Assembling genomes using short-read sequencing technology

Short-read sequencing technology can bring gigabase genome assemblies in under a million dollars

DIDA: Distributed Indexing Dispatched Alignment

One essential application in bioinformatics that is affected by the high-throughput sequencing data deluge is the sequence alignment problem, where nucleotide or amino acid sequences are queried against targets to find regions of close similarity. When queries are too many and/or targets are too large, the alignment process becomes computationally challenging. This is usually addressed by preprocessing techniques, where the queries and/or targets are indexed for easy access while searching for matches. When the target is static, such as in an established reference genome, the cost of indexing is amortized by reusing the generated index. However, when the targets are non-static, such as contigs in the intermediate steps of a de novo assembly process, a new index must be computed for each run. To address such scalability problems, we present DIDA, a novel framework that distributes the indexing and alignment tasks into smaller subtasks over a cluster of compute nodes. It provides a workflow beyond the common practice of embarrassingly parallel implementations. DIDA is a cost-effective, scalable and modular framework for the sequence alignment problem in terms of memory usage and runtime. It can be employed in large-scale alignments to draft genomes and intermediate stages of de novo assembly runs. The DIDA source code, sample files and user manual are available through http://www.bcgsc.ca/platform/bioinfo/software/dida. The software is released under the British Columbia Cancer Agency License (BCCA), and is free for academic use

The genetic landscape of high-risk neuroblastoma

Neuroblastoma is a malignancy of the developing sympathetic nervous system that often presents with widespread metastatic disease, resulting in survival rates of less than 50%1. To determine the spectrum of somatic mutation in high-risk neuroblastoma, we studied 240 cases using a combination of whole exome, genome and transcriptome sequencing as part of the Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET) initiative. Here we report a low median exonic mutation frequency of 0.60 per megabase (0.48 non-silent), and remarkably few recurrently mutated genes in these tumors. Genes with significant somatic mutation frequencies included ALK (9.2% of cases), PTPN11 (2.9%), ATRX (2.5%, an additional 7.1% had focal deletions), MYCN (1.7%, a recurrent p.Pro44Leu alteration), and NRAS (0.83%). Rare, potentially pathogenic germline variants were significantly enriched in ALK, CHEK2, PINK1, and BARD1. The relative paucity of recurrent somatic mutations in neuroblastoma challenges current therapeutic strategies reliant upon frequently altered oncogenic drivers

Assemblathon 2: evaluating de novo methods of genome assembly in three vertebrate species

Background: The process of generating raw genome sequence data continues to become cheaper, faster, and more accurate. However, assembly of such data into high-quality, finished genome sequences remains challenging. Many genome assembly tools are available, but they differ greatly in terms of their performance (speed, scalability, hardware requirements, acceptance of newer read technologies) and in their final output (composition of assembled sequence). More importantly, it remains largely unclear how to best assess the quality of assembled genome sequences. The Assemblathon competitions are intended to assess current state-of-the-art methods in genome assembly. Results: In Assemblathon 2, we provided a variety of sequence data to be assembled for three vertebrate species (a bird, a fish, and snake). This resulted in a total of 43 submitted assemblies from 21 participating teams. We evaluated these assemblies using a combination of optical map data, Fosmid sequences, and several statistical methods. From over 100 different metrics, we chose ten key measures by which to assess the overall quality of the assemblies. Conclusions: Many current genome assemblers produced useful assemblies, containing a significant representation of their genes and overall genome structure. However, the high degree of variability between the entries suggests that there is still much room for improvement in the field of genome assembly and that approaches which work well in assembling the genome of one species may not necessarily work well for another

Frequent mutation of histone-modifying genes in non-Hodgkin lymphoma

Follicular lymphoma (FL) and diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) are the two most common non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHLs). Here we sequenced tumour and matched normal DNA from 13 DLBCL cases and one FL case to identify genes with mutations in B-cell NHL. We analysed RNA-seq data from these and another 113 NHLs to identify genes with candidate mutations, and then re-sequenced tumour and matched normal DNA from these cases to confirm 109 genes with multiple somatic mutations. Genes with roles in histone modification were frequent targets of somatic mutation. For example, 32% of DLBCL and 89% of FL cases had somatic mutations in MLL2, which encodes a histone methyltransferase, and 11.4% and 13.4% of DLBCL and FL cases, respectively, had mutations in MEF2B, a calcium-regulated gene that cooperates with CREBBP and EP300 in acetylating histones. Our analysis suggests a previously unappreciated disruption of chromatin biology in lymphomagenesis

Efficient assembly of large genomes

Genome sequence assembly presents a fascinating and frequently-changing challenge. As DNA sequencing technologies evolve, the bioinformatics methods used to assemble sequencing data must evolve along with it. Sequencing technology has evolved from slab gel sequencing, to capillary sequencing, to short read sequencing by synthesis, to long-read and linked-read single-molecule sequencing. Each evolutionary jump in sequencing technology required developing new bioinformatic tools to address the unique characteristics of its sequencing data. This work reports the development of efficient methods to assemble short-read and linked-read sequencing data, named ABySS 2.0 and Tigmint. ABySS 2.0 reduces the memory requirements of short-read genome sequencing assembly by ten fold compared to ABySS 1.0. It does so by using a Bloom filter probabilistic data structure to represent a de Bruijn graph. Tigmint uses linked reads to identify large-scale errors in a genome sequence assembly. Correcting assembly errors using Tigmint before scaffolding improves both the contiguity and correctness of a human genome assembly compared to scaffolding without correction. I have also applied these methods to assemble the 12 gigabase genome of western redcedar (Thuja plicata), which is four times the size of the human genome. Although numerous mitochondrial genomes of angiosperm are available, few mitochondria of gymnosperms have been sequenced. I assembled the plastid and mitochondrial genomes of white spruce (Picea glauca) using whole genome short read sequencing. I assembled the mitochondrial genome of Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) using whole genome long read sequencing, the largest complete genome assembly of a gymnosperm mitochondrion. The mitochondrial genomes of both species include a remarkable number of trans-spliced genes. I have developed two additional tools, UniqTag and ORCA. UniqTag assigns unique and stable gene identifiers to genes based on their sequence content. This gene labeling system addresses the inconvenience of gene identifiers changing between versions of a genome assembly. ORCA is a comprehensive bioinformatics computing environment, which includes hundreds of bioinformatics tools in a single easily-installed Docker image, and is useful for education and research. The assembly of linked read and long read sequencing of large molecules of DNA have yielded substantial improvements in the quality of genome assembly projects.Science, Faculty ofGraduat

Ethernet Communication in Lighting Control

<p>Pathway Connectivity Inc. designs products to control entertainment and architectural lighting devices. Their products are typically installed in theatres, theme parks, and cruise ships. Lighting control devices currently use an industry standard protocol, DMX512, or digital multiplex 512, which allows 512 lighting fixtures to be controlled using a single cable. With the advent of more complex lighting fixtures, such as moving lights, this aging protocol is becoming less suitable. During my employ at Pathway Connectivity, the company designed the Pathport to serve as a bridge between the installed base of DMX products and today’s ubiquitous Ethernet networks. This thesis considers the design of the Pathport and measures a number of performance parameters such as network latency, dropped packet rate, and processor utilisation.</p

Predicting Job Salaries from Text Descriptions

An online job listing web site has extensive data that is primarily unstructured text descriptions of the posted jobs. Many listings provide a salary, but as many as half do not. For those listings that do not provide a salary, it is useful to predict a salary based on the description of that job. We tested a variety of regression methods, including maximum-likelihood regression, lasso regression, artificial neural net- works and random forests. We optimized the parameters of each of these methods, validated the performance of each model using cross validation and compared the performance of these methods on a withheld test data set.Science, Faculty ofStatistics, Department ofUnreviewedGraduat

UniqTag: Content-Derived Unique and Stable Identifiers for Gene Annotation

<div><p>When working on an ongoing genome sequencing and assembly project, it is rather inconvenient when gene identifiers change from one build of the assembly to the next. The gene labelling system described here, UniqTag, addresses this common challenge. UniqTag assigns a unique identifier to each gene that is a representative <i>k</i>-mer, a string of length <i>k</i>, selected from the sequence of that gene. Unlike serial numbers, these identifiers are stable between different assemblies and annotations of the same data without requiring that previous annotations be lifted over by sequence alignment. We assign UniqTag identifiers to ten builds of the Ensembl human genome spanning eight years to demonstrate this stability. The implementation of UniqTag in Ruby and an R package are available at <a href="https://github.com/sjackman/uniqtag" target="_blank">https://github.com/sjackman/uniqtag</a> sjackman/uniqtag. The R package is also available from CRAN: install.packages ("uniqtag"). Supplementary material and code to reproduce it is available at <a href="https://github.com/sjackman/uniqtag-paper" target="_blank">https://github.com/sjackman/uniqtag-paper</a>.</p></div

Scaffolding large genomes using mate-pair sequencing and ABySS

<p>The sequencing and assembly of the white spruce genome (<em>Picea glauca</em>) using ABySS</p