BOL: Related items

Cleaner BLAST Databases for More Accurate Results

LEGE — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 01:23:08 -0500

Do you use BLAST to identify a sequence or the evolutionary scope of a gene? That can be challenging if contaminated and misclassified sequences are in the BLAST databases and show up in your search results. To address this problem, we now use the NCBI quality assurance tools listed below to systematically remove these misleading sequences from the default nucleotide (nt) and protein (nr) BLAST databases.

Foreign Contamination Screen tool for genome cross-species screening (FCS-GX) detects contamination from foreign organisms in genomes and other sequences using the genome cross-species aligner (GX)
Average Nucleotide Identity (ANI) evaluates the taxonomic classification of prokaryotic genome assemblies. Sequences from genomes marked up as ‘unverified source organism’ are considered suspect and removed.

Ref https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2024/04/22/cleaner-blast-databases-more-accurate-results/

Tadpole: an assembler, error-corrector, and read-extender

BioStar — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 23:35:40 -0600

Tadpole is a kmer-based assembler, with additional capabilities of error-correcting and extending reads. It does not do any complicated graph analysis or scaffolding, and therefore, is not particularly good for diploid organisms. Tadpole is very conservative and optimized for correctness rather than length; which is to say, it stops at every branch, and condenses every repeat. Also, it does not currently do scaffolding.

To error-correct reads:
tadpole.sh in=reads.fq out=corrected.fq mode=correct

To extend reads by 50bp in each direction:
tadpole.sh in=reads.fq out=extended.fq mode=extend el=50 er=50

To error-correct and extend at the same time, using a kmer length of 62:
tadpole.sh in=reads.fq out=extended.fq mode=extend el=50 er=50 k=62 ecc=t

More at http://seqanswers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61445

Address of the bookmark: https://jgi.doe.gov/data-and-tools/bbtools/bb-tools-user-guide/tadpole-guide/

Omega2: metagenome assembly pipeline

Jit — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 05:56:07 -0500

Omega found overlaps between reads using a prefix/suffix hash table. The overlap graph of reads was simplified by removing transitive edges and trimming short branches. Unitigs were generated based on minimum cost flow analysis of the overlap graph and then merged to contigs and scaffolds using mate-pair information. In comparison with three de Bruijn graph assemblers (SOAPdenovo, IDBA-UD and MetaVelvet), Omega provided comparable overall performance on a HiSeq 100-bp dataset and superior performance on a MiSeq 300-bp dataset. In comparison with Celera on the MiSeq dataset, Omega provided more continuous assemblies overall using a fraction of the computing time of existing overlap-layout-consensus assemblers. This indicates Omega can more efficiently assemble longer Illumina reads, and at deeper coverage, for metagenomic datasets.

Address of the bookmark: http://omega.omicsbio.org/

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

Genome assembly forensics: finding the elusive mis-assembly

Jit — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 18:02:01 -0600

We present the first collection of tools aimed at automated genome assembly validation. This work formalizes several mechanisms for detecting mis-assemblies, and describes their implementation in our automated validation pipeline, called amosvalidate. We demonstrate the application of our pipeline in both bacterial and eukaryotic genome assemblies, and highlight several assembly errors in both draft and finished genomes. The software described is compatible with common assembly formats and is released, open-source, at http://amos.sourceforge.net.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2397507/

http://amos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/AMOS

Address of the bookmark: http://amos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/AMOS

GMASS: a novel measure for genomeassembly structural similarity

Abhimanyu Singh — Sun, 14 Apr 2019 20:35:40 -0500

The GMASS score is a novel measure for representing structural similarity between two assemblies. It will contribute to the understanding of assembly output and developing de novo assemblers.

https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-019-2710-z

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinfo.konkuk.ac.kr/GMASS/htdocs/syncircos.php

JCVI:Python utility libraries on genome assembly, annotation and comparative genomics

Jit — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 06:19:06 -0500

Collection of Python libraries to parse bioinformatics files, or perform computation related to assembly, annotation, and comparative genomics.

https://github.com/tanghaibao/jcvi

More at https://github.com/tanghaibao/jcvi/wiki

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/tanghaibao/jcvi

Genome assembly training tutorial at Galaxy !

Jit — Sun, 27 Dec 2020 05:25:45 -0600

In this tutorial we assemble and annotate the genome of E. coli strain C-1. This strain is routinely used in experimental evolution studies involving bacteriophages. For instance, now classic works by Holly Wichman and Jim Bull (Bull 1997, Bull 1998, Wichman 1999) have been performed using this strain and bacteriophage phiX174.

Address of the bookmark: https://training.galaxyproject.org/training-material/topics/assembly/tutorials/unicycler-assembly/tutorial.html

IVA: accurate de novo assembly of RNA virus genomes

Neel — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 07:51:59 -0500

IVA (Iterative Virus Assembler) designed specifically for read pairs sequenced at highly variable depth from RNA virus samples. We tested IVA on datasets from 140 sequenced samples from human immunodeficiency virus-1 or influenza-virus-infected people and demonstrated that IVA outperforms all other virus de novo assemblers.

Availability and implementation: The software runs under Linux, has the GPLv3 licence and is freely available from http://sanger-pathogens.github.io/iva

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25725497/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/sanger-pathogens/iva

auN: a new metric to measure assembly contiguity

Jit — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 01:18:47 -0500

Given a de novo assembly, we often measure the “average” contig length by N50. N50 is neither the real average nor median. It is the length of the contig such that this and longer contigs cover at least 50% of the assembly. A longer N50 indicates better contiguity. We can similarly define Nx such that contigs no shorter than Nx covers x% of the assembly. The Nx curve plots Nx as a function of x, where x is ranged from 0 to 100.

Address of the bookmark: https://lh3.github.io/2020/04/08/a-new-metric-on-assembly-contiguity