scholarly journals Utilizing the VirIdAl Pipeline to Search for Viruses in the Metagenomic Data of Bat Samples

Viruses ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 2006
Author(s):  
Anna Y Budkina ◽  
Elena V Korneenko ◽  
Ivan A Kotov ◽  
Daniil A Kiselev ◽  
Ilya V Artyushin ◽  
...  

According to various estimates, only a small percentage of existing viruses have been discovered, naturally much less being represented in the genomic databases. High-throughput sequencing technologies develop rapidly, empowering large-scale screening of various biological samples for the presence of pathogen-associated nucleotide sequences, but many organisms are yet to be attributed specific loci for identification. This problem particularly impedes viral screening, due to vast heterogeneity in viral genomes. In this paper, we present a new bioinformatic pipeline, VirIdAl, for detecting and identifying viral pathogens in sequencing data. We also demonstrate the utility of the new software by applying it to viral screening of the feces of bats collected in the Moscow region, which revealed a significant variety of viruses associated with bats, insects, plants, and protozoa. The presence of alpha and beta coronavirus reads, including the MERS-like bat virus, deserves a special mention, as it once again indicates that bats are indeed reservoirs for many viral pathogens. In addition, it was shown that alignment-based methods were unable to identify the taxon for a large proportion of reads, and we additionally applied other approaches, showing that they can further reveal the presence of viral agents in sequencing data. However, the incompleteness of viral databases remains a significant problem in the studies of viral diversity, and therefore necessitates the use of combined approaches, including those based on machine learning methods.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark J.P. Chaisson ◽  
Ashley D. Sanders ◽  
Xuefang Zhao ◽  
Ankit Malhotra ◽  
David Porubsky ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTThe incomplete identification of structural variants (SVs) from whole-genome sequencing data limits studies of human genetic diversity and disease association. Here, we apply a suite of long-read, short-read, and strand-specific sequencing technologies, optical mapping, and variant discovery algorithms to comprehensively analyze three human parent–child trios to define the full spectrum of human genetic variation in a haplotype-resolved manner. We identify 818,054 indel variants (<50 bp) and 27,622 SVs (≥50 bp) per human genome. We also discover 156 inversions per genome—most of which previously escaped detection. Fifty-eight of the inversions we discovered intersect with the critical regions of recurrent microdeletion and microduplication syndromes. Taken together, our SV callsets represent a sevenfold increase in SV detection compared to most standard high-throughput sequencing studies, including those from the 1000 Genomes Project. The method and the dataset serve as a gold standard for the scientific community and we make specific recommendations for maximizing structural variation sensitivity for future large-scale genome sequencing studies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (W1) ◽  
pp. W200-W207
Author(s):  
Simone Puccio ◽  
Giorgio Grillo ◽  
Arianna Consiglio ◽  
Maria Felicia Soluri ◽  
Daniele Sblattero ◽  
...  

Abstract High-Throughput Sequencing technologies are transforming many research fields, including the analysis of phage display libraries. The phage display technology coupled with deep sequencing was introduced more than a decade ago and holds the potential to circumvent the traditional laborious picking and testing of individual phage rescued clones. However, from a bioinformatics point of view, the analysis of this kind of data was always performed by adapting tools designed for other purposes, thus not considering the noise background typical of the ‘interactome sequencing’ approach and the heterogeneity of the data. InteractomeSeq is a web server allowing data analysis of protein domains (‘domainome’) or epitopes (‘epitome’) from either Eukaryotic or Prokaryotic genomic phage libraries generated and selected by following an Interactome sequencing approach. InteractomeSeq allows users to upload raw sequencing data and to obtain an accurate characterization of domainome/epitome profiles after setting the parameters required to tune the analysis. The release of this tool is relevant for the scientific and clinical community, because InteractomeSeq will fill an existing gap in the field of large-scale biomarkers profiling, reverse vaccinology, and structural/functional studies, thus contributing essential information for gene annotation or antigen identification. InteractomeSeq is freely available at https://InteractomeSeq.ba.itb.cnr.it/


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (12) ◽  
pp. 3632-3636 ◽  
Author(s):  
Weibo Zheng ◽  
Jing Chen ◽  
Thomas G Doak ◽  
Weibo Song ◽  
Ying Yan

Abstract Motivation Programmed DNA elimination (PDE) plays a crucial role in the transitions between germline and somatic genomes in diverse organisms ranging from unicellular ciliates to multicellular nematodes. However, software specific for the detection of DNA splicing events is scarce. In this paper, we describe Accurate Deletion Finder (ADFinder), an efficient detector of PDEs using high-throughput sequencing data. ADFinder can predict PDEs with relatively low sequencing coverage, detect multiple alternative splicing forms in the same genomic location and calculate the frequency for each splicing event. This software will facilitate research of PDEs and all down-stream analyses. Results By analyzing genome-wide DNA splicing events in two micronuclear genomes of Oxytricha trifallax and Tetrahymena thermophila, we prove that ADFinder is effective in predicting large scale PDEs. Availability and implementation The source codes and manual of ADFinder are available in our GitHub website: https://github.com/weibozheng/ADFinder. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua D Podlevsky ◽  
Corey M Hudson ◽  
Jerilyn A Timlin ◽  
Kelly P Williams

