pET Vectors

pET21a Download PDF
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xXf4t3cpyvmSsk95ZJXkOJ67lyPsrfGQ/view?usp=sharing

pET28a Download PDF
https://drive.google.com/file/d/164M0uOwB-M9IJDE9BJ8j5OcN6XCDT7yt/view?usp=sharing

Sequence Variation of Rare Outer Membrane Protein β-Barrel Domains in Clinical Strains Provides Insights into the Evolution of Treponema pallidum subsp. pallidum, the Syphilis Spirochete

http://mbio.asm.org/content/9/3/e01006-18.short

ABSTRACT

In recent years, considerable progress has been made in topologically and functionally characterizing integral outer membrane proteins (OMPs) of Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum, the syphilis spirochete, and identifying its surface-exposed β-barrel domains. Extracellular loops in OMPs of Gram-negative bacteria are known to be highly variable. We examined the sequence diversity of β-barrel-encoding regions of tprC, tprD, and bamA in 31 specimens from Cali, Colombia; San Francisco, California; and the Czech Republic and compared them to allelic variants in the 41 reference genomes in the NCBI database. To establish a phylogenetic framework, we used T. pallidum 0548 (tp0548) genotyping and tp0558 sequences to assign strains to the Nichols or SS14 clades. We found that (i) β-barrels in clinical strains could be grouped according to allelic variants in T. pallidum subsp. pallidum reference genomes; (ii) for all three OMP loci, clinical strains within the Nichols or SS14 clades often harbored β-barrel variants that differed from the Nichols and SS14 reference strains; and (iii) OMP variable regions often reside in predicted extracellular loops containing B-cell epitopes. On the basis of structural models, nonconservative amino acid substitutions in predicted transmembrane β-strands of T. pallidum repeat C (TprC) and TprD2 could give rise to functional differences in their porin channels. OMP profiles of some clinical strains were mosaics of different reference strains and did not correlate with results from enhanced molecular typing. Our observations suggest that human host selection pressures drive T. pallidum subsp. pallidum OMP diversity and that genetic exchange contributes to the evolutionary biology of T. pallidum subsp. pallidum. They also set the stage for topology-based analysis of antibody responses to OMPs and help frame strategies for syphilis vaccine development.

IMPORTANCE

Despite recent progress characterizing outer membrane proteins (OMPs) of Treponema pallidum, little is known about how their surface-exposed, β-barrel-forming domains vary among strains circulating within high-risk populations. In this study, sequences for the β-barrel-encoding regions of three OMP loci, tprC, tprD, and bamA, in T. pallidum subsp. pallidum isolates from a large number of patient specimens from geographically disparate sites were examined. Structural models predict that sequence variation within β-barrel domains occurs predominantly within predicted extracellular loops. Amino acid substitutions in predicted transmembrane strands that could potentially affect porin channel function were also noted. Our findings suggest that selection pressures exerted within human populations drive T. pallidum subsp. pallidum OMP diversity and that recombination at OMP loci contributes to the evolutionary biology of syphilis spirochetes. These results also set the stage for topology-based analysis of antibody responses that promote clearance of T. pallidum subsp. pallidum and frame strategies for vaccine development based upon conserved OMP extracellular loops.

The major outer sheath protein forms distinct conformers and multimeric complexes in the outer membrane and periplasm of Treponema denticola

Recent Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-13550-6

The major outer sheath protein (MOSP) is a prominent constituent of the cell envelope of Treponema denticola (TDE) and one of its principal virulence determinants. Bioinformatics predicts that MOSP consists of N- and C-terminal domains, MOSPN and MOSPC. Biophysical analysis of constructs refolded in vitro demonstrated that MOSPC, previously shown to possess porin activity, forms amphiphilic trimers, while MOSPN forms an extended hydrophilic monomer. In TDE and E. coliexpressing MOSP with a PelB signal sequence (PelB-MOSP), MOSPC is OM-embedded and surface-exposed, while MOSPN resides in the periplasm. 

Immunofluorescence assay, surface proteolysis, and novel cell fractionation schemes revealed that MOSP in TDE exists as outer membrane (OM) and periplasmic trimeric conformers; PelB-MOSP, in contrast, formed only OM-MOSP trimers. Although both conformers form hetero-oligomeric complexes in TDE, only OM-MOSP associates with dentilisin. Mass spectrometry (MS) indicated that OM-MOSP interacts with proteins in addition to dentilisin, most notably, oligopeptide-binding proteins (OBPs) and the β-barrel of BamA. MS also identified candidate partners for periplasmic MOSP, including TDE1658, a spirochete-specific SurA/PrsA ortholog. 

Collectively, our data suggest that MOSP destined for the TDE OM follows the canonical BAM pathway, while formation of a stable periplasmic conformer involves an export-related, folding pathway not present in E. coli.

The Treponema pallidum Outer Membrane

Recent Article: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/82_2017_44

The outer membrane (OM) of Treponema pallidum, the uncultivatable agent of venereal syphilis, has long been the subject of misconceptions and controversy. Decades ago, researchers postulated that T. pallidum’s poor surface antigenicity is the basis for its ability to cause persistent infection, but they mistakenly attributed this enigmatic property to the presence of a protective outer coat of serum proteins and mucopolysaccharides. Subsequent studies revealed that the OM is the barrier to antibody binding, that it contains a paucity of integral membrane proteins, and that the preponderance of the spirochete’s immunogenic lipoproteins is periplasmic. 

Since the advent of recombinant DNA technology, the fragility of the OM, its low protein content, and the lack of sequence relatedness between T. pallidum and Gram-negative outer membrane proteins (OMPs) have complicated efforts to characterize molecules residing at the host–pathogen interface. We have overcome these hurdles using the genomic sequence in concert with computational tools to identify proteins predicted to form β-barrels, the hallmark conformation of OMPs in double-membrane organisms and evolutionarily related eukaryotic organelles. We also have employed diverse methodologies to confirm that some candidate OMPs do, in fact, form amphiphilic β-barrels and are surface-exposed in T. pallidum. 

These studies have led to a structural homology model for BamA and established the bipartite topology of the T. pallidum repeat (Tpr) family of proteins. Recent bioinformatics has identified several structural orthologs for well-characterized Gram-negative OMPs, suggesting that the T. pallidum OMP repertoire is more Gram-negative-like than previously supposed. Lipoprotein adhesins and proteases on the spirochete surface also may contribute to disease pathogenesis and protective immunity.

Consensus Phylogenetic trees of Fifteen Prokaryotic Aminoacyl-tRNA Synthetase Polypeptides based on Euclidean Geometry of All-Pairs Distances and Concatenation

An interesting one from my friend. 

Read full here:  http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/06/051623

For comments and quarries please write to  rhishi.sr[at]gmail.com 

Most molecular phylogenetic trees depict the relative closeness or the extent of similarity among a set of taxa based on comparison of sequences of homologous genes or proteins. Since the tree topology for individual monogenic traits varies among the same set of organisms and does not overlap taxonomic hierarchy, hence there is a need to generate multidimensional phylogenetic trees. Phylogenetic trees were constructed for 119 prokaryotes representing 2 phyla under Archaea and 11 phyla under Bacteria after comparing multiple sequence alignments for 15 different aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase polypeptides. 

The topology of Neighbor Joining (NJ) trees for individual tRNA synthetase polypeptides varied substantially. We use Euclidean geometry to estimate all-pairs distances in order to construct phylogenetic trees. Further, we used a novel 'Taxonomic fidelity' algorithm to estimate clade by clade similarity between the phylogenetic tree and the taxonomic tree. We find that, as compared to trees for individual tRNA synthetase polypeptides and rDNA sequences, the topology of our Euclidean tree and that for aligned and concatenated sequences of 15 proteins are closer to the taxonomic trees and offer the best consensus. We have also aligned sequences after concatenation, and find that by changing the order of sequence joining prior to alignment, the tree topologies vary. In contrast, changing the types of polypeptides in the grouping for Euclidean trees does not affect the tree topologies. 

We show that a consensus phylogenetic tree of 15 polypeptides from 14 aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases for 119 prokaryotes using Euclidean geometry exhibits better taxonomic fidelity than trees for individual tRNA synthetase polypeptides as well as 16S rDNA. We have also examined Euclidean N-dimensional trees for 15 tRNA synthetase polypeptides which give the same topology as that constructed after amalgamating 3-dimensional Euclidean trees for groups of 3 polypeptides. Euclidean N-dimensional trees offer a reliable future to multi-genic molecular phylogenetics.

