1
|
Shi Q, Zhang Q, Shao M. Accurate assembly of multiple RNA-seq samples with Aletsch. Bioinformatics 2024; 40:i307-i317. [PMID: 38940157 PMCID: PMC11211816 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btae215] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/29/2024] Open
Abstract
MOTIVATION High-throughput RNA sequencing has become indispensable for decoding gene activities, yet the challenge of reconstructing full-length transcripts persists. Traditional single-sample assemblers frequently produce fragmented transcripts, especially in single-cell RNA-seq data. While algorithms designed for assembling multiple samples exist, they encounter various limitations. RESULTS We present Aletsch, a new assembler for multiple bulk or single-cell RNA-seq samples. Aletsch incorporates several algorithmic innovations, including a "bridging" system that can effectively integrate multiple samples to restore missed junctions in individual samples, and a new graph-decomposition algorithm that leverages "supporting" information across multiple samples to guide the decomposition of complex vertices. A standout feature of Aletsch is its application of a random forest model with 50 well-designed features for scoring transcripts. We demonstrate its robust adaptability across different chromosomes, datasets, and species. Our experiments, conducted on RNA-seq data from several protocols, firmly demonstrate Aletsch's significant outperformance over existing meta-assemblers. As an example, when measured with the partial area under the precision-recall curve (pAUC, constrained by precision), Aletsch surpasses the leading assemblers TransMeta by 22.9%-62.1% and PsiCLASS by 23.0%-175.5% on human datasets. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION Aletsch is freely available at https://github.com/Shao-Group/aletsch. Scripts that reproduce the experimental results of this manuscript is available at https://github.com/Shao-Group/aletsch-test.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Qian Shi
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, United States
| | - Qimin Zhang
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, United States
| | - Mingfu Shao
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, United States
- Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, United States
| |
Collapse
|
2
|
Wei J, Xiao Y, Liu J, Herrera-Ulloa A, Loh KH, Xu K. Chromosome-level genome assembly of the silver pomfret Pampus argenteus. Sci Data 2024; 11:234. [PMID: 38395996 PMCID: PMC10891316 DOI: 10.1038/s41597-024-03070-0] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/25/2023] [Accepted: 02/13/2024] [Indexed: 02/25/2024] Open
Abstract
Pampus argenteus (Euphrasen, 1788) is one of the major fishery species in coastal China. Pampus argenteus has a highly specialized morphology, and its declining fishery resources have encouraged massive research efforts on its aquacultural biology. In this study, we reported the first high-quality chromosome-level genome of P. argenteus obtained by integrating Illumina, PacBio HiFi, and Hi-C sequencing techniques. The final size of the genome was 518.06 Mb, with contig and scaffold N50 values of 20.47 and 22.86 Mb, respectively. The sequences were anchored and oriented onto 24 pseudochromosomes based on Hi-C data corresponding to the 24-chromatid karyotype of P. argenteus. A colinear relationship was observed between the P. argenteus genome and that of a closely related species (Scomber japonicus). A total of 24,696 protein-coding genes were identified from the genome, 98.9% of which were complete BUSCOs. This report represents the first case of high-quality chromosome-level genome assembly for P. argenteus and can provide valuable information for future evolutionary, conservation, and aquacultural research.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Jiehong Wei
- Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, China
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
| | - Yongshuang Xiao
- Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, China
| | - Jing Liu
- Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, China.
| | | | - Kar-Hoe Loh
- Institute of Ocean and Earth Sciences, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
| | - Kuidong Xu
- Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, China.
| |
Collapse
|
3
|
Zahin T, Shi Q, Zang XC, Shao M. Accurate Assembly of Circular RNAs with TERRACE. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2024:2024.02.09.579380. [PMID: 38370635 PMCID: PMC10871327 DOI: 10.1101/2024.02.09.579380] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/20/2024]
Abstract
Circular RNA (circRNA) is a class of RNA molecules that forms a closed loop with its 5' and 3' ends covalently bonded. Due to this specific structure circRNAs are more stable than linear RNAs, admit distinct biological properties and functions, and have been proven to be promising biomarkers. Circular RNAs were severely overlooked previously owing to the biases in the RNA-seq protocols and in the detection algorithms, but recently gained tremendous attentions in both aspects. However, most existing methods for assembling circRNAs heavily rely on the annotated transcriptomes, and hence exhibit unsatisfactory accuracy when a high-quality transcriptome is unavailable. Here we present TERRACE, a new algorithm for full-length assembly of circRNAs from paired-end total RNA-seq data. TERRACE uses the splice graph as the underlying data structure to organize the splicing and coverage information. We transform the problem of assembling circRNAs into finding two paths that "bridge" the three fragments in the splice graph induced by back-spliced reads. To solve this formulation, we adopted a definition for optimal bridging paths and a dynamic programming algorithm to calculate such paths, an approach that was proven useful for assembling linear RNAs. TERRACE features an efficient algorithm to detect back-spliced reads that are missed by RNA-seq aligners, contributing to its much improved sensitivity. It also incorporates a new machine-learning approach that is trained to assign a confidence score to each assembled circRNA, which is shown superior to using abundance for scoring. TERRACE is compared with leading circRNA detection methods on both simulations and biological datasets. Our method consistently outperforms by a large margin in sensitivity while maintaining better or comparable precision. In particular, when the annotations are not provided, TERRACE can assemble 123%-412% more correct circRNAs than state-of-the-art methods on human tissues. TERRACE presents a major leap on assembling full-length circRNAs from RNA-seq data, and we expect it to be widely used in the downstream research on circRNAs.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Tasfia Zahin
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
| | - Qian Shi
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
| | - Xiaofei Carl Zang
- Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
| | - Mingfu Shao
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
- Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
| |
Collapse
|
4
|
Zhang Q, Shao M. Transcript assembly and annotations: Bias and adjustment. PLoS Comput Biol 2023; 19:e1011734. [PMID: 38127855 PMCID: PMC10769104 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011734] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/07/2023] [Revised: 01/05/2024] [Accepted: 12/04/2023] [Indexed: 12/23/2023] Open
Abstract
Transcript annotations play a critical role in gene expression analysis as they serve as a reference for quantifying isoform-level expression. The two main sources of annotations are RefSeq and Ensembl/GENCODE, but discrepancies between their methodologies and information resources can lead to significant differences. It has been demonstrated that the choice of annotation can have a significant impact on gene expression analysis. Furthermore, transcript assembly is closely linked to annotations, as assembling large-scale available RNA-seq data is an effective data-driven way to construct annotations, and annotations are often served as benchmarks to evaluate the accuracy of assembly methods. However, the influence of different annotations on transcript assembly is not yet fully understood. We investigate the impact of annotations on transcript assembly. Surprisingly, we observe that opposite conclusions can arise when evaluating assemblers with different annotations. To understand this striking phenomenon, we compare the structural similarity of annotations at various levels and find that the primary structural difference across annotations occurs at the intron-chain level. Next, we examine the biotypes of annotated and assembled transcripts and uncover a significant bias towards annotating and assembling transcripts with intron retentions, which explains above the contradictory conclusions. We develop a standalone tool, available at https://github.com/Shao-Group/irtool, that can be combined with an assembler to generate an assembly without intron retentions. We evaluate the performance of such a pipeline and offer guidance to select appropriate assembling tools for different application scenarios.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Qimin Zhang
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America
| | - Mingfu Shao
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America
- Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America
| |
Collapse
|
5
|
Li X, Shao M. On de novo Bridging Paired-end RNA-seq Data. ACM-BCB ... ... : THE ... ACM CONFERENCE ON BIOINFORMATICS, COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY AND BIOMEDICINE. ACM CONFERENCE ON BIOINFORMATICS, COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY AND BIOMEDICINE 2023; 2023:41. [PMID: 38045531 PMCID: PMC10692976 DOI: 10.1145/3584371.3612987] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/05/2023]
Abstract
The high-throughput short-reads RNA-seq protocols often produce paired-end reads, with the middle portion of the fragments being unsequenced. We explore if the full-length fragments can be computationally reconstructed from the sequenced two ends in the absence of the reference genome-a problem here we refer to as de novo bridging. Solving this problem provides longer, more informative RNA-seq reads, and benefits downstream RNA-seq analysis such as transcript assembly, expression quantification, and splicing differential analysis. However, de novo bridging is a challenging and complicated task owing to alternative splicing, transcript noises, and sequencing errors. It remains unclear if the data provides sufficient information for accurate bridging, let alone efficient algorithms that determine the true bridges. Methods have been proposed to bridge paired-end reads in the presence of reference genome (called reference-based bridging), but the algorithms are far away from scaling for de novo bridging as the underlying compacted de Bruijn graph (cdBG) used in the latter task often contains millions of vertices and edges. We designed a new truncated Dijkstra's algorithm for this problem, and proposed a novel algorithm that reuses the shortest path tree to avoid running the truncated Dijkstra's algorithm from scratch for all vertices for further speeding up. These innovative techniques result in scalable algorithms that can bridge all paired-end reads in a cdBG with millions of vertices. Our experiments showed that paired-end RNA-seq reads can be accurately bridged to a large extent. The resulting tool is freely available at https://github.com/Shao-Group/rnabridge-denovo.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Xiang Li
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA
| | - Mingfu Shao
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA
| |
Collapse
|
6
|
Oreper D, Klaeger S, Jhunjhunwala S, Delamarre L. The peptide woods are lovely, dark and deep: Hunting for novel cancer antigens. Semin Immunol 2023; 67:101758. [PMID: 37027981 DOI: 10.1016/j.smim.2023.101758] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/31/2022] [Revised: 03/22/2023] [Accepted: 03/22/2023] [Indexed: 04/08/2023]
Abstract
Harnessing the patient's immune system to control a tumor is a proven avenue for cancer therapy. T cell therapies as well as therapeutic vaccines, which target specific antigens of interest, are being explored as treatments in conjunction with immune checkpoint blockade. For these therapies, selecting the best suited antigens is crucial. Most of the focus has thus far been on neoantigens that arise from tumor-specific somatic mutations. Although there is clear evidence that T-cell responses against mutated neoantigens are protective, the large majority of these mutations are not immunogenic. In addition, most somatic mutations are unique to each individual patient and their targeting requires the development of individualized approaches. Therefore, novel antigen types are needed to broaden the scope of such treatments. We review high throughput approaches for discovering novel tumor antigens and some of the key challenges associated with their detection, and discuss considerations when selecting tumor antigens to target in the clinic.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Daniel Oreper
- Genentech, 1 DNA way, South San Francisco, 94080 CA, USA.
| | - Susan Klaeger
- Genentech, 1 DNA way, South San Francisco, 94080 CA, USA.
| | | | | |
Collapse
|
7
|
Zhang Q, Shao M. Transcript Assembly and Annotations: Bias and Adjustment. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2023:2023.04.20.537700. [PMID: 37131680 PMCID: PMC10153229 DOI: 10.1101/2023.04.20.537700] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/04/2023]
Abstract
Motivation Transcript annotations play a critical role in gene expression analysis as they serve as a reference for quantifying isoform-level expression. The two main sources of annotations are RefSeq and Ensembl/GENCODE, but discrepancies between their methodologies and information resources can lead to significant differences. It has been demonstrated that the choice of annotation can have a significant impact on gene expression analysis. Furthermore, transcript assembly is closely linked to annotations, as assembling large-scale available RNA-seq data is an effective data-driven way to construct annotations, and annotations are often served as benchmarks to evaluate the accuracy of assembly methods. However, the influence of different annotations on transcript assembly is not yet fully understood. Results We investigate the impact of annotations on transcript assembly. We observe that conflicting conclusions can arise when evaluating assemblers with different annotations. To understand this striking phenomenon, we compare the structural similarity of annotations at various levels and find that the primary structural difference across annotations occurs at the intron-chain level. Next, we examine the biotypes of annotated and assembled transcripts and uncover a significant bias towards annotating and assembling transcripts with intron retentions, which explains above the contradictory conclusions. We develop a standalone tool, available at https://github.com/Shao-Group/irtool, that can be combined with an assembler to generate an assembly without intron retentions. We evaluate the performance of such a pipeline and offer guidance to select appropriate assembling tools for different application scenarios.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Qimin Zhang
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The Pennsylvania State University
| | - Mingfu Shao
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The Pennsylvania State University
- Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University
| |
Collapse
|
8
|
Parada GE, Hemberg M. Bridge over troubled transcripts. NATURE COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE 2022; 2:142-143. [PMID: 38177442 DOI: 10.1038/s43588-022-00219-y] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/06/2024]
Affiliation(s)
- Guillermo E Parada
- Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
| | - Martin Hemberg
- Evergrande Center for Immunologic Diseases, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.
| |
Collapse
|