Tag: Genome assembly

Mitochondrial DNA Part B today published a mitochondrial genome announcement paper (1) in which I was involved in doing the assemblies and annotating them. The paper describes the mitogenome of Calanus glacialis, a marine planktonic copepod, which is a keystone species in the Arctic Ocean. The mitogenome is 20,674 bp long, and includes 13 protein-coding genes, 2 rRNA genes and 22 tRNA genes. While this is of course note a huge paper, we believe that this new resource will be of interest in understanding the structure and dynamics of C. glacialis populations. The main work in this paper has been carried out by Marvin Choquet at Nord University in Bodø, Norway. So hats off to him for great work, thanks Marvin! The paper can be read here.

Reference

1. Choquet M, Alves Monteiro HJ, Bengtsson-Palme J, Hoarau G: The complete mitochondrial genome of the copepod Calanus glacialis. Mitochondrial DNA Part B, 2, 2, 506–507 (2017). doi: 10.1080/23802359.2017.1361357 [Paper link]

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.

There is currently an interesting competition going on organised by UCSC called the Assemblathon. The idea is that participating research groups will try to assemble simulated short-reads to a simulated genome, with the winner being the group doing it “best” (by some criteria set up by the evaluation team at the UC Davis Genome Center). The complete set of rules can be found here. The whole thing will culminate in a Genome Assembly Workshop at UC Santa Cruz in mid-March.

I think the competition is an interesting initiative, hopefully inspiring new, more efficient, sequence assembly ideas. Those are desperately needed in these times of ever-incresing DNA sequence generation. In addition, there are numerous already existing genome assembly programs, but (as noted on the Assemblathon site) it is not obvious which one is the best in a given situation. Hopefully the competition can shed some light on that too. The deadline for participation is the sixth of February, and even though I am not myself competent enough to participate, I hope the ones who do are successful in their work.