Biology subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Blassel, L..
The authors have withdrawn this manuscript due to a duplicate posting of manuscript number 435621. Therefore, the author does not wish this work to be cited as reference for the project. Please cite and refer to the preprint 435621 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.16.435621). If you have any questions, please contact the corresponding authors.
MotivationThe first cases of the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in December 2019. Until the end of February 2020, the number of available genomes was below 1,000, and their multiple alignment was easily achieved using standard approaches. Subsequently, the availability of genomes has grown dramatically. Moreover, some genomes are of low quality with sequencing/assembly errors, making accurate re-alignment of all genomes nearly impossible on a daily basis. A more efficient, yet accurate approach was clearly required to pursue all subsequent bioinformatics analyses of this crucial data. ResultshCoV-19 genomes are highly conserved, with very few indels and no recombination. This makes the profile HMM approach particularly well suited to align new genomes, add them to an existing alignment and filter problematic ones. Using a core of [~]2,500 high quality genomes, we estimated a profile using HMMER, and implemented this profile in COVID-Align, a user-friendly interface to be used online or as standalone via Docker. The alignment of 1,000 genomes requires less than 20mn on our cluster. Moreover, COVID-Align provides summary statistics, which can be used to determine the sequencing quality and evolutionary novelty of input genomes (e.g. number of new mutations and indels). Availabilityhttps://covalign.pasteur.cloud, hub.docker.com/r/evolbioinfo/covid-align Contactsolivier.gascuel@pasteur.fr, frederic.lemoine@pasteur.fr Supplementary informationSupplementary information is available at Bioinformatics online.