BOL: Related items

Multi-metagenome assembly

Radha Agarkar — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 10:14:18 -0600

This project contains scripts and tutorials on how to assemble individual microbial genomes from metagenomes, as described in:

Genome sequences of rare, uncultured bacteria obtained by differential coverage binning of multiple metagenomes

Mads Albertsen, Philip Hugenholtz, Adam Skarshewski, Gene W. Tyson, Kåre L. Nielsen and Per .H. Nielsen

Nature Biotechnology 2013, doi: 10.1038/nbt.2579

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/MadsAlbertsen/multi-metagenome

QuorUM: An Error Corrector for Illumina Reads

BioStar — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 23:26:55 -0600

We produce trimmed and error-corrected reads that result in assemblies with longer contigs and fewer errors. We compared QuorUM against several published error correctors and found that it is the best performer in most metrics we use. QuorUM is efficiently implemented making use of current multi-core computing architectures and it is suitable for large data sets (1 billion bases checked and corrected per day per core)

Address of the bookmark: http://www.genome.umd.edu/

Trust But Verify: Sequencing Your Cell Lines Might Reveal an Uninvited Guest

LEGE — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:07:57 -0500

High-throughput sequencing has become indispensable in cell biology, enabling detailed insights into chromatin structure, gene expression, and regulatory dynamics. Yet, when faced with unexpectedly low mapping rates to the human genome, researchers often rush to troubleshoot technical parameters—sequencer quality, adapter trimming, or aligner settings.

Before you go down that path, consider this critical biological question:
Are you sequencing human cells—or bacterial contamination?

The Silent Saboteur: Mycoplasma in Cell Cultures

Mycoplasma contamination remains one of the most widespread and underdiagnosed issues in tissue culture work. Studies suggest that 15–35% of cell lines in use may be contaminated, often without visible signs. Unlike other microbial infections, Mycoplasma does not produce cloudiness, odor, or a change in pH. Many researchers won’t detect it unless they specifically test for it.

The consequences, however, are profound. Mycoplasma can significantly alter:

Host gene expression patterns
Cell proliferation rates
Epigenetic profiles and chromatin accessibility
Cytokine signaling and immune responses

In short, it can skew your results, compromise your biological conclusions, and invalidate weeks or months of research.

A Simple Diagnostic Step: Map Against Mycoplasma Genomes

If you encounter poor alignment rates to the human genome, consider mapping your reads to a Mycoplasma reference genome—or better yet, use a combined human + Mycoplasma reference. There have been cases where over half of all reads, initially assumed to be from human cells, were in fact bacterial in origin. This check is fast, easy, and could save your project.

How Contamination Happens—and Persists

Mycoplasma is small (0.1–0.3 μm), lacks a cell wall, and can pass through standard filters undetected. Common sources include:

Contaminated reagents (e.g., FBS)
Infected cell lines obtained from other labs
Poor aseptic technique or shared equipment

Once present, it spreads quickly between cultures and can persist for months, silently affecting results.

Why Treatment Is Difficult

While antibiotics such as Plasmocin or BM-Cyclin are sometimes used, they often offer only partial resolution and may themselves alter cell behavior. In many cases, the best course of action is to discard the contaminated culture and start with a fresh, verified stock.

Practical Recommendations for Researchers

Routinely test for Mycoplasma using PCR, qPCR, or fluorescence-based assays
Incorporate contamination screens into your sequencing QC pipeline
Use combined reference genomes when mapping ambiguous reads
Practice strict aseptic technique and monitor all incoming cell lines
Don’t ignore unexplained data anomalies—they might point to contamination

Closing Thought: Contamination Is a Biological Variable

It’s easy to view poor mapping as a technical issue, but sometimes the problem lies deeper—in the biology itself. Mycoplasma contamination doesn’t just interfere with sequencing; it interferes with science. As a research community, we must treat contamination not as an afterthought, but as a key variable to control.

So next time your reads won’t align, don’t just tune the aligner. Ask if your cells are telling the truth—or if they're hiding something.

Pollux: platform independent error correction of single and mixed genomes

Jit — Fri, 19 May 2017 09:41:27 -0500

Pollux: General-purpose error corrector that corrects errors introduced by Illumina, Ion Torrent, and Roche 454 sequencing technologies and can be applied to single- or mixed-genome data. In addition to correcting substitution errors, we locate and correct insertion, deletion, and homopolymer errors while remaining sensitive to low coverage areas of sequencing projects. Using published data sets, we correct 94% of Illumina MiSeq errors, 88% of Ion Torrent PGM errors, 85% of Roche 454 GS Junior errors. Introduced errors are 20 to 70 times more rare than successfully corrected errors. Furthermore, we show that the quality of assemblies improves when reads are corrected by our software.

https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-014-0435-6

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/emarinier/pollux

LAMSA: fast split read alignment with long approximate matches

Jit — Tue, 15 May 2018 04:44:42 -0500

LAMSA (Long Approximate Matches-based Split Aligner) is a novel split alignment approach with faster speed and good ability of handling SV events. It is well-suited to align long reads (over thousands of base-pairs). LAMSA takes takes the advantage of the rareness of SVs to implement a specifically designed two-step strategy. That is, LAMSA initially splits the read into relatively long fragments and co-linearly align them to solve the small variations or sequencing errors, and mitigate the effect of repeats. The alignments of the fragments are then used for implementing a sparse dynamic programming (SDP)-based split alignment approach to handle the large or non-co-linear variants. We benchmarked LAMSA with simulated and real datasets having various read lengths and sequencing error rates, the results demonstrate that it is substantially faster than the state-of-the-art long read aligners; mean-while, it also has good ability to handle various categories of SVs. LAMSA is open source and free for non-commercial use. LAMSA is mainly designed by Bo Liu & Yan Gao and developed by Yan Gao in Center for Bioinformatics, Harbin Institute of Technology, China.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/hitbc/LAMSA