Prediction of peptidoglycan hydrolases- a new class of antibacterial proteins

Recent article from our lab: 

Read more at: http://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-016-2753-8

Availability: http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in/hype/ and http://metabiosys.iiserb.ac.in/hype/.

Background

The efficacy of antibiotics against bacterial infections is decreasing due to the development of resistance in bacteria, and thus, there is a need to search for potential alternatives to antibiotics. In this scenario, peptidoglycan hydrolases can be used as alternate antibacterial agents due to their unique property of cleaving peptidoglycan cell wall present in both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria. Along with a role in maintaining overall peptidoglycan turnover in a cell and in daughter cell separation, peptidoglycan hydrolases also play crucial role in bacterial pathophysiology requiring development of a computational tool for the identification and classification of novel peptidoglycan hydrolases from genomic and metagenomic data.

Results

In this study, the known peptidoglycan hydrolases were divided into multiple classes based on their site of action and were used for the development of a computational tool ‘HyPe’ for identification and classification of novel peptidoglycan hydrolases from genomic and metagenomic data. Various classification models were developed using amino acid and dipeptide composition features by training and optimization of Random Forest and Support Vector Machines. Random Forest multiclass model was selected for the development of HyPe tool as it showed up to 71.12 % sensitivity, 99.98 % specificity, 99.55 % accuracy and 0.80 MCC in four different classes of peptidoglycan hydrolases. The tool was validated on 24 independent genomic datasets and showed up to 100 % sensitivity and 0.94 MCC. The ability of HyPe to identify novel peptidoglycan hydrolases was also demonstrated on 24 metagenomic datasets.

Conclusions

The present tool helps in the identification and classification of novel peptidoglycan hydrolases from complete genomic or metagenomic ORFs. To our knowledge, this is the only tool available for the prediction of peptidoglycan hydrolases from genomic and metagenomic data.

Keywords

Peptidoglycan hydrolase N-acetylglucosaminidase N-acetylmuramidases Lytic transglycosylases Endopeptidase N-acetylmuramoyl-L-alanine Carboxypeptidase Cell wall hydrolases Support Vector Machine Random Forest

Reconstruction of bacterial and viral genomes from multiple metagenomes

Recent article from our lab:

Read full article at http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fmicb.2016.00469/full

Several metagenomic projects have been accomplished or are in progress. However, in most cases, it is not feasible to generate complete genomic assemblies of species from the metagenomic sequencing of a complex environment. Only a few studies have reported the reconstruction of bacterial genomes from complex metagenomes. 

In this work, Binning-Assembly approach has been proposed and demonstrated for the reconstruction of bacterial and viral genomes from 72 human gut metagenomic datasets. A total 1156 bacterial genomes belonging to 219 bacterial families and, 279 viral genomes belonging to 84 viral families could be identified. More than 80% complete draft genome sequences could be reconstructed for a total of 126 bacterial and 11 viral genomes. Selected draft assembled genomes could be validated with 99.8% accuracy using their ORFs. 

The study provides useful information on the assembly expected for a species given its number of reads and abundance. This approach along with spiking was also demonstrated to be useful in improving the draft assembly of a bacterial genome. The Binning-Assembly approach can be successfully used to reconstruct bacterial and viral genomes from multiple metagenomic datasets obtained from similar environments.

Predicting Beta Barrel Outer Membrane Proteins (OMPs)

Here is compilation of some of the commonly available tools for prediction of Beta Barrel Outer Membrane Proteins (OMPs)

1.     Pred-TMBB (2004): http://bioinformatics.biol.uoa.gr/PRED-TMBB/input.jsp

PRED-TMBB: a web server for predicting the topology of beta-barrel outer membrane proteins. The beta-barrel outer membrane proteins constitute one of the two known structural classes of membrane proteins. Whereas there are several different web-based predictors for alpha-helical membrane proteins, currently there is no freely available prediction method for beta-barrel membrane proteins, at least with an acceptable level of accuracy. We present here a web server (PRED-TMBB, http://bioinformatics.biol.uoa.gr/PRED-TMBB) which is capable of predicting the transmembrane strands and the topology of beta-barrel outer membrane proteins of Gram-negative bacteria. The method is based on a Hidden Markov Model, trained according to the Conditional Maximum Likelihood criterion. The model was retrained and the training set now includes 16 non-homologous outer membrane proteins with structures known at atomic resolution. The user may submit one sequence at a time and has the option of choosing between three different decoding methods. The server reports the predicted topology of a given protein, a score indicating the probability of the protein being an outer membrane beta-barrel protein, posterior probabilities for the transmembrane strand prediction and a graphical representation of the assumed position of the transmembrane strands with respect to the lipid bilayer. http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/suppl_2/W400.long

2.      BOCTOPUS (2012): http://boctopus.cbr.su.se/

BOCTOPUS: improved topology prediction of transmembrane β barrel proteins

Transmembrane β barrel proteins (TMBs) are found in the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria, chloroplast and mitochondria. They play a major role in the translocation machinery, pore formation, membrane anchoring and ion exchange. TMBs are also promising targets for antimicrobial drugs and vaccines. Given the difficulty in membrane protein structure determination, computational methods to identify TMBs and predict the topology of TMBs are important. Results: Here, we present BOCTOPUS; an improved method for the topology prediction of TMBs by employing a combination of support vector machines (SVMs) and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). The SVMs and HMMs account for local and global residue preferences, respectively. Based on a 10-fold cross-validation test, BOCTOPUS performs better than all existing methods, reaching a Q3 accuracy of 87%. Further, BOCTOPUS predicted the correct number of strands for 83% proteins in the dataset. BOCTOPUS might also help in reliable identification of TMBs by using it as an additional filter to methods specialized in this task. http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/4/516.long

3.       TBBpred (2004): http://www.imtech.res.in/raghava/tbbpred/

Prediction of transmembrane regions of β-barrel proteins using ANN- and SVM-based methods. This article describes a method developed for predicting transmembrane β-barrel regions in membrane proteins using machine learning techniques: artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machine (SVM). The ANN used in this study is a feed-forward neural network with a standard back-propagation training algorithm. The accuracy of the ANN-based method improved significantly, from 70.4% to 80.5%, when evolutionary information was added to a single sequence as a multiple sequence alignment obtained from PSI-BLAST. We have also developed an SVM-based method using a primary sequence as input and achieved an accuracy of 77.4%. The SVM model was modified by adding 36 physicochemical parameters to the amino acid sequence information. Finally, ANN- and SVM-based methods were combined to utilize the full potential of both techniques. The accuracy and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) value of SVM, ANN, and combined method are 78.5%, 80.5%, and 81.8%, and 0.55, 0.63, and 0.64, respectively. These methods were trained and tested on a nonredundant data set of 16 proteins, and performance was evaluated using “leave one out cross-validation” (LOOCV). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/prot.20092/abstract;jsessionid=F041C3CA2F5E53B83924D0D73D2832C7.f03t02

4.       BETAWARE (2013): http://www.biocomp.unibo.it/~savojard/betawarecl/

BETAWARE: a machine-learning tool to detect and predict transmembrane beta-barrel proteins in prokaryotes. The annotation of membrane proteins in proteomes is an important problem of Computational Biology, especially after the development of high-throughput techniques that allow fast and efficient genome sequencing. Among membrane proteins, transmembrane β-barrels (TMBBs) are poorly represented in the database of protein structures (PDB) and difficult to identify with experimental approaches. They are, however, extremely important, playing key roles in several cell functions and bacterial pathogenicity. TMBBs are included in the lipid bilayer with a β-barrel structure and are presently found in the outer membranes of Gram-negative bacteria, mitochondria and chloroplasts. Recently, we developed two top-performing methods based on machine-learning approaches to tackle both the detection of TMBBs in sets of proteins and the prediction of their topology. Here, we present our BETAWARE program that includes both approaches and can run as a standalone program on a linux-based computer to easily address in-home massive protein annotation or filtering. http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/4/504.abstract 

