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Step-by-Step Guide to Running Genome Assembly

Abhi — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 11:35:55 -0600

Genome assembly is a critical process in bioinformatics, enabling the reconstruction of an organism's genome from short DNA sequence reads. Whether you’re working on a new microbial genome or a complex eukaryotic organism, this guide will walk you through the steps of genome assembly using state-of-the-art tools and best practices.

What is Genome Assembly?

Genome assembly involves piecing together short DNA sequence reads generated by sequencing platforms (e.g., Illumina, PacBio, Oxford Nanopore) into longer, contiguous sequences called contigs. This can be performed as:

De Novo Assembly: Without a reference genome.
Reference-Guided Assembly: Using a reference genome to guide the assembly process.

Step 1: Preparing Your Data

Before starting the assembly, ensure that your raw sequencing data is high quality.

Input Data
- Short Reads: Illumina sequencing generates short, accurate reads ideal for scaffolding.
- Long Reads: PacBio and Nanopore sequencing provide long reads for resolving repetitive regions.
Quality Control (QC)
Use tools like FastQC or MultiQC to assess the quality of your reads:

fastqc reads.fastq multiqc .

Look for issues like low-quality bases, adapter contamination, or overrepresented sequences.
Read Trimming and Filtering
Trim low-quality bases and adapters using Trimmomatic or Cutadapt:

trimmomatic PE reads_R1.fastq reads_R2.fastq trimmed_R1.fastq trimmed_R2.fastq \ ILLUMINACLIP:adapters.fa:2:30:10 LEADING:3 TRAILING:3 SLIDINGWINDOW:4:20 MINLEN:36

Step 2: Choosing an Assembly Strategy

Select an assembly strategy based on your data type:

Short-Read Assemblers:
- SPAdes: Popular for microbial genomes.
- Velvet: Fast for smaller genomes.
Long-Read Assemblers:
- Canu: Ideal for long-read datasets.
- Flye: Versatile for small and large genomes.
Hybrid Assemblers:
- MaSuRCA: Combines short and long reads.
- Unicycler: Optimized for bacterial genomes.

Step 3: Running the Assembly

3.1. SPAdes (Short-Read Assembly)

SPAdes is an excellent choice for small genomes, such as bacteria.

spades.py -1 trimmed_R1.fastq -2 trimmed_R2.fastq -o spades_output

The output includes assembled contigs (contigs.fasta) and scaffolds (scaffolds.fasta).

3.2. Canu (Long-Read Assembly)

Canu is designed for high-error long reads from PacBio or Nanopore.

canu -p genome -d canu_output genomeSize=4.7m -nanopore-raw reads.fastq

The output will be in canu_output/genome.contigs.fasta.

3.3. Hybrid Assembly with Unicycler

Unicycler combines short and long reads for improved assemblies.

unicycler -1 trimmed_R1.fastq -2 trimmed_R2.fastq -l long_reads.fastq -o unicycler_output

Step 4: Assessing Assembly Quality

After assembly, evaluate its quality using the following tools:

QUAST
QUAST generates assembly statistics, such as N50, genome size, and GC content:

quast contigs.fasta -o quast_output
BUSCO
BUSCO checks genome completeness by identifying conserved genes:

busco -i contigs.fasta -o busco_output -l fungi_odb10 -m genome
Assembly Graph Visualization
Visualize assembly graphs with Bandage:

Bandage load assembly_graph.gfa

Step 5: Post-Assembly Steps

Polishing
Improve assembly accuracy using tools like Pilon (for short reads) or Racon (for long reads).

racon long_reads.fasta mapped_reads.sam contigs.fasta > polished_contigs.fasta
Scaffolding
Link contigs into scaffolds using tools like SSPACE or Opera-LG if required.
Annotation
Annotate the assembled genome using Prokka for prokaryotes or Maker for eukaryotes.

prokka --outdir annotation_output --prefix genome contigs.fasta

Step 6: Sharing and Archiving

Submit to Public Repositories
Share your assembly in databases like NCBI GenBank, ENA, or DDBJ.
Metadata Preparation
Include detailed metadata for your submission, such as organism name, sequencing platform, and coverage.

Best Practices

Always perform quality checks at each stage to ensure data integrity.
Use multiple tools to cross-validate results when working with complex genomes.
Document parameters and software versions for reproducibility.