Abstract CRISPR arrays and CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins comprise a widespread adaptive immune system in bacteria and archaea. These systems function as a defense against exogenous parasitic mobile genetic elements that include bacteriophages, plasmids and foreign nucleic acids. With the continuous spread of antibiotic resistance, knowledge of pathogen susceptibility to bacteriophage therapy is becoming more critical. Additionally, gene-editing applications would benefit from the discovery of new cas genes with favorable properties. While next-generation sequencing has produced staggering quantities of data, transitioning from raw sequencing reads to the identification of CRISPR/Cas systems has remained challenging. This is especially true for metagenomic data, which has the highest potential for identifying novel cas genes. We report a comprehensive computational pipeline, CasCollect, for the targeted assembly and annotation of cas genes and CRISPR arrays—even isolated arrays—from raw sequencing reads. Benchmarking our targeted assembly pipeline demonstrates significantly improved timing by almost two orders of magnitude compared with conventional assembly and annotation, while retaining the ability to detect CRISPR arrays and cas genes. CasCollect is a highly versatile pipeline and can be used for targeted assembly of any specialty gene set, reconfigurable for user provided Hidden Markov Models and/or reference nucleotide sequences.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Young Lu ◽  
Jiaxing Bai ◽  
Yiwen Wang ◽  
Ying Wang ◽  
Fengzhu Sun

AbstractMotivationRapid developments in sequencing technologies have boosted generating high volumes of sequence data. To archive and analyze those data, one primary step is sequence comparison. Alignment-free sequence comparison based on k-mer frequencies offers a computationally efficient solution, yet in practice, the k-mer frequency vectors for large k of practical interest lead to excessive memory and storage consumption.ResultsWe report CRAFT, a general genomic/metagenomic search engine to learn compact representations of sequences and perform fast comparison between DNA sequences. Specifically, given genome or high throughput sequencing (HTS) data as input, CRAFT maps the data into a much smaller embedding space and locates the best matching genome in the archived massive sequence repositories. With 102 – 104-fold reduction of storage space, CRAFT performs fast query for gigabytes of data within seconds or minutes, achieving comparable performance as six state-of-the-art alignment-free measures.AvailabilityCRAFT offers a user-friendly graphical user interface with one-click installation on Windows and Linux operating systems, freely available at https://github.com/jiaxingbai/[email protected]; [email protected] informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (12) ◽  
pp. e0244480
Author(s):  
Xinghuo Ye ◽  
Zhihong Yang ◽  
Yeqin Jiang ◽  
Lan Yu ◽  
Rongkai Guo ◽  
...  

Identification of the target genes of microRNAs (miRNAs), trans-acting small interfering RNAs (ta-siRNAs), and small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) is an important step for understanding their regulatory roles in plants. In recent years, many bioinformatics software packages based on small RNA (sRNA) high-throughput sequencing (HTS) and degradome sequencing data analysis have provided strong technical support for large-scale mining of sRNA-target pairs. However, sRNA-target regulation is achieved using a complex network of interactions since one transcript might be co-regulated by multiple sRNAs and one sRNA may also affect multiple targets. Currently used mining software can realize the mining of multiple unknown targets using known sRNA, but it cannot rule out the possibility of co-regulation of the same target by other unknown sRNAs. Hence, the obtained regulatory network may be incomplete. We have developed a new mining software, sRNATargetDigger, that includes two function modules, “Forward Digger” and “Reverse Digger”, which can identify regulatory sRNA-target pairs bidirectionally. Moreover, it has the ability to identify unknown sRNAs co-regulating the same target, in order to obtain a more authentic and reliable sRNA-target regulatory network. Upon re-examination of the published sRNA-target pairs in Arabidopsis thaliana, sRNATargetDigger found 170 novel co-regulatory sRNA-target pairs. This software can be downloaded from http://www.bioinfolab.cn/sRNATD.html.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marius Welzel ◽  
Anja Lange ◽  
Dominik Heider ◽  
Michael Schwarz ◽  
Bernd Freisleben ◽  
...  