5.       ConBBPRED (2005): http://bioinformatics.biol.uoa.gr/ConBBPRED/index.jsp

Prediction of the transmembrane strands and topology of β-barrel outer membrane proteins is of interest in current bioinformatics research. Several methods have been applied so far for this task, utilizing different algorithmic techniques and a number of freely available predictors exist. The methods can be grossly divided to those based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), on Neural Networks (NNs) and on Support Vector Machines (SVMs). In this work, we compare the different available methods for topology prediction of β-barrel outer membrane proteins. We evaluate their performance on a non-redundant dataset of 20 β-barrel outer membrane proteins of gram-negative bacteria, with structures known at atomic resolution. Also, we describe, for the first time, an effective way to combine the individual predictors, at will, to a single consensus prediction method. We assess the statistical significance of the performance of each prediction scheme and conclude that Hidden Markov Model based methods, HMM-B2TMR, ProfTMB and PRED-TMBB, are currently the best predictors, according to either the per-residue accuracy, the segments overlap measure (SOV) or the total number of proteins with correctly predicted topologies in the test set. Furthermore, we show that the available predictors perform better when only transmembrane β-barrel domains are used for prediction, rather than the precursor full-length sequences, even though the HMM-based predictors are not influenced significantly. The consensus prediction method performs significantly better than each individual available predictor, since it increases the accuracy up to 4% regarding SOV and up to 15% in correctly predicted topologies.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/6/7

6.       TMBETA-RBF (2008): http://rbf.bioinfo.tw/~sachen/OMPpredict/TMBETADISC-RBF.php

TMBETA-NET: discrimination and prediction of membrane spanning β-strands in outer membrane proteins. We have developed a web-server, TMBETA-NET for discriminating outer membrane proteins and predicting their membrane spanning β-strand segments. The amino acid compositions of globular and outer membrane proteins have been systematically analyzed and a statistical method has been proposed for discriminating outer membrane proteins. The prediction of membrane spanning segments is mainly based on feed forward neural network and refined with β-strand length. Our program takes the amino acid sequence as input and displays the type of the protein along with membrane-spanning β-strand segments as a stretch of highlighted amino acid residues. Further, the probability of residues to be in transmembrane β-strand has been provided with a coloring scheme. We observed that outer membrane proteins were discriminated with an accuracy of 89% and their membrane spanning β-strand segments at an accuracy of 73% just from amino acid sequence information. The prediction server is available at http://psfs.cbrc.jp/tmbeta-net/

7.       TMB-HUNT (2005): http://www.bioinformatics.leeds.ac.uk/betaBarrel/

TMB-Hunt: a web server to screen sequence sets for transmembrane β-barrel proteins. TMB-Hunt is a program that uses a modified k-nearest neighbour (k-NN) algorithm to classify protein sequences as transmembrane β-barrel (TMB) or non-TMB on the basis of whole sequence amino acid composition. By including differentially weighted amino acids, evolutionary information and by calibrating the scoring, a discrimination accuracy of 92.5% was achieved, as tested using a rigorous cross-validation procedure. The TMB-Hunt web server, available at www.bioinformatics.leeds.ac.uk/betaBarrel, allows screening of up to 10 000 sequences in a single query and provides results and key statistics in a simple colour coded format. http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/33/suppl_2/W188.long

8.       TMBPro (2008): suite of specialized predictors for predicting secondary structure, beta-contacts, and tertiary structure of Transmembrane Beta-Barrel (TMB) proteins. http://tmbpro.ics.uci.edu/ TMBpro: secondary structure, β-contact and tertiary structure prediction of transmembrane β-barrel proteins. Transmembrane β-barrel (TMB) proteins are embedded in the outer membranes of mitochondria, Gram-negative bacteria and chloroplasts. These proteins perform critical functions, including active ion-transport and passive nutrient intake. Therefore, there is a need for accurate prediction of secondary and tertiary structure of TMB proteins. Traditional homology modeling methods, however, fail on most TMB proteins since very few non-homologous TMB structures have been determined. Yet, because TMB structures conform to specific construction rules that restrict the conformational space drastically, it should be possible for methods that do not depend on target-template homology to be applied successfully.Results: We develop a suite (TMBpro) of specialized predictors for predicting secondary structure (TMBpro-SS), β-contacts (TMBpro-CON) and tertiary structure (TMBpro-3D) of transmembrane β-barrel proteins. We compare our results to the recent state-of-the-art predictors transFold and PRED-TMBB using their respective benchmark datasets, and leave-one-out cross-validation. Using the transFold dataset TMBpro predicts secondary structure with per-residue accuracy (Q2) of 77.8%, a correlation coefficient of 0.54, and TMBpro predicts β-contacts with precision of 0.65 and recall of 0.67. Using the PRED-TMBB dataset, TMBpro predicts secondary structure with Q2 of 88.3% and a correlation coefficient of 0.75. All of these performance results exceed previously published results by 4% or more. Working with the PRED-TMBB dataset, TMBpro predicts the tertiary structure of transmembrane segments with RMSD <6.0 Å for 9 of 14 proteins. For 6 of 14 predictions, the RMSD is <5.0 Å, with a GDT_TS score greater than 60.0. http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/4/513.long

9.       MCMBB Markov Chain Model Beta Barrels (2004): http://athina.biol.uoa.gr/bioinformatics/mcmbb/

The task of finding β-barrel outer membrane proteins of the gram-negative bacteria is of greatimportance in current Bioinformatics research. We developed a computational method, which discriminates β- barrel outer membrane proteins from globular ones and, also, from α-helical membrane proteins. The methodis based on a 1st order Markov Chain model, which captures the alternating pattern of hydrophilic-hydrophobicresidues occurring in the membrane-spanning beta-strands of beta-barrel outer membrane proteins. The modelachieves high accuracy in discriminating outer membrane proteins, and could be used alone, or in conjunctionwith other more sophisticated methods, already available http://www.academia.edu/316959/Finding_Beta-Barrel_Outer_Membrane_Proteins_With_a_Markov_Chain_Model

10.   TMB-KNN (2008): http://cs.ndsu.nodak.edu/~chayan/Server/TMB_KNN.html

TMB-Hunt: a web server to screen sequence sets for transmembrane β-barrel proteins

TMB-Hunt is a program that uses a modified k-nearest neighbour (k-NN) algorithm to classify protein sequences as transmembrane β-barrel (TMB) or non-TMB on the basis of whole sequence amino acid composition. By including differentially weighted amino acids, evolutionary information and by calibrating the scoring, a discrimination accuracy of 92.5% was achieved, as tested using a rigorous cross-validation procedure. The TMB-Hunt web server, available at www.bioinformatics.leeds.ac.uk/betaBarrel, allows screening of up to 10 000 sequences in a single query and provides results and key statistics in a simple colour coded format. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1160145/

11.   transFold (2006): super-secondary structure prediction of transmembrane β-barrel proteins http://bioinformatics.bc.edu/clotelab/transFold/

transFold: a web server for predicting the structure and residue contacts of transmembrane beta-barrels. Transmembrane β-barrel (TMB) proteins are embedded in the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria, mitochondria and chloroplasts. The cellular location and functional diversity of β-barrel outer membrane proteins makes them an important protein class. At the present time, very few non-homologous TMB structures have been determined by X-ray diffraction because of the experimental difficulty encountered in crystallizing transmembrane (TM) proteins. The transFold web server uses pairwise inter-strand residue statistical potentials derived from globular (non-outer-membrane) proteins to predict the supersecondary structure of TMB. Unlike all previous approaches, transFold does not use machine learning methods such as hidden Markov models or neural networks; instead, transFold employs multi-tape S-attribute grammars to describe all potential conformations, and then applies dynamic programming to determine the global minimum energy supersecondary structure. The transFold web server not only predicts secondary structure and TMB topology, but is the only method which additionally predicts the side-chain orientation of transmembrane β-strand residues, inter-strand residue contacts and TM β-strand inclination with respect to the membrane. The program transFold currently outperforms all other methods for accuracy of β-barrel structure prediction. Available at http://bioinformatics.bc.edu/clotelab/transFold. http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/34/suppl_2/W189.full

