With advances in Cancer Genomics, Mutation Annotation Format (MAF) is being widley accepted and used to store variants detected. The Cancer Genome Atlas Project has seqenced over 30 different cancers with sample size of each cancer type being over 200. The resulting data consisting of genetic variants is stored in the form of Mutation Annotation Format. This package attempts to summarize, analyze, annotate and visualize MAF files in an efficient manner either from TCGA sources or any in-house studies as long as the data is in MAF format. Maftools can also handle ICGC Simple Somatic Mutation format.

maftools is on bioRxiv

Please cite the below if you find this tool useful for you.

Mayakonda, A. and H.P. Koeffler, Maftools: Efficient analysis, visualization and summarization of MAF files from large-scale cohort based cancer studies. bioRxiv, 2016. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/052662

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/PoisonAlien/maftools

PEAR evaluates all possible paired-end read overlaps and without requiring the target fragment size as input. In addition, it implements a statistical test for minimizing false-positive results. Together with a highly optimized implementation, it can merge millions of paired end reads within a couple of minutes on a standard desktop computer.

More at http://www.exelixis-lab.org/web/software/pear

Paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3933873/

Address of the bookmark: http://www.exelixis-lab.org/web/software/pear

Reads are simulated from both strands of a provided or randomly generated reference sequence.

Address of the bookmark: https://bitbucket.org/genomeinformatics/simlord/

More at https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-021-04056-0

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/SR-Martin/alvis

So far miniasm is in early development stage. It has only been tested on a dozen of PacBio and Oxford Nanopore (ONT) bacterial data sets. Including the mapping step, it takes about 3 minutes to assemble a bacterial genome. Under the default setting, miniasm assembles 9 out of 12 PacBio datasets and 3 out of 4 ONT datasets into a single contig. The 12 PacBio data sets are PacBio E. coli sample, ERS473430, ERS544009, ERS554120, ERS605484, ERS617393, ERS646601, ERS659581, ERS670327, ERS685285, ERS743109 and a deprecated PacBio E. coli data set. ONT data are acquired from the Loman Lab.

For a C. elegans PacBio data set (only 40X are used, not the whole dataset), miniasm finishes the assembly, including reads overlapping, in ~10 minutes with 16 CPUs. The total assembly size is 105Mb; the N50 is 1.94Mb. In comparison, the HGAP3produces a 104Mb assembly with N50 1.61Mb. This dotter plot gives a global view of the miniasm assembly (on the X axis) and the HGAP3 assembly (on Y). They are broadly comparable. Of course, the HGAP3 consensus sequences are much more accurate. In addition, on the whole data set (assembled in ~30 min), the miniasm N50 is reduced to 1.79Mb. Miniasm still needs improvements.

Miniasm confirms that at least for high-coverage bacterial genomes, it is possible to generate long contigs from raw PacBio or ONT reads without error correction. It also shows that minimap can be used as a read overlapper, even though it is probably not as sensitive as the more sophisticated overlapers such as MHAP and DALIGNER. Coupled with long-read error correctors and consensus tools, miniasm may also be useful to produce high-quality assemblies.

Minimap and miniasm are ultrafast tools for (i) mapping and (ii) assembly. Designed for long, noisy reads, they do not have a correction or consensus step, and therefore the resulting assemblies are contiguous (i.e. long) but very noisy (i.e. full of errors)

We start with an all against all comparison:

minimap -Sw5 -L100 -m0 -t8 reads.fq reads.fq | gzip -1 > reads.paf.gz

Then we can assemble

miniasm -f reads.fq reads.paf.gz > reads.gfa

Convert GFA to FASTA:

awk '/^S/{print ">"$2"\n"$3}' reads.gfa | fold > reads.fa

And then count how many contigs:

grep ">" reads.fa | wc -l

# Download sample PacBio from the PBcR website
wget -O- http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/software/PBcR/data/selfSampleData.tar.gz | tar zxf -
ln -s selfSampleData/pacbio_filtered.fastq reads.fq
# Install minimap and miniasm (requiring gcc and zlib)
git clone https://github.com/lh3/minimap && (cd minimap && make)
git clone https://github.com/lh3/miniasm && (cd miniasm && make)
# Overlap
minimap/minimap -Sw5 -L100 -m0 -t8 reads.fq reads.fq | gzip -1 > reads.paf.gz
# Layout
miniasm/miniasm -f reads.fq reads.paf.gz > reads.gfa

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/lh3/miniasm

The tool should be compatible with most UNIX flavors and has been successfully tested on the following operating systems:

• Mac OS X 10.11.1
• Mac OS X 10.10.3
• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/mculinovic/EAGLER

python finisherSC.py destinedFolder mummerPath

If you are running on server computer and would like to use multiple threads, then the following commands can generate 20 threads to run FinisherSC.

python finisherSC.py -par 20 destinedFolder mummerPath

Sometimes, if the names of raw reads and contigs consists of special characters/formats, FinisherSC/MUMmer may not parse them correctly. In that case, you want to have a quick renaming of the names of contigs/reads in contigs.fasta or raw_reads.fasta using the following command.

    perl -pe 's/>[^\$]*$/">Seg" . ++$n ."\n"/ge' raw_reads.fasta > newRaw_reads.fasta
    cp newRaw_reads.fasta raw_reads.fasta
    perl -pe 's/>[^\$]*$/">Seg" . ++$n ."\n"/ge' contigs.fasta > newContigs.fasta
    cp newContigs.fasta contigs.fasta

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/kakitone/finishingTool

I made Rebaler for bacterial genomes (specifically for the task of testing basecallers). It should in principle work for non-bacterial genomes as well, but I haven't tested it.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/rrwick/Rebaler