Predicting metabolic modules in incomplete bacterial genomes with MetaPathPredict.

The reconstruction of complete microbial metabolic pathways using 'omics data from environmental samples remains challenging. Computational pipelines for pathway reconstruction that utilize machine learning methods to predict the presence or absence of KEGG modules in incomplete genomes are lacking. Here, we present MetaPathPredict, a software tool that incorporates machine learning models to predict the presence of complete KEGG modules within bacterial genomic datasets. Using gene annotation data and information from the KEGG module database, MetaPathPredict employs deep learning models to predict the presence of KEGG modules in a genome. MetaPathPredict can be used as a command line tool or as a Python module, and both options are designed to be run locally or on a compute cluster. Benchmarks show that MetaPathPredict makes robust predictions of KEGG module presence within highly incomplete genomes.

VIBES: a workflow for annotating and visualizing viral sequences integrated into bacterial genomes.

Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. Many bacteriophages integrate their genomes into the bacterial chromosome and become prophages. Prophages may substantially burden or benefit host bacteria fitness, acting in some cases as parasites and in others as mutualists. Some prophages have been demonstrated to increase host virulence. The increasing ease of bacterial genome sequencing provides an opportunity to deeply explore prophage prevalence and insertion sites. Here we present VIBES (Viral Integrations in Bacterial genomES), a workflow intended to automate prophage annotation in complete bacterial genome sequences. VIBES provides additional context to prophage annotations by annotating bacterial genes and viral proteins in user-provided bacterial and viral genomes. The VIBES pipeline is implemented as a Nextflow-driven workflow, providing a simple, unified interface for execution on local, cluster and cloud computing environments. For each step of the pipeline, a container including all necessary software dependencies is provided. VIBES produces results in simple tab-separated format and generates intuitive and interactive visualizations for data exploration. Despite VIBES's primary emphasis on prophage annotation, its generic alignment-based design allows it to be deployed as a general-purpose sequence similarity search manager. We demonstrate the utility of the VIBES prophage annotation workflow by searching for 178 Pf phage genomes across 1072 Pseudomonas spp. genomes.

nail: software for high-speed, high-sensitivity protein sequence annotation.

" Fast is fine, but accuracy is final. " -- Wyatt Earp. Background: The extreme diversity of newly sequenced organisms and considerable scale of modern sequence databases lead to a tension between competing needs for sensitivity and speed in sequence annotation, with multiple tools displacing the venerable BLAST software suite on one axis or another. Alignment based on profile hidden Markov models (pHMMs) has demonstrated state of art sensitivity, while recent algorithmic advances have resulted in hyper-fast annotation tools with sensitivity close to that of BLAST. Results: Here, we introduce a new tool that bridges the gap between advances in these two directions, reaching speeds comparable to fast annotation methods such as MMseqs2 while retaining most of the sensitivity offered by pHMMs. The tool, called nail, implements a heuristic approximation of the pHMM Forward/Backward (FB) algorithm by identifying a sparse subset of the cells in the FB dynamic programming matrix that contains most of the probability mass. The method produces an accurate approximation of pHMM scores and E-values with high speed and small memory requirements. On a protein benchmark, nail recovers the majority of recall difference between MMseqs2 and HMMER, with run time ~26x faster than HMMER3 (only ~2.4x slower than MMseqs2's sensitive variant). nail is released under the open BSD-3-clause license and is available for download at https://github.com/TravisWheelerLab/nail.

VIBES: A Workflow for Annotating and Visualizing Viral Sequences Integrated into Bacterial Genomes.

Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. Many bacteriophages integrate their genomes into the bacterial chromosome and become prophages. Prophages may substantially burden or benefit host bacteria fitness, acting in some cases as parasites and in others as mutualists, and have been demonstrated to increase host virulence. The increasing ease of bacterial genome sequencing provides an opportunity to deeply explore prophage prevalence and insertion sites. Here we present VIBES, a workflow intended to automate prophage annotation in complete bacterial genome sequences. VIBES provides additional context to prophage annotations by annotating bacterial genes and viral proteins in user-provided bacterial and viral genomes. The VIBES pipeline is implemented as a Nextflow-driven workflow, providing a simple, unified interface for execution on local, cluster, and cloud computing environments. For each step of the pipeline, a container including all necessary software dependencies is provided. VIBES produces results in simple tab separated format and generates intuitive and interactive visualizations for data exploration. Despite VIBES' primary emphasis on prophage annotation, its generic alignment-based design allows it to be deployed as a general-purpose sequence similarity search manager. We demonstrate the utility of the VIBES prophage annotation workflow by searching for 178 Pf phage genomes across 1,072 Pseudomonas spp. genomes. VIBES software is available at https://github.com/TravisWheelerLab/VIBES.

SODA: a TypeScript/JavaScript library for visualizing biological sequence annotation.

We present SODA, a lightweight and open-source visualization library for biological sequence annotations that enables straightforward development of flexible, dynamic and interactive web graphics. SODA is implemented in TypeScript and can be used as a library within TypeScript and JavaScript.