12.   BOMP (2004): http://services.cbu.uib.no/tools/bomp

BOMP: a program to predict integral β-barrel outer membrane proteins encoded within genomes of Gram-negative bacteria. This work describes the development of a program that predicts whether or not a polypeptide sequence from a Gram-negative bacterium is an integral β-barrel outer membrane protein. The program, called the β-barrel Outer Membrane protein Predictor (BOMP), is based on two separate components to recognize integral β-barrel proteins. The first component is a C-terminal pattern typical of many integral β-barrel proteins. The second component calculates an integral β-barrel score of the sequence based on the extent to which the sequence contains stretches of amino acids typical of transmembrane β-strands. The precision of the predictions was found to be 80% with a recall of 88% when tested on the proteins with SwissProt annotated subcellular localization in Escherichia coli K 12 (788 sequences) and Salmonella typhimurium (366 sequences). When tested on the predicted proteome of E.coli, BOMP found 103 of a total of 4346 polypeptide sequences to be possible integral β-barrel proteins. Of these, 36 were found by BLAST to lack similarity (E-value score < 1e−10) to proteins with annotated subcellular localization in SwissProt. BOMP predicted the content of integral β-barrels per predicted proteome of 10 different bacteria to range from 1.8 to 3%. BOMP is available at http://www.bioinfo.no/tools/bomp http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/suppl_2/W394.full

13.   TMBETA-net (2004): http://psfs.cbrc.jp/tmbeta-net/

TMBETA-NET: discrimination and prediction of membrane spanning beta-strands in outer membrane proteins. We have developed a web-server, TMBETA-NET for discriminating outer membrane proteins and predicting their membrane spanning beta-strand segments. The amino acid compositions of globular and outer membrane proteins have been systematically analyzed and a statistical method has been proposed for discriminating outer membrane proteins. The prediction of membrane spanning segments is mainly based on feed forward neural network and refined with beta-strand length. Our program takes the amino acid sequence as input and displays the type of the protein along with membrane-spanning beta-strand segments as a stretch of highlighted amino acid residues. Further, the probability of residues to be in transmembrane beta-strand has been provided with a coloring scheme. We observed that outer membrane proteins were discriminated with an accuracy of 89% and their membrane spanning beta-strand segments at an accuracy of 73% just from amino acid sequence information. The prediction server is available at http://psfs.cbrc.jp/tmbeta-net/. http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/33/suppl_2/W164.long

14.   TMBB-DB (2012): http://beta-barrel.tulane.edu/index.html

TMBB-DB: a transmembrane β-barrel proteome database. We previously reported the development of a highly accurate statistical algorithm for identifying β-barrel outer membrane proteins or transmembrane β-barrels (TMBBs), from genomic sequence data of Gram-negative bacteria (Freeman,T.C. and Wimley,W.C. (2010) Bioinformatics, 26, 1965–1974). We have now applied this identification algorithm to all available Gram-negative bacterial genomes (over 600 chromosomes) and have constructed a publicly available, searchable, up-to-date, database of all proteins in these genomes. For each protein in the database, there is information on (i) β-barrel membrane protein probability for identification of β-barrels, (ii) β-strand and β-hairpin propensity for structure and topology prediction, (iii) signal sequence score because most TMBBs are secreted through the inner membrane translocon and, thus, have a signal sequence, and (iv) transmembrane α-helix predictions, for reducing false positive predictions. This information is sufficient for the accurate identification of most β-barrel membrane proteins in these genomes. In the database there are nearly 50 000 predicted TMBBs (out of 1.9 million total putative proteins). Of those, more than 15 000 are ‘hypothetical’ or ‘putative’ proteins, not previously identified as TMBBs. This wealth of genomic information is not available anywhere else. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3463127/

Woods: A fast and accurate functional annotator and classifier of genomic and metagenomic sequences

Another recent publication from our lab.

Citation: 

Sharma, A. K., Gupta, A., Kumar, S., Dhakan, D. B., & Sharma, V. K. (2015). Woods: A fast and accurate functional annotator and classifier of genomic and metagenomic sequences. Genomics.

Functional annotation of the gigantic metagenomic data is one of the major time-consuming and computationally demanding tasks, which is currently a bottleneck for the efficient analysis. The commonly used homology-based methods to functionally annotate and classify proteins are extremely slow. 

Therefore, to achieve faster and accurate functional annotation, we have developed an orthology-based functional classifier 'Woods' by using a combination of machine learning and similarity-based approaches. Woods displayed a precision of 98.79% on independent genomic dataset, 96.66% on simulated metagenomic dataset and >97% on two real metagenomic datasets. In addition, it performed >87 times faster than BLAST on the two real metagenomic datasets. Woods can be used as a highly efficient and accurate classifier with high-throughput capability which facilitates its usability on large metagenomic datasets.

The Woods web server is freely accessible at http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in/woods/index.php and http://metabiosys.iiserb.ac.in/woods/index.php. The standalone version of Woods can be downloaded from the above web servers and usage instructions are provided in Text S1 and also in the Tutorial section of the web server.

For complete article click here: Woods: A fast and accurate functional annotator and classifier of genomic and metagenomic sequences 

MP3: A Software Tool for the Prediction of Pathogenic Proteins in Genomic and Metagenomic Data

MP3 is publicly available at http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in/mp3/ind​ex.php.

The identification of virulent proteins in any de-novo sequenced genome is useful in estimating its pathogenic ability and understanding the mechanism of pathogenesis. Similarly, the identification of such proteins could be valuable in comparing the metagenome of healthy and diseased individuals and estimating the proportion of pathogenic species. However, the common challenge in both the above tasks is the identification of virulent proteins since a significant proportion of genomic and metagenomic proteins are novel and yet unannotated. The currently available tools which carry out the identification of virulent proteins provide limited accuracy and cannot be used on large datasets. 

Therefore, we have developed an MP3 standalone tool and web server for the prediction of pathogenic proteins in both genomic and metagenomic datasets. MP3 is developed using an integrated Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) approach to carry out highly fast, sensitive and accurate prediction of pathogenic proteins. It displayed Sensitivity, Specificity, MCC and accuracy values of 92%, 100%, 0.92 and 96%, respectively, on blind dataset constructed using complete proteins. On the two metagenomic blind datasets (Blind A: 51–100 amino acids and Blind B: 30–50 amino acids), it displayed Sensitivity, Specificity, MCC and accuracy values of 82.39%, 97.86%, 0.80 and 89.32% for Blind A and 71.60%, 94.48%, 0.67 and 81.86% for Blind B, respectively. In addition, the performance of MP3 was validated on selected bacterial genomic and real metagenomic datasets. 

To our knowledge, MP3 is the only program that specializes in fast and accurate identification of partial pathogenic proteins predicted from short (100–150 bp) metagenomic reads and also performs exceptionally well on complete protein sequences. 

16S Classifier: A Tool for Fast and Accurate Taxonomic Classification of 16S rRNA Hypervariable Regions in Metagenomic Datasets

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0116106

Classifier is available freely at http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in/16Sclassifier.

The sequencing of 16S rRNA gene is commonly performed to estimate the microbial diversity in a metagenomic study. The rapid developments in genome sequencing technologies have shifted the focus on sequencing the selected hypervariable regions (HVRs) of 16S rRNA gene instead of sequencing the complete gene. The recent metagenomic projects involve the sequencing of only a single HVR or a combination of two or more HVRs. At present there is no specialized method available for the correct identification and classification of species using short variable 16S rRNA sequences. Therefore, we have developed 16S Classifier using a machine learning method, Random Forest, for faster and accurate taxonomic classification of short hypervariable regions of 16S rRNA sequence. It displayed the precision values of up to 0.91 on training datasets and the precision values of up to 0.98 on the first test dataset. On real metagenomic datasets, it showed up to 99.7% accuracy at the phylum level and up to 99.0% accuracy at the genus level. 

16S classifier displayed up to 42.9%, 40.7%, 41.0%, 57.9% and 73.8% higher accuracy at phylum, class, order, family and genus levels, respectively, as compared to the commonly used RDP classifier program. In addition, it is 7.5 times faster than RDP Classifier and 800 times faster than BLAST. 16S classifier can be easily used with the QIIME pipeline which is commonly used for the 16S rRNA analysis.

