Tag: Bioinformatics

Looking for a job?

The Core Facilites at Sahlgrenska are looking for a skilled bioinformatician that can support research projects employing the Core Facilites’ services. The employee will e.g. deal with setting up analysis pipelines for next generation sequencing data. They (of course) want an experienced bioinformatician, who also knows programming (Java, C and/or C++, and scripting languages such as Perl or Python). It is also preferable if the applicant knows how to set up secure systems and manage work with the Unix/Linux terminal. More on the position can be found at GU’s web site. The application time closes on the 17th of September.

Published paper: Guidelines for DNA quality checking

I have co-authored a paper together with, among others, Henrik Nilsson that was published today in MycoKeys. The paper deals with checking quality of DNA sequences prior to using them for research purposes. In our opinion, a lot of the software available for sequence quality management is rather complex and resource intensive. Not everyone have the skills to master such software, and in addition computational resources might also be scarce. Luckily, there’s a lot that can be done in quality control of DNA sequences just using manual means and a web browser. This paper puts these means together into one comprehensible and easy-to-digest document. Our targeted audience is primaily biologists who do not have a strong background in computer science, and still have a dataset requiring DNA sequence quality control.

We have chosen to focus on the fungal ITS barcoding region, but the guidelines should be pretty general and applicable to most groups of organisms. In very short our five guidelines spells:

  1. Establish that the sequences come from the intended gene or marker
    Can be done using a multiple alignment of the sequences and verifying that they all feature some suitable, conserved sub-region (the 5.8S gene in the ITS case)
  2. Establish that all sequences are given in the correct (5’ to 3’) orientation
    Examine the alignment for any sequences that do not align at all to the others; re-orient these; re-run the alignment step; and examine them again
  3. Establish that there are no (at least bad cases of) chimeras in the dataset
    Run the sequences through BLAST in one of the large sequence databases, e.g. at NCBI (or in the ITS case, use the UNITE database), to verify that the best match comprises more or less the full length of the query sequences
  4. Establish that there are no other major technical errors in the sequences
    Examine the BLAST results carefully, particularly the graphical overview and the pairwise alignment, for anomalies (there are some nice figures in the paper on how it should and should not look like)
  5. Establish that any taxonomic annotations given to the sequences make sense
    Examine the BLAST hit list to see that the species names produced make sense

A much more thorough description of these guidelines can be found in the paper itself, which is available under open access from MycoKeys. There’s simply no reason not to go there and at least take a look at it. Happy quality control!

Reference
Nilsson RH, Tedersoo L, Abarenkov K, Ryberg M, Kristiansson E, Hartmann M, Schoch CL, Nylander JAA, Bergsten J, Porter TM, Jumpponen A, Vaishampayan P, Ovaskainen O, Hallenberg N, Bengtsson-Palme J, Eriksson KM, Larsson K-H, Larsson E, Kõljalg U: Five simple guidelines for establishing basic authenticity and reliability of newly generated fungal ITS sequences. MycoKeys. Issue 4 (2012), 37–63. doi: 10.3897/mycokeys.4.3606 [Paper link]

Megraft paper in print

I just learned from Research in Microbiology that the paper on our software Megraft has now been assigned a volume and an issue. The proper way of referencing Megraft should consequently now be:

Bengtsson J, Hartmann M, Unterseher M, Vaishampayan P, Abarenkov K, Durso L, Bik EM, Garey JR, Eriksson KM, Nilsson RH: Megraft: A software package to graft ribosomal small subunit (16S/18S) fragments onto full-length sequences for accurate species richness and sequencing depth analysis in pyrosequencing-length metagenomes. Research in Microbiology. Volume 163, Issues 6–7 (2012), 407–412, doi: 10.1016/j.resmic.2012.07.001[Paper link]

Megraft is currently at version 1.0.1, but I have a slightly updated version in the pipeline which will be made available later this fall.

ISME14 begins today

I am on my way to Copenhagen for the ISME14 conference that begins today. I’m myself quite excited about this event, and will present three posters (two as first author), and give a short talk on antibiotic resistance gene identification and metagenomics. My talk will be in the Bioinformatics in Microbial Ecology session on Thursday afternoon (at 13.30).

If you’d like to talk about Metaxa and Megraft, I will present an SSU-oriented poster in the Monday afternoon poster section (board number 267A). My antibiotic resistance gene poster will be presented on Thursday afternoon (board number 002A), and I really encourage everyone interested in metagenomics (especially metagenomic assembly) to come talk to me then! Finally, I am also partially responsible for a poster on periphyton metagenomics with Martin Eriksson as its main author. This poster is also presented on Monday, in the Microbial Dispersion and Biogeography session (board number 021A).

I hope to be able to make another post later tonight on what are the “essential” sessions for me on this conference. Hope to see you there soon!

New paper accepted: Megraft

Yesterday, our paper on Megraft – a software tool to graft ribosomal small subunit (16S/18S) fragments onto full-length SSU sequences – became available as an accepted online early article in Research in Microbiology. Megraft is built upon the notion that when examining the depth of a community sequencing effort, researchers often use rarefaction analysis of the ribosomal small subunit (SSU/16S/18S) gene in a metagenome. However, the SSU sequences in metagenomic libraries generally are present as fragmentary, non-overlapping entries, which poses a great problem for this analysis. Megraft aims to remedy this problem by grafting the input SSU fragments from the metagenome (obtained by e.g. Metaxa) onto full-length SSU sequences. The software also uses a variability model which accounts for observed and unobserved variability. This way, Megraft enables accurate assessment of species richness and sequencing depth in metagenomic datasets.

