Search bioRxivSearch

Biology subjects

Patro, R.

Publications and source records attributed to Patro, R..

9 recordsLinked to original sources

A junction coverage compatibility score to quantify the reliability of transcript abundance estimates and annotation catalogs

Most methods for statistical analysis of RNA-seq data take a matrix of abundance estimates for some type of genomic features as their input, and consequently the quality of any obtained results are directly dependent on the quality of these abundances. Here, we present the junction coverage compatibility (JCC) score, which provides a way to evaluate the reliability of transcript-level abundance estimates as well as the accuracy of transcript annotation catalogs. It works by comparing the observed number of reads spanning each annotated splice junction in a genomic region to the predicted number of junction-spanning reads, inferred from the estimated transcript abundances and the genomic coordinates of the corresponding annotated transcripts. We show that while most genes show good agreement between the observed and predicted junction coverages, there is a small set of genes that do not. Genes with poor agreement are found regardless of the method used to estimate transcript abundances, and the corresponding transcript abundances should be treated with care in any downstream analyses.

bioinformatics

Alevin: An integrated method for dscRNA-seq quantification

We introduce alevin, a fast end-to-end pipeline to process droplet-based single cell RNA sequencing data, which performs cell barcode detection, read mapping, unique molecular identifier deduplication, gene count estimation, and cell barcode whitelisting. Alevins approach to UMI deduplication accounts for both gene-unique reads and reads that multimap between genes. This addresses the inherent bias in existing tools which discard gene-ambiguous reads, and improves the accuracy of gene abundance estimates.

bioinformatics

Mantis: A Fast, Small, and Exact Large-Scale Sequence Search Index

MotivationSequence-level searches on large collections of RNA-seq experiments, such as the NIH Sequence Read Archive (SRA), would enable one to ask many questions about the expression or variation of a given transcript in a population. Bloom filter-based indexes and variants, such as the Sequence Bloom Tree, have been proposed in the past to solve this problem. However, these approaches suffer from fundamental limitations of the Bloom filter, resulting in slow build and query times, less-than-optimal space usage, and large numbers of false positives.\n\nResultsThis paper introduces Mantis, a space-efficient data structure that can be used to index thousands of rawread experiments and facilitate large-scale sequence searches on those experiments. Mantis uses counting quotient filters instead of Bloom filters, enabling rapid index builds and queries, small indexes, and exact results, i.e., no false positives or negatives. Furthermore, Mantis is also a colored de Bruijn graph representation, so it supports fast graph traversal and other topological analyses in addition to large-scale sequence-level searches.\n\nIn our performance evaluation, index construction with Mantis is 4.4x faster and yields a 20% smaller index than the state-of-the-art split sequence Bloom tree (SSBT). For queries, Mantis is 6x -108x faster than SSBT and has no false positives or false negatives. For example, Mantis was able to search for all 200,400 known human transcripts in an index of 2652 human blood, breast, and brain RNA-seq experiments in one hour and 22 minutes; SBT took close to 4 days and AllSomeSBT took about eight hours.\n\nMantis is written in C++11 and is available at https://github.com/splatlab/mantis.

bioinformatics

A space and time-efficient index for the compacted colored de Bruijn graph

We present a novel data structure for representing and indexing the compacted colored de Bruijn graph, which allows for efficient pattern matching and retrieval of the reference information associated with each k-mer. As the popularity of the de Bruijn graph as an index has increased over the past few years, so have the number of proposed representations of this structure. Existing structures typically fall into two categories; those that are hashing-based and provide very fast access to the underlying k-mer information, and those that are space-frugal and provide asymptotically efficient but practically slower pattern search.\n\nOur representation achieves a compromise between these two extremes. By building upon minimum perfect hashing, carefully organizing our data structure, and making use of succinct representations where applicable, our data structure provides practically fast k-mer lookup while greatly reducing the space compared to traditional hashing-based implementations. Further, we describe a sampling scheme built on the same underlying representation, which provides the ability to trade off k-mer query speed for a reduction in the de Bruijn graph index size. We believe this representation strikes a desirable balance between speed and space usage, and it will allow for fast search on large reference sequences.\n\nPufferfish is developed in C++11, is open source (GPL v3), and is available at https://github.com/COMBINE-lab/Pufferfish. The scripts used to generate the results in this manuscript are available at https://github.com/COMBINE-lab/pufferfish_experiments.

bioinformatics

Towards Selective-Alignment: Producing Accurate And Sensitive Alignments Using Quasi-Mapping