To the best of our knowledge, 16S Classifier is the only available tool which can carry out the efficient, sensitive and accurate taxonomic assignment of any of the 16S rRNA hypervariable regions which are commonly used in metagenomic projects. In the case of complete 16S rRNA also, it displayed exceptional (precision of 0.97) performance on the test dataset. Thus, the wide usage of this tool is anticipated in different metagenomic projects. 16S 

Instructions for running the stand-alone version of 16S Classifier on the Linux PC.

1. User can download zip file of a particular hypervariable region or complete 16S, which is freely available at http://metagenomics.iiserb.ac.in/16Sclassifier/download.html

2. Extract the zipped file which contains a model file (*.Rdata), a script file (*.sh) and an exe file (16sclassifier.exe).

Other dependencies:

1. User has to install R from the following link http://cran.r-project.org/

2. intall Randomforest by typing the following commands in terminal  R  and install.packages ('randomForest')

# Command line usage #

./16sclassifier.exe 'queryfile' 'modelname'

The query file should be in Fasta format and the model name could be v2, v3, v4, v5, v6, v7, v8, v23, v34, v35, v45, v56, v67, v78 and Complete16S.

Metagenomic Assemblers:

Here is the list of most commonly used assembler for metagenomics reads used. The list is extensive but by no means is complete. I will try to update as soon as I come across a new one. Help me keeping the list updated if you come across any new and interesting assembler I have missed.

MetaVelvet : http://metavelvet.dna.bio.keio.ac.jp/ : An extension of Velvet assembler to de novo metagenome assembly from short sequence reads: An important step in ‘metagenomics’ analysis is the assembly of multiple genomes from mixed sequence reads of multiple species in a microbial community. Most conventional pipelines use a single-genome assembler with carefully optimized parameters. A limitation of a single-genome assembler for de novo metagenome assembly is that sequences of highly abundant species are likely misidentified as repeats in a single genome, resulting in a number of small fragmented scaffolds. We extended a single-genome assembler for short reads, known as ‘Velvet’, to metagenome assembly, which we called ‘MetaVelvet’, for mixed short reads of multiple species. Our fundamental concept was to first decompose a de Bruijn graph constructed from mixed short reads into individual sub-graphs, and second, to build scaffolds based on each decomposed de Bruijn sub-graph as an isolate species genome. We made use of two features, the coverage (abundance) difference and graph connectivity, for the decomposition of the de Bruijn graph. For simulated datasets, MetaVelvet succeeded in generating significantly higher N50 scores than any single-genome assemblers. MetaVelvet also reconstructed relatively low-coverage genome sequences as scaffolds. On real datasets of human gut microbial read data, MetaVelvet produced longer scaffolds and increased the number of predicted genes. http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/20/e155.short

MetAMOS: https://github.com/marbl/metAMOS a metagenomic assembly and analysis pipeline for AMOS: We describe MetAMOS, an open source and modular metagenomic assembly and analysis pipeline. MetAMOS represents an important step towards fully automated metagenomic analysis, starting with next-generation sequencing reads and producing genomic scaffolds, open-reading frames and taxonomic or functional annotations. MetAMOS can aid in reducing assembly errors, commonly encountered when assembling metagenomic samples, and improves taxonomic assignment accuracy while also reducing computational cost. MetAMOS can be downloaded from: https://github.com/treangen/MetAMOS. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4053804/

IDBA-UD: http://www.cs.hku.hk/~alse/idba_ud a de novo assembler for single-cell and metagenomic sequencing data with highly uneven depth. Motivation: Next-generation sequencing allows us to sequence reads from a microbial environment using single-cell sequencing or metagenomic sequencing technologies. However, both technologies suffer from the problem that sequencing depth of different regions of a genome or genomes from different species are highly uneven. Most existing genome assemblers usually have an assumption that sequencing depths are even. These assemblers fail to construct correct long contigs. Results: We introduce the IDBA-UD algorithm that is based on the de Bruijn graph approach for assembling reads from single-cell sequencing or metagenomic sequencing technologies with uneven sequencing depths. Several non-trivial techniques have been employed to tackle the problems. Instead of using a simple threshold, we use multiple depthrelative thresholds to remove erroneous k-mers in both low-depth and high-depth regions. The technique of local assembly with paired-end information is used to solve the branch problem of low-depth short repeat regions. To speed up the process, an error correction step is conducted to correct reads of high-depth regions that can be aligned to highconfident contigs. Comparison of the performances of IDBA-UD and existing assemblers (Velvet, Velvet-SC, SOAPdenovo and Meta-IDBA) for different datasets, shows that IDBA-UD can reconstruct longer contigs with higher accuracy. Availability: The IDBA-UD toolkit is available at our website http://www.cs.hku.hk/~alse/idba_ud. http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/11/1420.short

Meta-IDBA: http://www.cs.hku.hk/~alse/metaidba a de Novo assembler for metagenomic data. Motivation: Next-generation sequencing techniques allow us to generate reads from a microbial environment in order to analyze the microbial community. However, assembling of a set of mixed reads from different species to form contigs is a bottleneck of metagenomic research. Although there are many assemblers for assembling reads from a single genome, there are no assemblers for assembling reads in metagenomic data without reference genome sequences. Moreover, the performances of these assemblers on metagenomic data are far from satisfactory, because of the existence of common regions in the genomes of subspecies and species, which make the assembly problem much more complicated. Results: We introduce the Meta-IDBA algorithm for assembling reads in metagenomic data, which contain multiple genomes from different species. There are two core steps in Meta-IDBA. It first tries to partition the de Bruijn graph into isolated components of different species based on an important observation. Then, for each component, it captures the slight variants of the genomes of subspecies from the same species by multiple alignments and represents the genome of one species, using a consensus sequence. Comparison of the performances of Meta-IDBA and existing assemblers, such as Velvet and Abyss for different metagenomic datasets shows that Meta-IDBA can reconstruct longer contigs with similar accuracy. Availability: Meta-IDBA toolkit is available at our website http://www.cs.hku.hk/~alse/metaidba. http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/13/i94.short

Ray Meta: http://denovoassembler.sf.net: Voluminous parallel sequencing datasets, especially metagenomic experiments, require distributed computing for de novo assembly and taxonomic profiling. Ray Meta is a massively distributed metagenome assembler that is coupled with Ray Communities, which profiles microbiomes based on uniquely-colored k-mers. It can accurately assemble and profile a three billion read metagenomic experiment representing 1,000 bacterial genomes of uneven proportions in 15 hours with 1,024 processor cores, using only 1.5 GB per core. The software will facilitate the processing of large and complex datasets, and will help in generating biological insights for specific environments. Ray Meta is open source and available at http://denovoassembler.sf.net. : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4056372/

MAP: http://bioinfo.ctb.pku.edu.cn/MAP/ Motivation: A high-quality assembly of reads generated from shotgun sequencing is a substantial step in metagenome projects. Although traditional assemblers have been employed in initial analysis of metagenomes, they cannot surmount the challenges created by the features of metagenomic data. Result: We present a de novo assembly approach and its implementation named MAP (metagenomic assembly program). Based on an improved overlap/layout/consensus (OLC) strategy incorporated with several special algorithms, MAP uses the mate pair information, resulting in being more applicable to shotgun DNA reads (recommended as >200 bp) currently widely used in metagenome projects. Results of extensive tests on simulated data show that MAP can be superior to both Celera and Phrap for typical longer reads by Sanger sequencing, as well as has an evident advantage over Celera, Newbler and the newest Genovo, for typical shorter reads by 454 sequencing. Availability and implementation: The source code of MAP is distributed as open source under the GNU GPL license, the MAP program and all simulated datasets can be freely available at http://bioinfo.ctb.pku.edu.cn/MAP/. http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/11/1455.short

Genovo: http://cs.stanford.edu/group/genovo/ : Next-generation sequencing technologies produce a large number of noisy reads from the DNA in a sample. Metagenomics and population sequencing aim to recover the genomic sequences of the species in the sample, which could be of high diversity. Methods geared towards single sequence reconstruction are not sensitive enough when applied in this setting. We introduce a generative probabilistic model of read generation from environmental samples and present Genovo, a novel de novo sequence assembler that discovers likely sequence reconstructions under the model. A nonparametric prior accounts for the unknown number of genomes in the sample. Inference is performed by applying a series of hill-climbing steps iteratively until convergence. We compare the performance of Genovo to three other short read assembly programs in a series of synthetic experiments and across nine metagenomic datasets created using the 454 platform, the largest of which has 311k reads. Genovo's reconstructions cover more bases and recover more genes than the other methods, even for low-abundance sequences, and yield a higher assembly score. http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cmb.2010.0244  