AbstractSequencing of marker genes amplified from environmental samples, known as amplicon sequencing, allows us to resolve some of the hidden diversity and elucidate evolutionary relationships and ecological processes among complex microbial communities. The analysis of large numbers of samples at high sequencing depths generated by high throughput sequencing technologies requires effcient, flexible, and reproducible bioinformatics pipelines. Only a few existing workflows can be run in a user-friendly, scalable, and reproducible manner on different computing devices using an effcient workflow management system. We present Natrix, an open-source bioinformatics workflow for preprocessing raw amplicon sequencing data. The workflow contains all analysis steps from quality assessment, read assembly, dereplication, chimera detection, split-sample merging, sequence representative assignment (OTUs or ASVs) to the taxonomic assignment of sequence representatives. The workflow is written using Snakemake, a workflow management engine for developing data analysis workflows. In addition, Conda is used for version control. Thus, Snakemake ensures reproducibility and Conda offers version control of the utilized programs. The encapsulation of rules and their dependencies support hassle-free sharing of rules between workflows and easy adaptation and extension of existing workflows. Natrix is freely available on GitHub (https://github.com/MW55/Natrix).


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evangelos A. Dimopoulos ◽  
Alberto Carmagnini ◽  
Irina M. Velsko ◽  
Christina Warinner ◽  
Greger Larson ◽  
...  

Identification of specific species in metagenomic samples is critical for several key applications, yet many tools available require large computational power and are often prone to false positive identifications. Here we describe High-AccuracY and Scalable Taxonomic Assignment of MetagenomiC data (HAYSTAC), which can estimate the probability that a specific taxon is present in a metagenome. HAYSTAC provides a user-friendly tool to construct databases, based on publicly available genomes, that are used for competitive reads mapping. It then uses a novel Bayesian framework to infer the abundance and statistical support for each species identification, and provide per-read species classification. Unlike other methods, HAYSTAC is specifically designed to efficiently handle both ancient and modern DNA data, as well as incomplete reference databases, making it possible to run highly accurate hypothesis-driven analyses (i.e., assessing the presence of a specific species) on variably sized reference databases while dramatically improving processing speeds. We tested the performance and accuracy of HAYSTAC using simulated Illumina libraries, both with and without ancient DNA damage, and compared the results to other currently available methods (i.e., Kraken2/Braken, MALT/HOPS, and Sigma). HAYSTAC identified fewer false positives than both Kraken2/Braken and MALT in all simulations, and fewer than Sigma in simulations of ancient data. It uses less memory than Kraken2/Braken as well as MALT both during database construction and sample analysis. Lastly, we used HAYSTAC to search for specific pathogens in two published ancient metagenomic datasets, demonstrating how it can be applied to empirical datasets. HAYSTAC is available from https://github.com/antonisdim/HAYSTAC


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Pace ◽  
K. Youens-Clark ◽  
C. Freeman ◽  
B. Hurwitz ◽  
K. Van Doorslaer

ABSTRACTHigh-throughput sequencing technologies provide unprecedented power to identify novel viruses from a wide variety of (environmental) samples. The field of ‘viral metagenomics’ has dramatically expanded our understanding of viral diversity. Viral metagenomic approaches imply that many novel viruses will not be described by researchers who are experts on the genomic organization of that virus. There is a need to develop analytical approaches to reconstruct, annotate, and classify viral genomes. We have developed the papillomavirus annotation tool (PuMA) to provide researchers with a convenient and reproducible method to annotate novel papillomaviruses. PuMA provides an accessible method for automated papillomavirus genome annotation. PuMA currently has a 98% accuracy when benchmarked against the 481 reference genomes in the papillomavirus episteme (PaVE). Finally, PuMA was used to annotate 168 newly isolated papillomaviruses, and successfully annotated 1424 viral features. To demonstrate its general applicability, we developed a version of PuMA that can annotate polyomaviruses.PuMA is available on GitHub (https://github.com/KVD-lab/puma) and through the iMicrobe online environment (https://www.imicrobe.us/#/apps/puma)


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Odrzywolek ◽  
Zuzanna Karwowska ◽  
Jan Majta ◽  
Aleksander Byrski ◽  
Kaja Milanowska-Zabel ◽  
...  

Understanding the function of microbial proteins is essential to reveal the clinical potential of the microbiome. The application of high-throughput sequencing technologies allows for fast and increasingly cheaper acquisition of data from microbial communities. However, many of the inferred protein sequences are novel and not catalogued, hence the possibility of predicting their function through conventional homology-based approaches is limited. Here, we leverage a deep-learning-based representation of proteins to assess its utility in alignment-free analysis of microbial proteins. We trained a language model on the Unified Human Gastrointestinal Protein catalogue and validated the resulting protein representation on the bacterial part of the SwissProt database. Finally, we present a use case on proteins involved in SCFA metabolism. Results indicate that our model (ArdiMiPE) manages to accurately represent features related to protein structure and function, allowing for alignment-free protein analyses. Technologies such as ArdiMiPE that contextualize metagenomic data are a promising direction to deeply understand the microbiome.


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