MotivationWe introduce an algorithm for selectively aligning high-throughput sequencing reads to a transcriptome, with the goal of improving transcript-level quantification. This algorithm attempts to bridge the gap between fast \"mapping\" algorithms and more traditional alignment procedures.\n\nResultsWe adopt a hybrid approach that is able to increase mapping accuracy while still retaining much of the efficiency of fast mapping algorithms. To achieve this, we introduce a new approach that explores the candidate search space with high sensitivity as well as a collection of carefully-engineered heuristics to efficiently filter these candidates. Additionally, unlike the strategies adopted in most aligners which first align the ends of paired-end reads independently, we introduce a notion of co-mapping. This procedure exploits relevant information between the \"hits\" from the left and right ends of paired-end reads before full alignments or mappings for each are generated, which improves the efficiency of filtering likely-spurious alignments. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of selective alignment in improving the accuracy of efficient transcript-level quantification from RNA-seq reads. Specifically, we show that selective-alignment is able to resolve certain complex mapping scenarios that can confound existing fast mapping procedures, while simultaneously eliminating spurious alignments that fast mapping approaches can produce.\n\nAvailabilitySelective-alignment is implemented in C++11 as a part of Salmon, and is available as open source software, under GPL v3, at: https://github.com/COMBINE-lab/salmon/tree/selective-alignment\n\nContactrob.patro@cs.stonybrook.edu

bioinformatics

Rainbowfish: A Succinct Colored de Bruijn Graph Representation

The colored de Bruijn graph-- a variant of the de Bruijn graph which associates each edge (i.e., k-mer) with some set of colors -- is an increasingly important combinatorial structure in computational biology. Iqbal et al. demonstrated the utility of this structure for representing and assembling a collection (pop-ulation) of genomes, and showed how it can be used to accurately detect genetic variants. Muggli et al. introduced VARI, a representation of the colored de Bruijn graph that adopts the BOSS representation for the de Bruijn graph topology and achieves considerable savings in space over Cortex, albeit with some sacrifice in speed. The memory-efficient representation of VARI allows the colored de Bruijn graph to be constructed and analyzed for large datasets, beyond what is possible with Cortex.\n\nIn this paper, we introduce Rainbowfish, a succinct representation of the color information of the colored de Bruijn graph that reduces the space usage even further. Our representation also uses BOSS to represent the de Bruijn graph, but decomposes the color sets based on an equivalence relation and exploits the inherent skewness in the distribution of these color sets. The Rainbowfish representation is compressed based on the 0th-order entropy of the color sets, which can lead to a significant reduction in the space required to store the relevant information for each edge. In practice, Rainbowfish achieves up to a 20 x improvement in space over VARI. Rainbowfish is written in C++11 and is available at https://github.com/COMBINE-lab/rainbowfish.

bioinformatics

Squeakr: An Exact and Approximate k-mer Counting System

Motivationk-mer-based algorithms have become increasingly popular in the processing of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) data. These algorithms span the gamut of the analysis pipeline from k-mer counting (e.g., for estimating assembly parameters), to error correction, genome and transcriptome assembly, and even transcript quantification. Yet, these tasks often use very different k-mer representations and data structures. In this paper, we set forth the fundamental operations for maintaining multisets of k-mers and classify existing systems from a data-structural perspective. We then show how to build a k-mer-counting and multiset-representation system using the counting quotient filter (CQF), a feature-rich approximate membership query (AMQ) data structure. We introduce the k-mer-counting/querying system Squeakr (Simple Quotient filter-based Exact and Approximate Kmer Representation), which is based on the CQF. This off-the-shelf data structure turns out to be an efficient (approximate or exact) representation for sets or multisets of k-mers.\n\nResultsSqueakr takes 2x-3;4.3x less time than the state-of-the-art to count and perform a random-point-query workload. Squeakr is memory-efficient, consuming 1.5X-4.3X less memory than the state-of-the-art. It offers competitive counting performance, and answers point queries (i.e. queries for the abundance of a particular k-mer) over an order-of-magnitude faster than other systems. The Squeakr representation of the k-mer multiset turns out to be immediately useful for downstream processing (e.g., de Bruijn graph traversal) because it supports fast queries and dynamic k-mer insertion, deletion, and modification.\n\nAvailabilityhttps://github.com/splatlab/squeakr\n\nContact ppandey@cs.stonybrook.edu

bioinformatics

Graph regularized, semi-supervised learning improves annotation of de novo transcriptomes

We present a new method, GRASS, for improving an initial annotation of de novo transcriptomes. GRASS makes the shared-sequence relationships between assembled contigs explicit in the form of a graph, and applies an algorithm that performs label propagation to transfer annotations between related contigs and modifies the graph topology iteratively. We demonstrate that GRASS increases the completeness and accuracy of the initial annotation, allows for improved differential analysis, and is very efficient, typically taking 10s of minutes.

bioinformatics

Quark enables semi-reference-based compression of RNA-seq data

MotivationThe past decade has seen an exponential increase in biological sequencing capacity, and there has been a simultaneous effort to help organize and archive some of the vast quantities of sequencing data that are being generated. While these developments are tremendous from the perspective of maximizing the scientific utility of available data, they come with heavy costs. The storage and transmission of such vast amounts of sequencing data is expensive.\n\nResultsWe present Quark, a semi-reference-based compression tool designed for RNA-seq data. Quark makes use of a reference sequence when encoding reads, but produces a representation that can be decoded independently, without the need for a reference. This allows Quark to achieve markedly better compression rates than existing reference-free schemes, while still relieving the burden of assuming a specific, shared reference sequence between the encoder and decoder. We demonstrate that Quark achieves state-of-the-art compression rates, and that, typically, only a small fraction of the reference sequence must be encoded along with the reads to allow reference-free decompression.\n\nAvailabilityQuark is implemented in C++11, and is available under a GPLv3 license at www.github.com/COMBINE-lab/quark.\n\nContactrob.patro@cs.stonybrook.edu

bioinformatics