to reconstruct the recombination events that have taken place in their ancestry.
Bugs is a simple genetic algorithm program that simulates bacteria-like organisms which move about in a field of “algae” that they eat by moving over them. When they eat enough of the algae, they reproduce by division; if they don’t eat enough, they die. Over time, the initial aimless bugs will evolve into efficient foragers scouring their world for fresh algae.
