Tag: FARAO

I just wanted to share an experience with the FARAO software we recently published a paper about, and its compatibility with the GD and libpng libraries (used for creating PNG files). I have got questions from users about how to get this to work, and to test it out I decided to try to install it on my Mac. It turned out that it is nearly impossible to get this to work. These two packages are extremely picky with versions and dependencies. After trying for about on hour, I gave up and turned to my Linux machine. Surprisingly, I could not get it to work from scratch there either, despite that I have had it running (with some previous version combination) when we programmed and tested FARAO.

I find this extremely annoying myself, and I will try to look into other solutions for PNG or JPEG output from FARAO. In the mean time, I can only recommend to instead use the EPS output option, which produces more nice-looking figures and is considerably easier to set up. I am sorry about this and hope to be able to provide a better solution soon.

Late last year, we introduced FARAO – the Flexible All-Round Annotation Organizer – a software tool that allows visualization of annotated features on contigs. Today, the Applications Note describing the software was published as an advance access paper in Bioinformatics (1). As I have described before, storing and visualizing annotation and coverage information in FARAO has a number of advantages. FARAO is able to:

• Integrate annotation and coverage information for the same sequence set, enabling coverage estimates of annotated features
• Scale across millions of sequences and annotated features
• Filter sequences, such that only entries with annotations satisfying certain given criteria will be outputted
• Handle annotation and coverage data produced by a range of different bioinformatics tools
• Handle custom parsers through a flexible interface, allowing for adaption of the software to virtually any bioinformatic tool not supported out of the box
• Produce high-quality EPS output
• Integrate with MySQL databases

I have previously used FARAO to produce annotation figures in our paper on a polluted Indian lake (2), as well as in a paper on sewage treatment plants (which is in press and should be coming out any day now). We hope that the tool will find many more uses in other projects in the future!

References

1. Hammarén R, Pal C, Bengtsson-Palme J: FARAO: The Flexible All-Round Annotation Organizer. Bioinformatics, advance access (2016). doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btw499 [Paper link]
2. Bengtsson-Palme J, Boulund F, Fick J, Kristiansson E, Larsson DGJ: Shotgun metagenomics reveals a wide array of antibiotic resistance genes and mobile elements in a polluted lake in India. Frontiers in Microbiology, 5, 648 (2014). doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2014.00648 [Paper link]

A problem with annotating contigs from genomic and metagenomic projects is that there are few tools that allow the visualization of the annotated features, particularly if those features come from different sources. To alleviate this problem, I have (with assistance from Rickard Hammarén and Chandan Pal) over the last years developed a new annotation and read coverage visualization package – FARAO – which we today introduce to the public. FARAO has been used to produce the basis for the the contig annotation figures in my paper on the polluted Indian lake. Storing and visualizing annotation and coverage information in FARAO has a number of advantages. FARAO is able to:

• Integrate annotation and coverage information for the same sequence set, enabling coverage estimates of annotated features
• Scale across millions of sequences and annotated features
• Filter sequences, such that only entries with annotations satisfying certain given criteria will be outputted
• Handle annotation and coverage data produced by a range of different bioinformatics tools
• Handle custom parsers through a flexible interface, allowing for adaption of the software to virtually any bioinformatic tool
• Produce high-quality EPS output
• Integrate with MySQL databases

FARAO is today moved from a private pre-release state to a public beta state. It is still possible that this version contains bug that we have not discovered in our testing. Please send me an e-mail and make us aware of the potential shortcomings of our software if you find any unexpected behavior in this version of FARAO.