Biology subjects

Buchfink, B.

Publications and source records attributed to Buchfink, B..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

Sensitive clustering of protein sequences at tree-of-life scale using DIAMOND DeepClust

The biosphere genomics era is transforming life science research, but existing methods struggle to efficiently reduce the vast dimensionality of the protein universe. We present DIAMOND DeepClust, an ultra-fast cascaded clustering method optimized to cluster the 19 billion protein sequences currently defining the protein biosphere. As a result, we detect 1.7 billion clusters of which 32% hold more than one sequence. This means that 544 million clusters represent 94% of all known proteins, illustrating that clustering across the tree of life can significantly accelerate comparative studies in the Earth BioGenome era.

genomics↗

bioRxiv2023

Sensitive inference of alignment-safe intervalsfrom biodiverse protein sequence clusters usingEMERALD

Sequence alignments are the foundation of life science research, but most innovation focused on optimal alignments, while ignoring information derived from suboptimal solutions. We argue that one optimal alignment per pairwise sequence comparison was a reasonable approximation when dealing with very similar sequences, but is insufficient when exploring the biodiversity of the protein universe at tree-of-life scale. To overcome this limitation, we introduce pairwise alignment-safety to uncover the amino acid positions robustly shared across all suboptimal solutions. We implemented this approach into EMERALD, a dedicated software solution for alignment-safety inference and apply it to 400k sequences from the SwissProt database.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2019

Annotated bacterial chromosomes from frame-shift-corrected long read metagenomic data

BackgroundShort-read sequencing technologies have long been the work-horse of microbiome analysis. Continuing technological advances are making the application of long-read sequencing to metagenomic samples increasingly feasible.\n\nResultsWe demonstrate that whole bacterial chromosomes can be obtained from a complex community, by application of MinION sequencing to a sample from an EBPR bio-reactor, producing 6Gb of sequence that assembles in to multiple closed bacterial chromosomes. We provide a simple pipeline for processing such data, which includes a new approach to correcting erroneous frame-shifts.\n\nConclusionsAdvances in long read sequencing technology and corresponding algorithms will allow the routine extraction of whole chromosomes from environmental samples, providing a more detailed picture of individual members of a microbiome.

bioinformatics↗