We introduce Shouji, a highly parallel and accurate pre-alignment filter that remarkably reduces the need for computationally-costly dynamic programming algorithms. The first key idea of our proposed pre-alignment filter is to provide high filtering accuracy by correctly detecting all common subsequences shared between two given sequences. The second key idea is to design a hardware accelerator design that adopts modern FPGA (field-programmable gate array) architectures to further boost the performance of our algorithm.

More at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/Shouji

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/Shouji

The biggest and perhaps most fearsome of the world's big cats, the tiger, shares 95.6 percent of its DNA with humans' cute and furry companions, domestic cats.

The new research showed that big cats have genetic mutations that enabled them to be carnivores. The team also identified mutations that allow snow leopards to thrive at high altitudes.

Reference:

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/your-cat-ferocious-tigers-share-lot-95-6-percent-their-4B11182690

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/flora-fauna/Gene-mapping-of-tiger-completed/articleshow/22671681.cms

Paper:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130917/ncomms3433/full/ncomms3433.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_assembly 

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-0951-y

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/operasf/

Again, running spades.py will show you the options:

spades.py

This produces:

SPAdes genome assembler v3.10.1

Usage: /usr/local/SPAdes-3.10.1-Linux/bin/spades.py [options] -o <output_dir>

Basic options:
-o      <output_dir>    directory to store all the resulting files (required)
--sc                    this flag is required for MDA (single-cell) data
--meta                  this flag is required for metagenomic sample data
--rna                   this flag is required for RNA-Seq data
--plasmid               runs plasmidSPAdes pipeline for plasmid detection
--iontorrent            this flag is required for IonTorrent data
--test                  runs SPAdes on toy dataset
-h/--help               prints this usage message
-v/--version            prints version

Input data:
--12    <filename>      file with interlaced forward and reverse paired-end reads
-1      <filename>      file with forward paired-end reads
-2      <filename>      file with reverse paired-end reads
-s      <filename>      file with unpaired reads
--pe<#>-12      <filename>      file with interlaced reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-1       <filename>      file with forward reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-2       <filename>      file with reverse reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-s       <filename>      file with unpaired reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-<or>    orientation of reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9; <or> = fr, rf, ff)
--s<#>          <filename>      file with unpaired reads for single reads library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-12      <filename>      file with interlaced reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-1       <filename>      file with forward reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-2       <filename>      file with reverse reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-s       <filename>      file with unpaired reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-<or>    orientation of reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9; <or> = fr, rf, ff)
--hqmp<#>-12    <filename>      file with interlaced reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-1     <filename>      file with forward reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-2     <filename>      file with reverse reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-s     <filename>      file with unpaired reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-<or>  orientation of reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9; <or> = fr, rf, ff)
--nxmate<#>-1   <filename>      file with forward reads for Lucigen NxMate library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--nxmate<#>-2   <filename>      file with reverse reads for Lucigen NxMate library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--sanger        <filename>      file with Sanger reads
--pacbio        <filename>      file with PacBio reads
--nanopore      <filename>      file with Nanopore reads
--tslr  <filename>      file with TSLR-contigs
--trusted-contigs       <filename>      file with trusted contigs
--untrusted-contigs     <filename>      file with untrusted contigs

Pipeline options:
--only-error-correction runs only read error correction (without assembling)
--only-assembler        runs only assembling (without read error correction)
--careful               tries to reduce number of mismatches and short indels
--continue              continue run from the last available check-point
--restart-from  <cp>    restart run with updated options and from the specified check-point ('ec', 'as', 'k<int>', 'mc')
--disable-gzip-output   forces error correction not to compress the corrected reads
--disable-rr            disables repeat resolution stage of assembling

Advanced options:
--dataset       <filename>      file with dataset description in YAML format
-t/--threads    <int>           number of threads
                                [default: 16]
-m/--memory     <int>           RAM limit for SPAdes in Gb (terminates if exceeded)
                                [default: 250]
--tmp-dir       <dirname>       directory for temporary files
                                [default: <output_dir>/tmp]
-k              <int,int,...>   comma-separated list of k-mer sizes (must be odd and
                                less than 128) [default: 'auto']
--cov-cutoff    <float>         coverage cutoff value (a positive float number, or 'auto', or 'off') [default: 'off']
--phred-offset  <33 or 64>      PHRED quality offset in the input reads (33 or 64)
                                [default: auto-detect]

As you can see this is also a “pipeline” of tools that can be switched on or off. SPAdes takes quite a long time, so for the purposes of this practical, something like this may suffice:

spades.py -t 4 \
          -m 32 \
          -k 31,51,71 \
          --only-assembler \
          -1 miseq.1.fastq -2 miseq.2.fastq \
          --nanopore minion.fastq \
          -o hybrid_assembly