Extended Genovo: http://xgenovo.dna.bio.keio.ac.jp Metagenomes present assembly challenges, when assembling multiple genomes from mixed reads of multiple species. An assembler for single genomes can’t adapt well when applied in this case. A metagenomic assembler, Genovo, is a de novo assembler for metagenomes under a generative probabilistic model. Genovo assembles all reads without discarding any reads in a preprocessing step, and is therefore able to extract more information from metagenomic data and, in principle, generate better assembly results. Paired end sequencing is currently widely-used yet Genovo was designed for 454 single end reads. In this research, we attempted to extend Genovo by incorporating paired-end information, named Xgenovo, so that it generates higher quality assemblies with paired end reads. First, we extended Genovo by adding a bonus parameter in the Chinese Restaurant Process used to get prior accounts for the unknown number of genomes in the sample. This bonus parameter intends for a pair of reads to be in the same contig and as an effort to solve chimera contig case. Second, we modified the sampling process of the location of a read in a contig. We used relative distance for the number of trials in the symmetric geometric distribution instead of using distance between the offset and the center of contig used in Genovo. Using this relative distance, a read sampled in the appropriate location has higher probability. Therefore a read will be mapped in the correct location. Results of extensive experiments on simulated metagenomic datasets from simple to complex with species coverage setting following uniform and lognormal distribution showed that Xgenovo can be superior to the original Genovo and the recently proposed metagenome assembler for 454 reads, MAP. Xgenovo successfully generated longer N50 than Genovo and MAP while maintaining the assembly quality even for very complex metagenomic datasets consisting of 115 species. Xgenovo also demonstrated the potential to decrease the computational cost. This means that our strategy worked well. The software and all simulated datasets are publicly available online at http://xgenovo.dna.bio.keio.ac.jp. https://peerj.com/articles/196/

SmashCommunity: a metagenomic annotation and analysis tool. SmashCommunity is a stand-alone metagenomic annotation and analysis pipeline suitable for data from Sanger and 454 sequencing technologies. It supports state-of-the-art software for essential metagenomic tasks such as assembly and gene prediction. It provides tools to estimate the quantitative phylogenetic and functional compositions of metagenomes, to compare compositions of multiple metagenomes and to produce intuitive visual representations of such analyses. Availability: SmashCommunity source code and documentation are available at http://www.bork.embl.de/software/smash: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/23/2977.short

Bambus 2: http://amos.sf.net. Motivation: Sequencing projects increasingly target samples from non-clonal sources. In particular, metagenomics has enabled scientists to begin to characterize the structure of microbial communities. The software tools developed for assembling and analyzing sequencing data for clonal organisms are, however, unable to adequately process data derived from non-clonal sources. Results: We present a new scaffolder, Bambus 2, to address some of the challenges encountered when analyzing metagenomes. Our approach relies on a combination of a novel method for detecting genomic repeats and algorithms that analyze assembly graphs to identify biologically meaningful genomic variants. We compare our software to current assemblers using simulated and real data. We demonstrate that the repeat detection algorithms have higher sensitivity than current approaches without sacrificing specificity. In metagenomic datasets, the scaffolder avoids false joins between distantly related organisms while obtaining long-range contiguity. Bambus 2 represents a first step toward automated metagenomic assembly. Availability: Bambus 2 is open source and available from http://amos.sf.net. http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/21/2964.short

MetaCAA: https://metagenomics.atc.tcs.com/MetaCAA A clustering-aided methodology for efficient assembly of metagenomic datasets. A key challenge in analyzing metagenomics data pertains to assembly of sequenced DNA fragments (i.e. reads) originating from various microbes in a given environmental sample. Several existing methodologies can assemble reads originating from a single genome. However, these methodologies cannot be applied for efficient assembly of metagenomic sequence datasets. In this study, we present MetaCAA — a clustering-aided methodology which helps in improving the quality of metagenomic sequence assembly. MetaCAA initially groups sequences constituting a given metagenome into smaller clusters. Subsequently, sequences in each cluster are independently assembled using CAP3, an existing single genome assembly program. Contigs formed in each of the clusters along with the unassembled reads are then subjected to another round of assembly for generating the final set of contigs. Validation using simulated and real-world metagenomic datasets indicates that MetaCAA aids in improving the overall quality of assembly. A software implementation of MetaCAA is available at https://metagenomics.atc.tcs.com/MetaCAA. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0888754314000135

Genomic Assemblers:

Here is the list of most commonly used assembler for genomic reads used. The list is extensive but by no means is complete. I will try to update as soon as I come across a new one. Help me keeping the list updated if you come across any new and interesting assembler I have missed.

ABySS: http://www.bcgsc.ca/downloads/abyss/ : Widespread adoption of massively parallel deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing instruments has prompted the recent development of de novo short read assembly algorithms. A common shortcoming of the available tools is their inability to efficiently assemble vast amounts of data generated from large-scale sequencing projects, such as the sequencing of individual human genomes to catalog natural genetic variation. To address this limitation, we developed ABySS (Assembly By Short Sequences), a parallelized sequence assembler. As a demonstration of the capability of our software, we assembled 3.5 billion paired-end reads from the genome of an African male publicly released by Illumina, Inc. Approximately 2.76 million contigs ≥100 base pairs (bp) in length were created with an N50 size of 1499 bp, representing 68% of the reference human genome. Analysis of these contigs identified polymorphic and novel sequences not present in the human reference assembly, which were validated by alignment to alternate human assemblies and to other primate genomes. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2694472/

SOAPdenovo: http://soap.genomics.org.cn/ : Next-generation massively parallel DNA sequencing technologies provide ultrahigh throughput at a substantially lower unit data cost; however, the data are very short read length sequences, making de novo assembly extremely challenging. Here, we describe a novel method for de novo assembly of large genomes from short read sequences. We successfully assembled both the Asian and African human genome sequences, achieving an N50 contig size of 7.4 and 5.9 kilobases (kb) and scaffold of 446.3 and 61.9 kb, respectively. The development of this de novo short read assembly method creates new opportunities for building reference sequences and carrying out accurate analyses of unexplored genomes in a cost-effective way. http://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2009/12/16/gr.097261.109

Velvet: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/~zerbino/velvet : We have developed a new set of algorithms, collectively called “Velvet,” to manipulate de Bruijn graphs for genomic sequence assembly. A de Bruijn graph is a compact representation based on short words (k-mers) that is ideal for high coverage, very short read (25–50 bp) data sets. Applying Velvet to very short reads and paired-ends information only, one can produce contigs of significant length, up to 50-kb N50 length in simulations of prokaryotic data and 3-kb N50 on simulated mammalian BACs. When applied to real Solexa data sets without read pairs, Velvet generated contigs of ∼8 kb in a prokaryote and 2 kb in a mammalian BAC, in close agreement with our simulated results without read-pair information. Velvet represents a new approach to assembly that can leverage very short reads in combination with read pairs to produce useful assemblies. http://genome.cshlp.org/content/18/5/821.short

ALLPATHS-LG: ftp://ftp.broadinstitute.org/pub/crd/ALLPATHS/Release-LG/: Massively parallel DNA sequencing technologies are revolutionizing genomics by making it possible to generate billions of relatively short (~100-base) sequence reads at very low cost. Whereas such data can be readily used for a wide range of biomedical applications, it has proven difficult to use them to generate high-quality de novo genome assemblies of large, repeat-rich vertebrate genomes. To date, the genome assemblies generated from such data have fallen far short of those obtained with the older (but much more expensive) capillary-based sequencing approach. Here, we report the development of an algorithm for genome assembly, ALLPATHS-LG, and its application to massively parallel DNA sequence data from the human and mouse genomes, generated on the Illumina platform. The resulting draft genome assemblies have good accuracy, short-range contiguity, long-range connectivity, and coverage of the genome. In particular, the base accuracy is high (≥99.95%) and the scaffold sizes (N50 size = 11.5 Mb for human and 7.2 Mb for mouse) approach those obtained with capillary-based sequencing. The combination of improved sequencing technology and improved computational methods should now make it possible to increase dramatically the de novo sequencing of large genomes. 

