More recently, we've been enthused about using k-mer based similarity measures and computing and searching k-mer-based sketch search databases for all the things.

But I haven't spent too much talking about using k-mers for taxonomy, although that has become an ahem area of interest recently, if you read into our papers a bit.

In this blog post I'm going to fix this by doing a little bit of a literature review and waxing enthusiastic about other people's work. Then in a future blog post I'll talk about how we're building off of this work in fun! and interesting? ways!

Address of the bookmark: http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2017-something-about-kmers.html

There are several pre-computed trees available for display, including the main Tree Of Life, described in Ciccarelli, et al., 2006. In addition to the precomputed trees, users can upload and display personal trees and data, using the 'Data upload' page or through a personal user account.

Address of the bookmark: http://itol.embl.de/

Other tools

https://github.com/shenwei356/taxonkit

• ETE, version: 3.1.1
• BioPython, version: 1.73
• taxadb, version: 0.10.1
• TaxonKit, version: 0.5.0

Address of the bookmark: https://pypi.org/project/ete3/3.1.1/

Address of the bookmark: http://christophergandrud.github.io/d3Network/

General information.

Field terminator is "\t|\t"

Row terminator is "\t|\n"

nodes.dmp file consists of taxonomy nodes. The description for each node includes the following

fields:

tax_id -- node id in GenBank taxonomy database

  parent tax_id -- parent node id in GenBank taxonomy database

  rank -- rank of this node (superkingdom, kingdom, ...) 

  embl code -- locus-name prefix; not unique

  division id -- see division.dmp file

  inherited div flag  (1 or 0) -- 1 if node inherits division from parent

  genetic code id -- see gencode.dmp file

  inherited GC  flag  (1 or 0) -- 1 if node inherits genetic code from parent

  mitochondrial genetic code id -- see gencode.dmp file

  inherited MGC flag  (1 or 0) -- 1 if node inherits mitochondrial gencode from parent

  GenBank hidden flag (1 or 0)            -- 1 if name is suppressed in GenBank entry lineage

  hidden subtree root flag (1 or 0)       -- 1 if this subtree has no sequence data yet

  comments -- free-text comments and citations

Taxonomy names file (names.dmp):

tax_id -- the id of node associated with this name

name_txt -- name itself

unique name -- the unique variant of this name if name not unique

name class -- (synonym, common name, ...)

Divisions file (division.dmp):

division id -- taxonomy database division id

division cde -- GenBank division code (three characters)

division name -- e.g. BCT, PLN, VRT, MAM, PRI...

comments

Genetic codes file (gencode.dmp):

genetic code id -- GenBank genetic code id

abbreviation -- genetic code name abbreviation

name -- genetic code name

cde -- translation table for this genetic code

starts -- start codons for this genetic code

Deleted nodes file (delnodes.dmp):

tax_id -- deleted node id

Merged nodes file (merged.dmp):

old_tax_id                              -- id of nodes which has been merged

new_tax_id                              -- id of nodes which is result of merging

Citations file (citations.dmp):

cit_id -- the unique id of citation

cit_key -- citation key

pubmed_id -- unique id in PubMed database (0 if not in PubMed)

medline_id -- unique id in MedLine database (0 if not in MedLine)

url -- URL associated with citation

text -- any text (usually article name and authors).

-- The following characters are escaped in this text by a backslash:

-- newline (appear as "\n"),

-- tab character ("\t"),

-- double quotes ('\"'),

-- backslash character ("\\").

taxid_list -- list of node ids separated by a single space