The algorithm, efficiency and accuracy of Megraft is thoroughly described in the paper. It should be noted that this is not a panacea for species richness estimates in metagenomics, but it is a huge step forward over existing approaches. Megraft shares some similarities with EMIRGE (Miller et al., 2011), which is a software package for reconstruction of full-length ribosomal genes from paired-end Illumina sequences. Megraft, however, is set apart in that it has a strong focus on rarefaction, and functions also when the number of sequences is small, which is often the case in 454 and Sanger-based metagenomics studies. Thus, EMIRGE and Megraft seek to solve a roughly similar problem, but for different sequencing technologies and sequencing scales.

Megraft is available for download here, and the paper can be read here.

  1. Bengtsson, J., Hartmann, M., Unterseher, M., Vaishampayan, P., Abarenkov, K., Durso, L., Bik, E.M., Garey, J.R., Eriksson, K.M., Nilsson R.H. (2012). Megraft: A software package to graft
  2. Miller, C. S., Baker, B. J., Thomas, B. C., Singer, S. W., & Banfield, J. F. (2011). EMIRGE: reconstruction of full-length ribosomal genes from microbial community short read sequencing data. Genome Biology, 12(5), R44. doi:10.1186/gb-2011-12-5-r44

One more thing…

I realized that I have been using a newer version of Metaxa than most of you for the last couple of months. This bug fix was written sometime in February or March, and we have kept it internal to make sure it works as it should. Then other things came across and we never got around to actually release it. But with testing passed and upcoming versions of Metaxa in the pipeline, I think it is about time that everyone gets their hands on the latest Metaxa version.

It’s only two small things this time:

  • Slight tweaks to the new HMM scoring system, making Metaxa just a little bit faster
  • Fixed a rarely occurring bug causing the –heuristics options to be ignored in certain circumstances

Download the Metaxa 1.1.1 package here

Metaxa and Illumina data

For the last months I have been (part time) struggling with getting Metaxa to eat Illumina paired-end data. This is a pretty tricky task, mainly due to the fact that Illumina reads are so much shorter than those obtained by Sanger and 454 sequencing. Therefore, I am more than happy to inform the community that today (the day before I go on vacation) I have a working prototype up and running. In fact, calling it a prototype is unfair, it is a quite far gone piece of software by now. Currently, I am running it on test data sets, and I will try to keep it running over the next couple of weeks. Thereafter, I hope to be able to release it sometime this autumn (but don’t expect a September release!), harnessing the power of Illumina sequencing for SSU identification. Stayed tuned, and have a great summer!

Presentation at SocBiN 2012

For those of you who like to listen to (or look at) me, I will be giving a presentation at this year’s SocBiN conference in Stockholm. My presentation has the long and quite informative title: Comprehensive Analysis of Antibiotic Resistance Genes in River Sediment, Well Water and Soil Microbial Communities Using Metagenomic DNA Sequencing. The talk is scheduled in the Using Next generation sequence data session, right after Jeroen Raes and Christopher Quince… It’s a short talk, so I will probably need to keep it simple, but it will be the first time I present results generated in relation with my present position, which I personally feel is very nice. We’re moving forward!

Pfam team aims at cleaning erroneous protein families

The guys at Pfam recently introduced a new database, called AntiFam, which will provide HMM profiles for some groups of sequences that seemingly formed larger protein families, although they were not actually real proteins. For example, rRNA sequences could contain putative ORFs, that seems to be conserved over broad lineages; with the only problem being that they are not translated into proteins in real life, as they are part of an rRNA [1].

With this initiative the Xfam team wants to “reduce the number of spurious proteins that make their way into the protein sequence databases.” I have run into this problem myself at some occasions with suspicious sequences in GenBank, and I highly encourage this development towards consistency and correctness in sequence databases. It is of extreme importance that databases remain reliable if we want bioinformatics to tell us anything about organismal or community functions. The Antifam database is a first step towards such a cleanup of the databases, and as such I would like to applaud Pfam for taking actions in this direction.

To my knowledge, GenBank are doing what they can with e.g. barcoding data (SSU, LSU, ITS sequences), but for bioinformatics and metagenomics (and even genomics) to remain viable, these initiatives needs to come quickly; and automated (but still very sensitive) tools for this needs to get our focus immediately. For example, Metaxa [2] could be used as a tool to clean up SSU sequences of misclassified origin. More such tools are needed, and a lot of work remains to be done in the area of keeping databases trustworthy in the age of large-scale sequencing.

References

  1. Tripp, H. J., Hewson, I., Boyarsky, S., Stuart, J. M., & Zehr, J. P. (2011). Misannotations of rRNA can now generate 90% false positive protein matches in metatranscriptomic studies. Nucleic Acids Research, 39(20), 8792–8802. doi:10.1093/nar/gkr576
  2. Bengtsson, J., Eriksson, K. M., Hartmann, M., Wang, Z., Shenoy, B. D., Grelet, G.-A., Abarenkov, K., et al. (2011). Metaxa: a software tool for automated detection and discrimination among ribosomal small subunit (12S/16S/18S) sequences of archaea, bacteria, eukaryotes, mitochondria, and chloroplasts in metagenomes and environmental sequencing datasets. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, 100(3), 471–475. doi:10.1007/s10482-011-9598-6

GoBiG Introduction Meeting

The newly formed bioinformatics network for PhD students in Gothenburg (GoBiG), will have an introductory meeting next week, on thursday the 26th at Chalmers. See this page for more info.