The ALLPATHS-LG program is available at http://www.broadinstitute.org/science/programs/genome-biology/crd. http://www.pnas.org/content/108/4/1513.short

Bambus2: http://amos.sf.net: Motivation: Sequencing projects increasingly target samples from non-clonal sources. In particular, metagenomics has enabled scientists to begin to characterize the structure of microbial communities. The software tools developed for assembling and analyzing sequencing data for clonal organisms are, however, unable to adequately process data derived from non-clonal sources. Results: We present a new scaffolder, Bambus 2, to address some of the challenges encountered when analyzing metagenomes. Our approach relies on a combination of a novel method for detecting genomic repeats and algorithms that analyze assembly graphs to identify biologically meaningful genomic variants. We compare our software to current assemblers using simulated and real data. We demonstrate that the repeat detection algorithms have higher sensitivity than current approaches without sacrificing specificity. In metagenomic datasets, the scaffolder avoids false joins between distantly related organisms while obtaining long-range contiguity. Bambus 2 represents a first step toward automated metagenomic assembly. Availability: Bambus 2 is open source and available from http://amos.sf.net. http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/21/2964.short

Newbler: http://454.com/contact-us/software-request.asp : In the last year, high-throughput sequencing technologies have progressed from proof-of-concept to production quality. While these methods produce high-quality reads, they have yet to produce reads comparable in length to Sanger-based sequencing. Current fragment assembly algorithms have been implemented and optimized for mate-paired Sanger-based reads, and thus do not perform well on short reads produced by short read technologies. We present a new Eulerian assembler that generates nearly optimal short read assemblies of bacterial genomes and describe an approach to assemble reads in the case of the popular hybrid protocol when short and long Sanger-based reads are combined. http://genome.cshlp.org/content/18/2/324.full

MIRA: http://www.chevreux.org/mira_downloads.html We present an EST sequence assembler that specializes in reconstruction of pristine mRNA transcripts, while at the same time detecting and classifying single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) occuring in different variations thereof. The assembler uses iterative multipass strategies centered on high-confidence regions within sequences and has a fallback strategy for using low-confidence regions when needed. It features special functions to assemble high numbers of highly similar sequences without prior masking, an automatic editor that edits and analyzes alignments by inspecting the underlying traces, and detection and classification of sequence properties like SNPs with a high specificity and a sensitivity down to one mutation per sequence. In addition, it includes possibilities to use incorrectly preprocessed sequences, routines to make use of additional sequencing information such as base-error probabilities, template insert sizes, strain information, etc., and functions to detect and resolve possible misassemblies. The assembler is routinely used for such various tasks as mutation detection in different cell types, similarity analysis of transcripts between organisms, and pristine assembly of sequences from various sources for oligo design in clinical microarray experiments. http://genome.cshlp.org/content/14/6/1147

Euler-USR: http://euler-assembler.ucsd.edu/portal/ : Increasing read length is currently viewed as the crucial condition for fragment assembly with next-generation sequencing technologies. However, introducing mate-paired reads (separated by a gap of length, GapLength) opens a possibility to transform short mate-pairs into long mate-reads of length ≈ GapLength, and thus raises the question as to whether the read length (as opposed to GapLength) even matters. We describe a new tool, EULER-USR, for assembling mate-paired short reads and use it to analyze the question of whether the read length matters. We further complement the ongoing experimental efforts to maximize read length by a new computational approach for increasing the effective read length. While the common practice is to trim the error-prone tails of the reads, we present an approach that substitutes trimming with error correction using repeat graphs. An important and counterintuitive implication of this result is that one may extend sequencing reactions that degrade with length “past their prime” to where the error rate grows above what is normally acceptable for fragment assembly. http://genome.cshlp.org/content/19/2/336.full

Celera Assembler: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wgs-assembler/files/wgs-assembler/wgs-7.0/ :

Minia: http://minia.genouest.org/files/minia-1.6088.tar.gz  : Minia is a short-read assembler based on a de Bruijn graph, capable of assembling a human genome on a desktop computer in a day. The output of Minia is a set of contigs. Minia produces results of similar contiguity and accuracy to other de Bruijn assemblers (e.g. Velvet).  http://minia.genouest.org/files/minia.pdf

Ray: http://sourceforge.net/projects/denovoassembler/files/ : An accurate genome sequence of a desired species is now a pre-requisite for genome research. An important step in obtaining a high-quality genome sequence is to correctly assemble short reads into longer sequences accurately representing contiguous genomic regions. Current sequencing technologies continue to offer increases in throughput, and corresponding reductions in cost and time. Unfortunately, the benefit of obtaining a large number of reads is complicated by sequencing errors, with different biases being observed with each platform. Although software are available to assemble reads for each individual system, no procedure has been proposed for high-quality simultaneous assembly based on reads from a mix of different technologies. In this paper, we describe a parallel short-read assembler, called Ray, which has been developed to assemble reads obtained from a combination of sequencing platforms. We compared its performance to other assemblers on simulated and real datasets. We used a combination of Roche/454 and Illumina reads to assemble three different genomes. We showed that mixing sequencing technologies systematically reduces the number of contigs and the number of errors. Because of its open nature, this new tool will hopefully serve as a basis to develop an assembler that can be of universal utilization (availability: http://deNovoAssembler.sf.Net/). For online Supplementary Material, seewww.liebertonline.com. http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cmb.2009.0238

Edena: http://www.genomic.ch/edena : Novel high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies allow researchers to characterize a bacterial genome during a single experiment and at a moderate cost. However, the increase in sequencing throughput that is allowed by using such platforms is obtained at the expense of individual sequence read length, which must be assembled into longer contigs to be exploitable. This study focuses on the Illumina sequencing platform that produces millions of very short sequences that are 35 bases in length. We propose a de novo assembler software that is dedicated to process such data. Based on a classical overlap graph representation and on the detection of potentially spurious reads, our software generates a set of accurate contigs of several kilobases that cover most of the bacterial genome. The assembly results were validated by comparing data sets that were obtained experimentally for Staphylococcus aureus strain MW2 and Helicobacter acinonychis strain Sheeba with that of their published genomes acquired by conventional sequencing of 1.5- to 3.0-kb fragments. We also provide indications that the broad coverage achieved by high-throughput sequencing might allow for the detection of clonal polymorphisms in the set of DNA molecules being sequenced. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2336802/

MSR-CA: http://www.genome.umd.edu/SR_CA_MANUAL.htm : The MSR-CA assembler combines the benefits of deBruijn graph and Overlap-Layout-Consensus assembly approaches.  The strength of the deBruijn graph approach is in its ability to quickly create a graph representation of the genome assembly from the deep coverage short read data.  However in most cases the graph is extremely complex and it is hard to find a way to recover the original genome sequence from simply traversing it. On the other hand, overlap-layout-consensus is better suited for longer reads with high coverage, and since it usually relies on overlaps of 40 bases or longer, it is better for resolving short repetitive structures.

SGA: https://github.com/jts/sga De novo genome sequence assembly is important both to generate new sequence assemblies for previously uncharacterized genomes and to identify the genome sequence of individuals in a reference-unbiased way. We present memory efficient data structures and algorithms for assembly using the FM-index derived from the compressed Burrows-Wheeler transform, and a new assembler based on these called SGA (String Graph Assembler). We describe algorithms to error correct, assemble and scaffold large sets of sequence data. SGA uses the overlap-based string graph model of assembly, unlike most de novo assemblers that rely on de Bruijn graphs, and is simply parallelizable. We demonstrate the error correction and assembly performance of SGA on 1.2 billion sequence reads from a human genome, which we are able to assemble using 54 GB of memory. The resulting contigs are highly accurate and contiguous, while covering 95% of the reference genome (excluding contigs less than 200bp in length). Because of the low memory requirements and parallelization without requiring inter-process communication, SGA provides the first practical assembler to our knowledge for a mammalian-sized genome on a low-end computing cluster. http://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2011/12/07/gr.126953.111