In turn, these parameters mean

• use 4 threads
• max memory is 32Gb
• use 3 kmer values to build the de bruijn graph(s) - 31, 51 and 71
• only run the assembler, not the correction algorithm (for speed)
• read 1 and read 2 of the MiSeq data
• the nanopore data
• put the output in folder “hybrid_assembly”

Following are the genome assembly tools based on string graph:

1.SGA (String Graph Assembler) https://github.com/jts/sga

Assembles large genomes from high coverage short read data. SGA is designed as a modular set of programs, which are used to form an assembly pipeline. SGA implements a set of assembly algorithms based on the FM-index. As the FM-index is a compressed data structure, the algorithms are very memory efficient. The SGA assembly has three distinct phases. The first phase corrects base calling errors in the reads. The second phase assembles contigs from the corrected reads. The third phase uses paired end and/or mate pair data to build scaffolds from the contigs. The output of this software is a PDF report that allows the properties of the genome and data quality to be visually explored. By providing more information to the user at the start of an assembly project, this software will help increase awareness of the factors that make a given assembly easy or difficult, assist in the selection of software and parameters and help to troubleshoot an assembly if it runs into problems.

2. SAGE: String-overlap Assembly of GEnomes https://github.com/lucian-ilie/SAGE2

SAGE, for de novo genome assembly. As opposed to most assemblers, which are de Bruijn graph based, SAGE uses the string-overlap graph. SAGE builds upon great existing work on string-overlap graph and maximum likelihood assembly, bringing an important number of new ideas, such as the efficient computation of the transitive reduction of the string overlap graph, the use of (generalized) edge multiplicity statistics for more accurate estimation of read copy counts, and the improved use of mate pairs and min-cost flow for supporting edge merging. The assemblies produced by SAGE for several short and medium-size genomes compared favourably with those of existing leading assemblers.

3. FSG: Fast String Graph

The new integrated assembler has been assessed on a standard benchmark, showing that fast string graph (FSG) is significantly faster than SGA while maintaining a moderate use of main memory, and showing practical advantages in running FSG on multiple threads. Moreover, we have studied the effect of coverage rates on the running times.

4.  BASE https://github.com/dhlbh/BASE

It enhances the classic seed-extension approach by indexing the reads efficiently to generate adaptive seeds that have high probability to appear uniquely in the genome. Such seeds form the basis for BASE to build extension trees and then to use reverse validation to remove the branches based on read coverage and paired-end information, resulting in high-quality consensus sequences of reads sharing the seeds. Such consensus sequences are then extended to contigs. BASE is a practically efficient tool for constructing contig, with significant improvement in quality for long NGS reads. It is relatively easy to extend BASE to include scaffolding.

5. Fermi https://github.com/lh3/fermi/

Fermi is a de novo assembler with a particular focus on assembling Illumina short sequence reads from a mammal-sized genome. In addition to the role of a typical assembler, fermi also aims to preserve heterozygotes which are often collapsed by other assemblers. Its ultimate goal is to find a minimal set of unitigs to represent all the information in raw reads.

If you want to learn about String Graph assembler, please read the following papers -

i) The Fragment Assembly String Graph - E. W. Myers

This paper describes the String Graph concept.

ii) Efficient construction of an assembly string graph using the FM-index - Jared T. Simpson and Richard Durbin

This earlier paper from Simpson and Durbin

iii) Efficient de novo assembly of large genomes using compressed data structures - Jared T. Simpson and Richard Durbin

if you map reads to GRCh38 or hg38, use the following:

ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/all/GCA/000/001/405/GCA_000001405.15_GRCh38/seqs_for_alignment_pipelines.ucsc_ids/GCA_000001405.15_GRCh38_no_alt_analysis_set.fna.gz

There are several other versions of GRCh37/GRCh38. What’s wrong with them? Here are a collection of potential issues:

More at http://lh3.github.io/2017/11/13/which-human-reference-genome-to-use

Address of the bookmark: http://lh3.github.io/2017/11/13/which-human-reference-genome-to-use

Genome assembly projects typically run multiple algorithms in an attempt to find the single best assembly, although those assemblies often have complementary, if untapped, strengths and weaknesses. We present our metassembler algorithm that merges multiple assemblies of a genome into a single superior sequence. 

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/metassembler/?source=directory

To resolve this, download and have in SSPACED-Longreads folder.

Cheers :)

Quickstart

http://nanopolish.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart_consensus.html

Algorithms

http://simpsonlab.github.io/2017/06/30/nanopolish-v0.7.0/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/jts/nanopolish

Address of the bookmark: http://www.fishbrowser.org/software/P_RNA_scaffolder/#