SALSA: A tool to scaffold long read assemblies with Hi-C

Jit — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 04:01:15 -0500

This code is used to scaffold your assemblies using Hi-C data. This version implements some improvements in the original SALSA algorithm. If you want to use the old version, it can be found in the old_salsa branch. To use the latest version, first run the following commands: cd SALSA make To run the code, you will need Python 2.7, BOOST libraries and Networkx(version lower than 1.2). If you consider using this tool, please cite our publication which describes the methods used for scaffolding. Ghurye, J., Pop, M., Koren, S., Bickhart, D., & Chin, C. S. (2017). Scaffolding of long read assemblies using long range contact information. BMC genomics, 18(1), 527. Link Ghurye, J., Rhie, A., Walenz, B.P., Schmitt, A., Selvaraj, S., Pop, M., Phillippy, A.M. and Koren, S., 2018. Integrating Hi-C links with assembly graphs for chromosome-scale assembly. bioRxiv, p.261149 Link For any queries, please either ask on github issue page or send an email to Jay Ghurye (jayg@cs.umd.edu).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/machinegun/SALSA

GraphMap - A highly sensitive and accurate mapper for long, error-prone reads

Rahul Agarwal — Mon, 06 Jul 2015 08:46:53 -0500

GraphMap is a novel mapper targeted at aligning long, error-prone third-generation sequencing data.
It is designed to handle Oxford Nanopore MinION 1d and 2d reads with very high sensitivity and accuracy, and also presents a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art for PacBio read mappers.

GraphMap was also designed for ease-of-use: the default parameters can handle a wide range of read lengths and error profiles, including: Illumina, PacBio and Oxford Nanopore.
This is an especially important feature for technologies where the error rates and error profiles can vary widely across, or even within, sequencing runs.

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/06/10/020719

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/isovic/graphmap

SPAdes hybrid genome assembly

Jit — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 08:05:40 -0600

When you have both Illumina and Nanopore data, then SPAdes remains a good option for hybrid assembly - SPAdes was used to produce the B fragilis assembly by Mick Watson’s group.

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 

Basic options:
-o          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          file with interlaced forward and reverse paired-end reads
-1            file with forward paired-end reads
-2            file with reverse paired-end reads
-s            file with unpaired reads
--pe<#>-12            file with interlaced reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-1             file with forward reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-2             file with reverse reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-s             file with unpaired reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--pe<#>-    orientation of reads for paired-end library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9;  = fr, rf, ff)
--s<#>                file with unpaired reads for single reads library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-12            file with interlaced reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-1             file with forward reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-2             file with reverse reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-s             file with unpaired reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--mp<#>-    orientation of reads for mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9;  = fr, rf, ff)
--hqmp<#>-12          file with interlaced reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-1           file with forward reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-2           file with reverse reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-s           file with unpaired reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--hqmp<#>-  orientation of reads for high-quality mate-pair library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9;  = fr, rf, ff)
--nxmate<#>-1         file with forward reads for Lucigen NxMate library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--nxmate<#>-2         file with reverse reads for Lucigen NxMate library number <#> (<#> = 1,2,..,9)
--sanger              file with Sanger reads
--pacbio              file with PacBio reads
--nanopore            file with Nanopore reads
--tslr        file with TSLR-contigs
--trusted-contigs             file with trusted contigs
--untrusted-contigs           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      restart run with updated options and from the specified check-point ('ec', 'as', 'k', 'mc')
--disable-gzip-output   forces error correction not to compress the corrected reads
--disable-rr            disables repeat resolution stage of assembling

Advanced options:
--dataset             file with dataset description in YAML format
-t/--threads               number of threads
                                [default: 16]
-m/--memory                RAM limit for SPAdes in Gb (terminates if exceeded)
                                [default: 250]
--tmp-dir              directory for temporary files
                                [default: /tmp]
-k                 comma-separated list of k-mer sizes (must be odd and
                                less than 128) [default: 'auto']
--cov-cutoff             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”

Nanopore adaptor !

Jit — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 00:10:29 -0600

Porechop is a tool for finding and removing adapters from Oxford Nanopore reads. Adapters on the ends of reads are trimmed off, and when a read has an adapter in its middle, it is treated as chimeric and chopped into separate reads. Porechop performs thorough alignments to effectively find adapters, even at low sequence identity.

Porechop also supports demultiplexing of Nanopore reads that were barcoded with the Native Barcoding Kit, PCR Barcoding Kit or Rapid Barcoding Kit.

The known Nanopore adapters that Porechop looks for are defined

https://github.com/rrwick/Porechop/blob/master/porechop/adapters.py

They are:

Ligation kit adapters
Rapid kit adapters
PCR kit adapters
Barcodes
Native barcoding
Rapid barcoding

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/rrwick/Porechop/blob/master/porechop/adapters.py

NanoPack: visualizing and processing long-read sequencing data

Jit — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 18:41:34 -0500

The NanoPack tools are written in Python3 and released under the GNU GPL3.0 License. The source code can be found at https://github.com/wdecoster/nanopack, together with links to separate scripts and their documentation. The scripts are compatible with Linux, Mac OS and the MS Windows 10 subsystem for Linux and are available as a graphical user interface, a web service at http://nanoplot.bioinf.be and command line tools.

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/34/15/2666/4934939

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/wdecoster/nanoQC