SSAKE: http://www.bcgsc.ca/bioinfo/software/ssake : Novel DNA sequencing technologies with the potential for up to three orders magnitude more sequence throughput than conventional Sanger sequencing are emerging. The instrument now available from Solexa Ltd, produces millions of short DNA sequences of 25 nt each. Due to ubiquitous repeats in large genomes and the inability of short sequences to uniquely and unambiguously characterize them, the short read length limits applicability for de novo sequencing. However, given the sequencing depth and the throughput of this instrument, stringent assembly of highly identical sequences can be achieved. We describe SSAKE, a tool for aggressively assembling millions of short nucleotide sequences by progressively searching through a prefix tree for the longest possible overlap between any two sequences. SSAKE is designed to help leverage the information from short sequence reads by stringently assembling them into contiguous sequences that can be used to characterize novel sequencing targets. Availability: http://www.bcgsc.ca/bioinfo/software/ssake . http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/4/500.full

VCAKE: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vcake/ : Inexpensive de novo genome sequencing, particularly in organisms with small genomes, is now possible using several new sequencing technologies. Some of these technologies such as that from Illumina's Solexa Sequencing, produce high genomic coverage by generating a very large number of small reads (∼30 bp). While prior work shows that partial assembly can be performed by k-mer extension in error-free reads, this algorithm is unsuccessful with the sequencing error rates found in practice. We present VCAKE (Verified Consensus Assembly by K-mer Extension), a modification of simple k-mer extension that overcomes error by using high depth coverage. Though it is a simple modification of a previous approach, we show significant improvements in assembly results on simulated and experimental datasets that include error. Availability: http://152.2.15.114/~labweb/VCAKE. http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/21/2942.long

QSRA: http://qsra.cgrb.oregonstate.edu : New rapid high-throughput sequencing technologies have sparked the creation of a new class of assembler. Since all high-throughput sequencing platforms incorporate errors in their output, short-read assemblers must be designed to account for this error while utilizing all available data. Results: We have designed and implemented an assembler, Quality-value guided Short Read Assembler, created to take advantage of quality-value scores as a further method of dealing with error. Compared to previous published algorithms, our assembler shows significant improvements not only in speed but also in output quality. Conclusion: QSRA generally produced the highest genomic coverage, while being faster than VCAKE. QSRA is extremely competitive in its longest contig and N50/N80 contig lengths, producing results of similar quality to those of EDENA and VELVET. QSRA provides a step closer to the goal of de novo assembly of complex genomes, improving upon the original VCAKE algorithm by not only drastically reducing runtimes but also increasing the viability of the assembly algorithm through further error handling capabilities. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/10/69

SHARCGS: http://sharcgs.molgen.mpg.de : The latest revolution in the DNA sequencing field has been brought about by the development of automated sequencers that are capable of generating giga base pair data sets quickly and at low cost. Applications of such technologies seem to be limited to resequencing and transcript discovery, due to the shortness of the generated reads. In order to extend the fields of application to de novo sequencing, we developed the SHARCGS algorithm to assemble short-read (25–40-mer) data with high accuracy and speed. The efficiency of SHARCGS was tested on BAC inserts from three eukaryotic species, on two yeast chromosomes, and on two bacterial genomes (Haemophilus influenzae, Escherichia coli). We show that 30-mer-based BAC assemblies have N50 sizes >20 kbp for Drosophila and Arabidopsis and >4 kbp for human in simulations taking missing reads and wrong base calls into account. We assembled 949,974 contigs with length >50 bp, and only one single contig could not be aligned error-free against the reference sequences. We generated 36-mer reads for the genome of Helicobacter acinonychis on the Illumina 1G sequencing instrument and assembled 937 contigs covering 98% of the genome with an N50 size of 3.7 kbp. With the exception of five contigs that differ in 1–4 positions relative to the reference sequence, all contigs matched the genome error-free. Thus, SHARCGS is a suitable tool for fully exploiting novel sequencing technologies by assembling sequence contigs de novo with high confidence and by outperforming existing assembly algorithms in terms of speed and accuracy. http://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2007/10/01/gr.6435207

CABOG: http://wgs-assembler.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page : The emergence of next-generation sequencing platforms led to resurgence of research in whole-genome shotgun assembly algorithms and software. DNA sequencing data from the Roche 454, Illumina/Solexa, and ABI SOLiD platforms typically present shorter read lengths, higher coverage, and different error profiles compared with Sanger sequencing data. Since 2005, several assembly software packages have been created or revised specifically for de novo assembly of next-generation sequencing data. This review summarizes and compares the published descriptions of packages named SSAKE, SHARCGS, VCAKE, Newbler, Celera Assembler, Euler, Velvet, ABySS, AllPaths, and SOAPdenovo. More generally, it compares the two standard methods known as the de Bruijn graph approach and the overlap/layout/consensus approach to assembly. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874646/

Shorty: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~skiena/shorty : New short-read sequencing technologies produce enormous volumes of 25–30 base paired-end reads. The resulting reads have vastly different characteristics than produced by Sanger sequencing, and require different approaches than the previous generation of sequence assemblers. In this paper, we present a short-read de novo assembler particularly targeted at the new ABI SOLiD sequencing technology. Results This paper presents what we believe to be the first de novo sequence assembly results on real data from the emerging SOLiD platform, introduced by Applied Biosystems. Our assembler SHORTY augments short-paired reads using a trivially small number (5 – 10) of seeds of length 300 – 500 bp. These seeds enable us to produce significant assemblies using short-read coverage no more than 100×, which can be obtained in a single run of these high-capacity sequencers. SHORTY exploits two ideas which we believe to be of interest to the short-read assembly community: (1) using single seed reads to crystallize assemblies, and (2) estimating intercontig distances accurately from multiple spanning paired-end reads. Conclusion We demonstrate effective assemblies (N50 contig sizes ~40 kb) of three different bacterial species using simulated SOLiD data. Sequencing artifacts limit our performance on real data, however our results on this data are substantially better than those achieved by competing assemblers. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2648751/

Taipan: http://taipan.sourceforge.net : Summary: The shorter and vastly more numerous reads produced by second-generation sequencing technologies require new tools that can assemble massive numbers of reads in reasonable time. Existing short-read assembly tools can be classified into two categories: greedy extension-based and graph-based. While the graph-based approaches are generally superior in terms of assembly quality, the computer resources required for building and storing a huge graph are very high. In this article, we present Taipan, an assembly algorithm which can be viewed as a hybrid of these two approaches. Taipan uses greedy extensions for contig construction but at each step realizes enough of the corresponding read graph to make better decisions as to how assembly should continue. We show that this approach can achieve an assembly quality at least as good as the graph-based approaches used in the popular Edena and Velvet assembly tools using a moderate amount of computing resources. Availability and Implementation: Source code in C running on Linux is freely available at http://taipan.sourceforge.net http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/17/2279.long

PCAP long-read assembler: http://seq.cs.iastate.edu/pcap.html : This unit describes how to use the Parallel Contig Assembly Program (PCAP) to assemble the data produced by a whole-genome shotgun sequencing project. We present a basic protocol for using PCAP on a multiprocessor computer in a 300-Mb genome assembly project. A support protocol to prepare input files for PCAP is also described. Another basic protocol for using PCAP on a distributed cluster of computers in a 3-Gb genome assembly project is presented, in addition to suggestions for understanding results from PCAP. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/0471250953.bi1103s11/abstract;jsessionid=D1E990D19BC5B53F5145818C47152BE5.f04t03

Seqcons: http://www.seqan.de/uploads/media/MicroRazerS.zip : Motivation: Novel high-throughput sequencing technologies pose new algorithmic challenges in handling massive amounts of short-read, high-coverage data. A robust and versatile consensus tool is of particular interest for such data since a sound multi-read alignment is a prerequisite for variation analyses, accurate genome assemblies and insert sequencing. Results: A multi-read alignment algorithm for de novo or reference-guided genome assembly is presented. The program identifies segments shared by multiple reads and then aligns these segments using a consistency-enhanced alignment graph. On real de novo sequencing data obtained from the newly established NCBI Short Read Archive, the program performs similarly in quality to other comparable programs. On more challenging simulated datasets for insert sequencing and variation analyses, our program outperforms the other tools. Availability: The consensus program can be downloaded fromhttp://www.seqan.de/projects/consensus.html. It can be used stand-alone or in conjunction with the Celera Assembler. Both application scenarios as well as the usage of the tool are described in the documentation. http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/9/1118.abstract