Bioinformatics

  • ​dbNSFP: dbNSFP is a database developed for functional prediction and annotation of all potential non-synonymous single-nucleotide variants (nsSNVs) in the human genome. 
  1. Liu X, Jian X, and Boerwinkle E. 2011. dbNSFP: a lightweight database of human non-synonymous SNPs and their functional predictions. Human Mutation. 32:894-899.
  2. Liu X, Jian X, and Boerwinkle E. 2013. dbNSFP v2.0: A Database of Human Non-synonymous SNVs and Their Functional Predictions and Annotations. Human Mutation. 34:E2393-E2402. 
  3. Liu X, Wu C, Li C and Boerwinkle E. 2016. dbNSFP v3.0: A One-Stop Database of Functional Predictions and Annotations for Human Non-synonymous and Splice Site SNVs. Human Mutation. 37(3):235-241. 
  • dbscSNV: dbscSNV includes all potential human SNVs within splicing consensus regions (−3 to +8 at the 5’ splice site and −12 to +2 at the 3’ splice site), i.e. scSNVs, related functional annotations and two ensemble prediction scores for predicting their potential of altering splicing. dbscSNV can be queried as an attached database for dbNSFP.
  1. Jian X, Boerwinkle E and Liu X. 2015. In silico prediction of splice-altering single nucleotide variants in the human genome. Nucleic Acids Research 42(22):13534-13544.
  • WGSA: WGSA is an annotation pipeline for human genome re-sequencing studies, to facilitate the functional annotation step of whole genome sequencing (WGS). Currently WGSA supports the annotation of SNVs and indels locally without remote database requests, allowing it to scale up for large WGS studies.
  1. Liu X, White S, Peng B, Johnson AD, Brody JA, Li AH, Huang Z, Carroll A, Wei P, Gibbs R, Klein RJ and Boerwinkle E. 2016. WGSA: an annotation pipeline for human genome sequencing studies. Journal of Medical Genetics 53:111-112. 
  • dbMTS: the database for miRNA target site (MTS) SNVs, which includes all potential MTS SNVs in the 3’UTR of human genome along with hundreds of functional annotations. This database can help studies easily identify putative SNVs that affect miRNA targeting and facilitate the prioritization of their functional importance.  dbMTS can be queried as an attached database for dbNSFP.

Population Genetics

  • SRV: srv is a forward simulation algorithm, which simulates DNA sequences assuming realistic models for human demographic and natural selection. 
  1. Peng B and Liu X. 2011. Simulating Sequences of the Human Genome with Rare Variants. Human Heredity. 70(4): 287–291.
  • jPopGen Suite: jPopGen Suite is an user-friendly package of java programs for population genetic analysis of SNP spectrum data from randomly sampled DNA sequences.
  • Stairway plot: The stairway plot is a method for inferring detailed population demographic history using the site frequency spectrum (SFS) from DNA sequence data. It does not need a pre-defined population model and can be applied to hundreds of unphased sequences.
  1. Liu X and Fu YX. 2015. Exploring population size changes using SNP frequency spectra. Nature Genetics. 47(5):555-559.