Spades

Spades is a trick-taking card game devised in the United States created in the 1930s. It can be played as either a partnership or solo/"cutthroat" game. The object is to take at least the number of tricks (also known as "books") that were bid before play of the hand began. In partnership Spades, the bids and tricks taken are combined for a partnership. Spades is a descendant of the Whist family of card games, which also includes Bridge, Hearts, and Oh Hell. Its major difference as compared to other Whist variants is that, instead of trump being decided by the highest bidder or at random, the Spade suit is always trumps, hence the name.

History

Spades was devised in the United States in the late 1930s and became popular in the 1940s. It is unclear which game it is most directly descended from, but it is known that Spades is a member of the Whist family and is a simplification of Contract Bridge such that a skilled Spades player can learn Bridge relatively quickly (the major additional rules being dynamic trump, the auction, dummy play, and rubber scoring).

Suit (cards)

In playing cards, a suit is one of several categories into which the cards of a deck are divided. Most often, each card bears one of several pips (symbols) showing to which suit it belongs; the suit may alternatively or additionally be indicated by the color printed on the card. The rank for each card is determined by the number of pips on it. Ranking indicates which cards within a suit are better, higher or more valuable than others, whereas there is no order between the suits unless defined in the rules of a specific card game. Unless playing with multiple decks, there is exactly one card of any given rank in any given suit. A deck may include special cards that belong to no suit, often called jokers.

Western suit-systems

Various languages have different terminology for suits such as colors, signs, or seeds. Modern Western playing cards are generally divided into two or three general suit-systems. The older Latin suits are subdivided into the Italian and Spanish suit-systems. The younger Germanic suits are subdivided into the German and Swiss suit-systems. The French suits are a derivative of the German suits but are generally considered a separate system on its own.

SPAdes (software)

SPAdes (St. Petersburg genome assembler) is a genome assembly algorithm which was designed for single cell and multi-cells bacterial data sets. However, it might not be suitable for large genomes projects.

SPAdes works with Ion Torrent, PacBio and Illumina paired-end, mate-pairs and single reads. Recently, SPAdes has been integrated into Galaxy pipelines by Guy Lionel and Philip Mabon.

Background

Studying the genome of single cells will help to track changes that occur in DNA over time or associated with exposure to different conditions. Additionally, many projects such as Human Microbiome Project and antibiotics discovery would greatly benefit from Single-cell sequencing (SCS). SCS has an advantage over sequencing DNA extracted from large number of cells. The problem of averaging out the significant variations between cells can be overcome by using SCS. Experimental and computational technologies are being optimized to allow researchers to sequence single cells. For instance, amplification of DNA extracted from a single cell is one of the experimental challenges. To maximize the accuracy and quality of SCS, a uniform DNA amplification is needed. It was demonstrated that using multiple annealing and looping-based amplification cycles (MALBAC) for DNA amplification generates less biasness compared to polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or multiple displacement amplification (MDA). Furthermore, it has been recognized that the challenges facing SCS are computational rather than experimental. Currently available assembler, such as Velvet, String Graph Assembler (SGA) and EULER-SR, were not designed to handle SCS assembly. Assembly of single cell data is difficult due to non-uniform read coverage, variation in insert length, high levels of sequencing errors and chimeric reads. Therefore, the new algorithmic approach, SPAdes, was designed to address these issues.