Conclusion

Genome assembly is a powerful process that transforms raw sequencing data into a coherent representation of an organism’s genome. By following this step-by-step guide, you can successfully assemble genomes and uncover valuable biological insights. Whether you’re assembling a microbial genome or tackling the complexities of a eukaryotic genome, these tools and strategies will set you on the path to success.

NGMLR: long-read mapper designed to align PacBio or Oxford Nanopore

Jit — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 07:30:54 -0500

CoNvex Gap-cost alignMents for Long Reads (ngmlr) is a long-read mapper designed to sensitively align PacBilo or Oxford Nanopore to (large) reference genomes. It was designed to quickly and correctly align the reads, including those spanning (complex) structural variations. Ngmlr uses an SV aware k-mer search to find approximate mapping locations for a read and then a banded Smith-Waterman alignment algorithm to compute the final alignment. Ngmlr uses a convex gap cost model that penalizes gap extensions for longer gaps less than for shorter ones to compute precise alignments. The gap model allows ngmlr to account for both the sequencing error and real genomic variations at the same time and makes it especially effective at more precisely identifying the position of breakpoints stemming from structural variations. The k-mer search helps to detect and split reads that cannot be aligned linearly, enabling ngmlr to reliably align reads to a wide range of different structural variations including nested SVs (e.g. inversions flanked by deletions).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/philres/ngmlr

NanoPack: visualizing and processing long-read sequencing data

Jit — Tue, 25 Dec 2018 21:20:50 -0600

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.

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

seqloc 0.6

Gudiya Pal — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 12:51:29 -0600

The Bio.SeqLoc modules in seqloc are designed to represent positions and locations (ranges of positions) on sequences, particularly nucleotide sequences. My original motivation for writing these packages was handing the locations of genes in eukaryotic genomes.

Handle sequence locations for bioinformatics http://www.ingolia-lab.org/seqloc-tutorial.html

Address of the bookmark: http://www.stackage.org/snapshot/nightly-2014-12-28/package/seqloc-0.6

SATSUMA : Highly sensitive whole-genome synteny alignments.

Jit — Fri, 13 May 2016 05:25:26 -0500

Satsuma is a whole-genome synteny alignment program. It takes two genomes, computes alignments, and then keeps only the parts that are orthologous, i.e. following the conserved order and orientation of features, such as protein coding genes, non-coding genes, or neutral sequences. Satsuma does not require any pre-processing, such as repeat masking, since it will automatically detect ambiguous mappings.

Satsuma has parallelization built-in and is designed to run on multi-core architectures. The run-time for aligning two bird-size genomes (~1.2 Gb) is around two days on 24 CPUs.

You can find the manual here.
Download the latest source code from here.
Stable versions can also be downloaded from the Broad Institute's web site.

An incomplete list of questions and answers (yes, these have really been asked by our users! Please feel free to add your own by e-mailing us) is here.

If you use Satsuma in your research, please cite:
Grabherr, M. G., Russell, P., Meyer, M., Mauceli, E., Alföldi, J., Di Palma, F., & Lindblad-Toh, K. (2010). Genome-wide synteny through highly sensitive sequence alignment: Satsuma. Bioinformatics, 26(9), 1145-51.

Tutorial at http://evomics.org/learning/genomics/satsuma/

Address of the bookmark: http://satsuma.sourceforge.net/

Kraken: ultrafast metagenomic sequence classification using exact alignments

Jit — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 11:01:44 -0500

Kraken is an ultrafast and highly accurate program for assigning taxonomic labels to metagenomic DNA sequences. Previous programs designed for this task have been relatively slow and computationally expensive, forcing researchers to use faster abundance estimation programs, which only classify small subsets of metagenomic data. Using exact alignment of k-mers, Kraken achieves classification accuracy comparable to the fastest BLAST program. In its fastest mode, Kraken classifies 100 base pair reads at a rate of over 4.1 million reads per minute, 909 times faster than Megablast and 11 times faster than the abundance estimation program MetaPhlAn. Kraken is available at http://ccb.jhu.edu/software/kraken/.

Krona

https://sourceforge.net/p/krona/home/krona/

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4053813/

Software and Tools to detect structure variation with long reads !!

Archana Malhotra — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 14:31:09 -0500

Uncovering the connection between genetics and heritable diseases requires an approach that looks at all the variant bases and types in a genome. While a PacBio de novo assembly resolves the most novel SV variants. 8-10X PacBio coverage of single genomes or trios reveals triple the SVs detectable by short-read data.

With Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing, you can access structural variations having a broad range of sizes, types, and GC content with the ability to:

Uncover missing heritability linked to structural variation
Unambiguously identify genomic context and variant breakpoints at the sequence level to unravel the genetic etiology of disease
Resolve structural variation across the complete size spectrum with basepair resolution

Following are the SV tools, which can assist you to achieve your goal.

Sniffles: Structural variation caller using third generation sequencing

Sniffles is a structural variation caller using third generation sequencing (PacBio or Oxford Nanopore). It detects all types of SVs using evidence from split-read alignments, high-mismatch regions, and coverage analysis. Please note the current version of Sniffles requires sorted output from BWA-MEM (use -M and -x parameter) or NGM-LR with the optional SAM attributes enabled!

More at https://github.com/fritzsedlazeck/Sniffles

MultiBreak-SV: It identifies structural variants from next-generation paired end data, third-generation long read data, or data from a combination of sequencing platforms.

There are two pieces of software in this release: (1) a pre-processor that takes machineformat (.m5) BLASR files, and (2) MultiBreak-SV. For installation and usage instructions, see doc/MultiBreakSV-Manual.txt.

More at https://github.com/raphael-group/multibreak-sv

Parliament: A Structural Variation Tool. Why ask a single sv-detection approach to find every variant when you can have a parliament of tools deciding?

Publication about the algorithm and “…the first long-read characterization of structural variation in a diploid human personal genome…” (HS1011) - “Assessing structural variation in a personal genome—towards a human reference diploid genome”

More at https://sourceforge.net/projects/parliamentsv/

https://www.dnanexus.com/papers/Parliament_Info_Sheet.pdf

PBHoney: the structural variation discovery tool

PBHoney is an implementation of two variant-identification approaches designed to exploit the high mappability of long reads (i.e., greater than 10,000 bp). PBHoney considers both intra-read discordance and soft-clipped tails of long reads to identify structural variants.

Read The Paper http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/15/180/abstract

More at https://sourceforge.net/projects/pb-jelly/

SMRT-SV: Structural variant and indel caller for PacBio reads

Structural variant (SV) and indel caller for PacBio reads based on methods from Chaisson et al. 2014.

SMRT-SV provides an official software package for tools described in Chaisson et al. 2014 and adds several key features including the following.

Unified variant calling user interface with built-in cluster compute support
Small indel calling (2-49 bp)
Improved inversion calling (screenInversions)
Quality metric for SV calls based on number of local assemblies supporting each call
Higher sensitivity for SV calls using tiled local assemblies across the entire genome instead of "signature" regions
Genotyping of SVs with Illumina paired-end reads from WGS samples

More at https://github.com/EichlerLab/pacbio_variant_caller

FOGSAA: Fast Optimal Global Sequence Alignment Algorithm

Jit — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 14:41:08 -0600

Sequence alignment algorithms are widely used to infer similarirty and the point of differences between pair of sequences. FOGSAA is a fast Global alignment algorithm. It is basically a branch and bound approach which starts branch expansion in a greedy way taking the symbols from the given pair of sequences (protein or nucleotide) and results in an optimal alignment faster than conventional dymanic programming techniques. It is also better than the heuristic methods with respect to alignment quality.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.isical.ac.in/~bioinfo_miu/FOGSAA.htm

medaka: Sequence correction provided by ONT Research

BioStar — Mon, 18 May 2020 16:28:00 -0500

medaka is a tool to create a consensus sequence from nanopore sequencing data. This task is performed using neural networks applied from a pileup of individual sequencing reads against a draft assembly. It outperforms graph-based methods operating on basecalled data, and can be competitive with state-of-the-art signal-based methods, whilst being much faster.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/nanoporetech/medaka

Tools for Sequence translation !

Abhi — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 03:37:58 -0600

BOrf - https://github.com/betsig/borf

CodAn - https://github.com/pedronachtigall/CodAn

EMBOSS-Sixpack - https://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/st/emboss_sixpack/

esl-translate - http://hmmer.org/, https://github.com/EddyRivasLab/easel

GeneMarkS-T - http://exon.gatech.edu/GeneMark/license_download.cgi

ORFfinder - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/orffinder/ (web server)

PLASS - https://github.com/soedinglab/plass

Prodigal - https://github.com/hyattpd/Prodigal

TransDecoder - https://github.com/TransDecoder/TransDecoder