BOL: Related items

String graph based genome assembly software and tools !

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 17:17:38 -0600

In graph theory, a string graph is an intersection graph of curves in the plane; each curve is called a "string". String graphs were first proposed by E. W. Myers in a 2005 publication. In recent Genome Research paper describing an innovative approach for assembling large genomes from NGS data caught our attention for several reasons. i) it give different "string graph" prospective of long lasting genome assembly problem ii) the paper is coauthored by Jared Simpson, the developer of ABySS assembler and Richard Durbin. iii) Simpson-Durbin algorithm is that it does not rely on de Bruijn graphs, and instead employs a different graph construction approach called ‘string graph’.

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

MUMmer4: A fast and versatile genome alignment system

Jit — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 04:59:17 -0600

MUMmer4, a substantially improved version of MUMmer that addresses genome size constraints by changing the 32-bit suffix tree data structure at the core of MUMmer to a 48-bit suffix array, and that offers improved speed through parallel processing of input query sequences. With a theoretical limit on the input size of 141Tbp, MUMmer4 can now work with input sequences of any biologically realistic length. We show that as a result of these enhancements, the nucmer program in MUMmer4 is easily able to handle alignments of large genomes;

Address of the bookmark: https://mummer4.github.io/

MECAT: fast mapping, error correction, and de novo assembly for single-molecule sequencing reads

Rahul Nayak — Fri, 11 May 2018 05:07:45 -0500

MECAT is an ultra-fast Mapping, Error Correction and de novo Assembly Tools for single molecula sequencing (SMRT) reads. MECAT employs novel alignment and error correction algorithms that are much more efficient than the state of art of aligners and error correction tools. MECAT can be used for effectively de novo assemblying large genomes. For example, on a 32-thread computer with 2.0 GHz CPU , MECAT takes 9.5 days to assemble a human genome based on 54x SMRT data, which is 40 times faster than the current PBcR-Mhap pipeline. MECAT performance were compared with PBcR-Mhap pipeline, FALCON and Canu(v1.3) in five real datasets. The quality of assembled contigs produced by MECAT is the same or better than that of the PBcR-Mhap pipeline and FALCON.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.4432

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/xiaochuanle/MECAT

PRICE (Paired-Read Iterative Contig Extension), a de novo genome assembler implemented in C++.

Surabhi Chaudhary — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 03:08:26 -0500

We are pleased to release PRICE (Paired-Read Iterative Contig Extension), a de novo genome assembler implemented in C++. Its name describes the strategy that it implements for genome assembly: PRICE uses paired-read information to iteratively increase the size of existing contigs. Initially, those contigs can be individual reads from a subset of the paired-read dataset, non-paired reads from sequencing technologies that provide non-paired data, or contigs that were output from a prior run of PRICE or any other assembler. http://derisilab.ucsf.edu/software/price/

Address of the bookmark: http://derisilab.ucsf.edu/software/price/

LR_Gapcloser: a tiling path-based gap closer that uses long reads to complete genome assembly

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 14 May 2020 15:09:52 -0500

LR_Gapcloser is a gap closing tool using long reads from studied species. The long reads could be downloaed from public read archive database (for instance, NCBI SRA database ) or be your own data. Then they are fragmented and aligned to scaffolds using BWA mem algorithm in BWA package. In the package, we provided a compiled bwa, so the user needn't to install bwa. LR_Gapcloser uses the alignments to find the bridging that cross the gap, and then fills the long read original sequence into the genomic gaps.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/CAFS-bioinformatics/LR_Gapcloser

swgis v2.0 : a seqword genomic island sniffer

Abhimanyu Singh — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 12:35:52 -0500

swgis v2.0 is the modified version of the seqword genomic island sniffer. this version is specifically optimized for predicting genomic islands in eukaryotic genomes. swgis v2.0 was tested on several eukaryotic species of different lineages. all identified genomic islands were deposited in the eugi database.

download swgis v2.0

Address of the bookmark: http://eugi.bi.up.ac.za/eugi_download_swgis.php

GenomeView: genome browser and annotation editor

Rahul Nayak — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 04:09:06 -0600

GenomeView is a genome browser and annotation editor that displays reference sequence, annotation, multiple alignments, short read alignments and graphs. Most major data formats are supported. Local and internet files can be loaded.
This project has moved to GitHub: https://github.com/GenomeView/genomeview

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

List of tools frequently used while genome assembly

BioStar — Tue, 22 Jan 2019 09:39:02 -0600

List of tools frequently used while genome assembly:

I have used the following assemblers

Spades (v. 3.10.1)
CANU (v. 1.6)
Unicycler (v. v0.4.1)
Miniasm (v. 0.2-r137-dirty)

I have used the following mappers

minimap2 (v. 2.0rc1-r232)
minimap (v. 0.2-r124-dirty)
bwa (v. 0.7.12-r1039)

I have used the following polishing tools

Racon (v. not available)
Pilon (v. 1.18)
Nanopolish (v. 0.8.3)

I have used the following tools to assess genome assembly characteristics

ANI.pl (https://github.com/chjp/ANI)
CheckM (v. 1.0.7)
Prokka (v. 1.12)
QUAST (v. 2.3)
mummer (v. not available)

If you have any ideas or superior tools we have missed please let us know in the comments.

The Rogers Lab

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 08:07:44 -0500

The Rogers lab studies evolution of genome structure. We explore the ways that complex mutations like duplications, deletions, rearrangements, and retrogenes can create new genetic material. We study how these new mutations are important for adaptation. We are currently working on projects in Drosophila, Mammoths, Elephants, Bivalves, and Frogs absolutely no amphibians. This multi-organism approach can help us understand when and why complex mutations are important for organism fitness.

More at http://evolscientist.com/

simuG: a general-purpose genome simulator

BioStar — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 04:33:18 -0600

Simulated genomes with pre-defined and random genomic variants can be very useful for benchmarking genomic and bioinformatics analyses. Here we introduce simuG, a lightweight tool for simulating the full-spectrum of genomic variants (single nucleotide polymorphisms, Insertions/Deletions, copy number variants, inversions and translocations) for any organisms (including human). The simplicity and versatility of simuG make it a unique general-purpose genome simulator for a wide-range of simulation-based applications.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/yjx1217/simuG