Search bioRxiv⌕ Search

bioRxiv · 10.1101/076067

De novo transcriptome assembly for the spiny mouse (Acomys cahirinus)

Abstract

Background: Spiny mice of the genus Acomys are small desert-dwelling rodents that display physiological characteristics not typically found in rodents. Recent investigations have reported a menstrual cycle and scar free-wound healing in this species; characteristics that are exceedingly rare in mammals, and of considerable interest to the scientific community. These unique physiological traits, and the potential for spiny mice to accurately model human diseases, are driving increased use of this genus in biomedical research. However, little genetic information is currently available for Acomys, limiting the application of some modern investigative techniques. This project aimed to generate a reference transcriptome assembly for the common spiny mouse (Acomys cahirinus).\n\nResults: Illumina RNA sequencing of male and female spiny mice produced 451 million, 150bp paired-end reads from 15 organ types. An extensive survey of de novo transcriptome assembly approaches of high-quality reads using Trinity, SOAPdenovo-Trans, and Velvet/Oases at multiple kmer lengths was conducted with 49 single-kmer assemblies generated from this dataset, with and without in silico normalization and probabilistic error correction. Merging transcripts from 49 individual single-kmer assemblies into a single meta-assembly of non-redundant transcripts using the EvidentialGene tr2aacds pipeline produced the highest quality transcriptome assembly, comprised of 880,080 contigs, of which 189,925 transcripts were annotated using the SwissProt/Uniprot database.\n\nConclusions: This study provides the first detailed characterization of the spiny mouse transcriptome. It validates the application of the EvidentialGene tr2aacds pipeline to generate a high-quality reference transcriptome assembly in a mammalian species, and provides a valuable scientific resource for further investigation into the unique physiological characteristics inherent in the genus Acomys.

Source connections

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Jared Mamrot, Roxane Legaie, Stacey J Ellery, Trevor Wilson, David Gardner, David W Walker, Peter Temple-Smith, Anthony T Papenfuss, Hayley Dickinson. 2016-09-19. De novo transcriptome assembly for the spiny mouse (Acomys cahirinus). https://doi.org/10.1101/076067

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related preprints

Detection and assembly of novel sequence insertions using Linked-Read technology

MotivationEmerging Linked-Read (aka read-cloud) technologies such as the 10x Genomics Chromium system have great potential for accurate detection and phasing of largescale human genome structural variations (SVs). By leveraging the long-range information encoded in Linked-Read sequencing, computational techniques are able to detect and characterize complex structural variations that are previously undetectable by short-read methods. However, there is no available Linked-Read method for detection and assembly of novel sequence insertions, DNA sequences present in a given sequenced sample but missing in the reference genome, without requiring whole genome de novo assembly. In this paper, we propose a novel integrated alignment-based and local-assembly-based algorithm, Novel-X, that effectively uses the barcode information encoded in Linked-Read sequencing datasets to improve detection of such events without the need of whole genome de novo assembly. We evaluated our method on two haploid human genomes, CHM1 and CHM13, sequenced on the 10x Genomics Chromium system. These genomes have been also characterized with high coverage PacBio long-reads recently. We also tested our method on NA12878, the wellknown HapMap CEPH diploid genome and the child genome in a Yoruba trio (NA19240) which was recently studied on multiple sequencing platforms. Detecting insertion events is very challenging using short reads and the only viable available solution is by long-read sequencing (e.g. PabBio or ONT). Our experiments, however, show that Novel-X finds many insertions that cannot be found by state of the art tools using short-read sequencing data but present in PacBio data. Since Linked-Read sequencing is significantly cheaper than long-read sequencing, our method using Linked-Reads enables routine large-scale screenings of sequenced genomes for novel sequence insertions. AvailabilitySoftware is freely available at https://github.com/1dayac/novel_insertions Contactimh2003@med.cornell.edu Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at https://github.com/1dayac/novel_insertions_supplementary

Bioinformatics↗

iCARE: An R Package to Build and Apply Absolute Risk Models

This report describes a R package, called the Individualized Coherent Absolute Risk Estimation (iCARE) tool, that allows researchers to build and evaluate models for absolute risk and apply them to estimate an individuals risk of developing disease during a specified time interval based on a set of user defined input parameters. An attractive feature of the software is that it gives users flexibility to update models rapidly based on new knowledge on risk factors and tailor models to different populations by specifying three input arguments: (1) a model for relative risk, (2) an age-specific disease incidence rate, (3) the distribution of risk factors for the population of interest. The tool can handle missing information on risk factors for individuals for whom risks are to be predicted using a coherent approach where all estimates are derived from a single model after appropriate model averaging. The software allows single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to be incorporated into the model using published odds ratios and allele frequencies. The validation component of the software implements the methods for evaluation of model calibration, discrimination and risk-stratification based on independent validation datasets. We provide an illustration of the utility of iCARE for building, validating and applying absolute risk models using breast cancer as an example.

Bioinformatics↗

deSPI: efficient classification of metagenomic reads with lightweight de Bruijn graph-based reference indexing

SummaryIn metagenomic studies, fast and effective tools are on wide demand to implement taxonomy classification for upto billions of reads. Herein, we propose deSPI, a novel read classification method that classifies reads by recognizing and analyzing the matches between reads and reference with de Bruijn graph-based lightweight reference indexing. deSPI has faster speed with relatively small memory footprint, meanwhile, it can also achieve higher or similar sensitivity and accuracy.\n\nAvailabilitythe C++ source code of deSPI is available at https://github.com/hitbc/deSPI\n\nContactydwang@hit.edu.cn\n\nSupplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Bioinformatics↗