Publications by authors named "Jesse Kerkvliet"

Accurate reconstruction of antibiotic resistance gene (ARG) plasmids from Illumina sequencing data has proven to be a challenge with current bioinformatic tools. In this work, we present an improved method to reconstruct plasmids using short reads. We developed plasmidEC, an ensemble classifier that identifies plasmid-derived contigs by combining the output of three different binary classification tools.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Antimicrobial resistance genes (ARG) are commonly found on acquired mobile genetic elements (MGEs) such as plasmids or transposons. Understanding the spread of resistance genes associated with mobile elements (mARGs) across different hosts and environments requires linking ARGs to the existing mobile reservoir within bacterial communities. However, reconstructing mARGs in metagenomic data from diverse ecosystems poses computational challenges, including genome fragment reconstruction (assembly), high-throughput annotation of MGEs, and identification of their association with ARGs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Fungi have crucial roles in ecosystems, and are important associates for many organisms. They are adapted to a wide variety of habitats, however their global distribution and diversity remains poorly documented. The exponential growth of DNA barcode information retrieved from the environment is assisting considerably the traditional ways for unraveling fungal diversity and detection.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Transcriptome quality control is an important step in RNA-Seq experiments. However, the quality of de novo assembled transcriptomes is difficult to assess, due to the lack of reference genome to compare the assembly to. We developed a method to assess and improve the quality of de novo assembled transcriptomes by focusing on the removal of chimeric sequences.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The characteristic ground colour and banding patterns on shells of the land snail form a classic study system for genetics and adaptation as it varies widely between individuals. We use RNAseq analysis to identify candidate genes underlying this polymorphism. We sequenced cDNA from the foot and the mantle (the shell-producing tissue) of four individuals of two phenotypes and produced a transcriptome of 147,397 contigs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF