iReport: a generalised Galaxy solution for integrated experimental reporting

Galactic Circos: User-friendly Circos plots within the Galaxy platform

BACKGROUND

Circos is a popular, highly flexible software package for the circular visualization of complex datasets. While especially popular in the field of genomic analysis, Circos enables interactive graphing of any analytical data, including alternative scientific domain data and non-scientific data. This high degree of flexibility also comes with a high degree of complexity, which may present an obstacle for researchers not trained in programming or the UNIX command line. The Galaxy platform provides a user-friendly browser-based graphical interface incorporating a broad range of "wrapped" command line tools to facilitate accessibility.

FINDINGS

We have developed a Galaxy wrapper for Circos, thus combining the power of Circos with the accessibility and ease of use of the Galaxy platform. The combination substantially simplifies the specification and configuration of Circos plots for end users while retaining the power to produce publication-quality visualizations of complex multidimensional datasets.

CONCLUSIONS

Galactic Circos enables the creation of publication-ready Circos plots using only a web browser, via the Galaxy platform. Users may download the full set of Circos configuration files of their plots for further manual customization. This version of Circos is available as an open-source installable application from the Galaxy ToolShed, with its use clarified in a training manual hosted by the Galaxy Training Network.

Galaxy mothur Toolset (GmT): a user-friendly application for 16S rRNA gene sequencing analysis using mothur

Background

The determination of microbial communities using the mothur tool suite (https://www.mothur.org) is well established. However, mothur requires bioinformatics-based proficiency in order to perform calculations via the command-line. Galaxy is a project dedicated to providing a user-friendly web interface for such command-line tools (https://galaxyproject.org/).

Results

We have integrated the full set of 125+ mothur tools into Galaxy as the Galaxy mothur Toolset (GmT) and provided a set of workflows to perform end-to-end 16S rRNA gene analyses and integrate with third-party visualization and reporting tools. We demonstrate the utility of GmT by analyzing the mothur MiSeq standard operating procedure (SOP) dataset (https://www.mothur.org/wiki/MiSeq_SOP).

Conclusions

GmT is available from the Galaxy Tool Shed, and a workflow definition file and full Galaxy training manual for the mothur SOP have been created. A Docker image with a fully configured GmT Galaxy is also available.

Development and evaluation of a culture-free microbiota profiling platform (MYcrobiota) for clinical diagnostics

Microbiota profiling has the potential to greatly impact on routine clinical diagnostics by detecting DNA derived from live, fastidious, and dead bacterial cells present within clinical samples. Such results could potentially be used to benefit patients by influencing antibiotic prescribing practices or to generate new classical-based diagnostic methods, e.g., culture or PCR. However, technical flaws in 16S rRNA gene next-generation sequencing (NGS) protocols, together with the requirement for access to bioinformatics, currently hinder the introduction of microbiota analysis into clinical diagnostics. Here, we report on the development and evaluation of an “end-to-end” microbiota profiling platform (MYcrobiota), which combines our previously validated micelle PCR/NGS (micPCR/NGS) methodology with an easy-to-use, dedicated bioinformatics pipeline. The newly designed bioinformatics pipeline processes micPCR/NGS data automatically and summarizes the results in interactive, but simple web reports. In order to explore the utility of MYcrobiota in clinical diagnostics, 47 clinical samples (40 “damaged skin” samples and 7 synovial fluids) were investigated using routine bacterial culture as comparator. MYcrobiota confirmed the presence of bacterial DNA in 37/37 culture-positive samples and detected bacterial taxa in 2/10 culture-negative samples. Moreover, 36/38 potentially relevant aerobic bacterial taxa and 3/3 mixtures of anaerobic bacteria were identified using culture and MYcrobiota, with the sensitivity and specificity being 95%. Interestingly, the majority of the 448 bacterial taxa identified using MYcrobiota were not identified using culture, which could potentially have an impact on clinical decision-making. Taken together, the development of MYcrobiota is a promising step towards the introduction of microbiota analysis into clinical diagnostic laboratories.

Maligner: a fast ordered restriction map aligner

MOTIVATION

The Optical Mapping System discovers structural variants and potentiates sequence assembly of genomes via scaffolding and comparisons that globally validate or correct sequence assemblies. Despite its utility, there are few publicly available tools for aligning optical mapping datasets.

RESULTS

Here we present software, named 'Maligner', for the alignment of both single molecule restriction maps (Rmaps) and in silico restriction maps of sequence contigs to a reference. Maligner provides two modes of alignment: an efficient, sensitive dynamic programming implementation that scales to large eukaryotic genomes, and a faster indexed based implementation for finding alignments with unmatched sites in the reference but not the query. We compare our software to other publicly available tools on Rmap datasets and show that Maligner finds more correct alignments in comparable runtime. Lastly, we introduce the M-Score statistic for normalizing alignment scores across restriction maps and demonstrate its utility for selecting high quality alignments.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION

The Maligner software is written in C ++ and is available at https://github.com/LeeMendelowitz/maligner under the GNU General Public License.

CONTACT

mpop@umiacs.umd.edu.