Computational complexity of algorithms for sequence comparison, short-read assembly and genome alignment

Techno-ethical concerns related to genetic sequencing reports

Recombinant DNA technologies of the current era, most of which are comparable to past works of science fiction, have had diverse and significant impacts on social life. Among them, genetic sequencing deserves particular attention. The widespread use of genetic testing has raised numerous concerns regarding autonomy, confidentiality and privacy. In this context, the proliferation of 'gene for X' reports influences debates about the potentially beneficial or detrimental uses of genetics. While several studies have reported concerns related to the collection, storage and use of genetic data, few have considered the technical shortcomings that can affect the reliability of interpretation of sequencing data. In this essay, we will cover some of the current practices of genetic testing and safety aspects of DNA data. To evaluate the reliability of DNA data we will raise the question whether an 'overestimation' of researchers' results might reflect an 'underestimation' of our genetic make-up in terms of the limitations of the parameters necessary for the correct interpretation of genomic DNA. Following that question we will highlight the responsibility of researchers for proper science communication to avoid misleading information about genetic sequencing data.

Khairuddin RF, Mahmood Y. Genome assembly composition of the String "ACGT" array: a review of data structure accuracy and performance challenges

Background

The development of sequencing technology increases the number of genomes being sequenced. However, obtaining a quality genome sequence remains a challenge in genome assembly by assembling a massive number of short strings (reads) with the presence of repetitive sequences (repeats). Computer algorithms for genome assembly construct the entire genome from reads in two approaches. The de novo approach concatenates the reads based on the exact match between their suffix-prefix (overlapping). Reference-guided approach orders the reads based on their offsets in a well-known reference genome (reads alignment). The presence of repeats extends the technical ambiguity, making the algorithm unable to distinguish the reads resulting in misassembly and affecting the assembly approach accuracy. On the other hand, the massive number of reads causes a big assembly performance challenge.

Method

The repeat identification method was introduced for misassembly by prior identification of repetitive sequences, creating a repeat knowledge base to reduce ambiguity during the assembly process, thus enhancing the accuracy of the assembled genome. Also, hybridization between assembly approaches resulted in a lower misassembly degree with the aid of the reference genome. The assembly performance is optimized through data structure indexing and parallelization. This article's primary aim and contribution are to support the researchers through an extensive review to ease other researchers' search for genome assembly studies. The study also, highlighted the most recent developments and limitations in genome assembly accuracy and performance optimization.

Results

Our findings show the limitations of the repeat identification methods available, which only allow to detect of specific lengths of the repeat, and may not perform well when various types of repeats are present in a genome. We also found that most of the hybrid assembly approaches, either starting with de novo or reference-guided, have some limitations in handling repetitive sequences as it is more computationally costly and time intensive. Although the hybrid approach was found to outperform individual assembly approaches, optimizing its performance remains a challenge. Also, the usage of parallelization in overlapping and reads alignment for genome assembly is yet to be fully implemented in the hybrid assembly approach.

Conclusion

We suggest combining multiple repeat identification methods to enhance the accuracy of identifying the repeats as an initial step to the hybrid assembly approach and combining genome indexing with parallelization for better optimization of its performance.

BLEND: a fast, memory-efficient and accurate mechanism to find fuzzy seed matches in genome analysis

Generating the hash values of short subsequences, called seeds, enables quickly identifying similarities between genomic sequences by matching seeds with a single lookup of their hash values. However, these hash values can be used only for finding exact-matching seeds as the conventional hashing methods assign distinct hash values for different seeds, including highly similar seeds. Finding only exact-matching seeds causes either (i) increasing the use of the costly sequence alignment or (ii) limited sensitivity. We introduce BLEND, the first efficient and accurate mechanism that can identify both exact-matching and highly similar seeds with a single lookup of their hash values, called fuzzy seed matches. BLEND (i) utilizes a technique called SimHash, that can generate the same hash value for similar sets, and (ii) provides the proper mechanisms for using seeds as sets with the SimHash technique to find fuzzy seed matches efficiently. We show the benefits of BLEND when used in read overlapping and read mapping. For read overlapping, BLEND is faster by 2.4×-83.9× (on average 19.3×), has a lower memory footprint by 0.9×-14.1× (on average 3.8×), and finds higher quality overlaps leading to accurate de novo assemblies than the state-of-the-art tool, minimap2. For read mapping, BLEND is faster by 0.8×-4.1× (on average 1.7×) than minimap2. Source code is available at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/BLEND.

L-RAPiT: A Cloud-Based Computing Pipeline for the Analysis of Long-Read RNA Sequencing Data

Long-read sequencing (LRS) has been adopted to meet a wide variety of research needs, ranging from the construction of novel transcriptome annotations to the rapid identification of emerging virus variants. Amongst other advantages, LRS preserves more information about RNA at the transcript level than conventional high-throughput sequencing, including far more accurate and quantitative records of splicing patterns. New studies with LRS datasets are being published at an exponential rate, generating a vast reservoir of information that can be leveraged to address a host of different research questions. However, mining such publicly available data in a tailored fashion is currently not easy, as the available software tools typically require familiarity with the command-line interface, which constitutes a significant obstacle to many researchers. Additionally, different research groups utilize different software packages to perform LRS analysis, which often prevents a direct comparison of published results across different studies. To address these challenges, we have developed the Long-Read Analysis Pipeline for Transcriptomics (L-RAPiT), a user-friendly, free pipeline requiring no dedicated computational resources or bioinformatics expertise. L-RAPiT can be implemented directly through Google Colaboratory, a system based on the open-source Jupyter notebook environment, and allows for the direct analysis of transcriptomic reads from Oxford Nanopore and PacBio LRS machines. This new pipeline enables the rapid, convenient, and standardized analysis of publicly available or newly generated LRS datasets.

HELIOS: High-speed sequence alignment in optics

In response to the imperfections of current sequence alignment methods, originated from the inherent serialism within their corresponding electrical systems, a few optical approaches for biological data comparison have been proposed recently. However, due to their low performance, raised from their inefficient coding scheme, this paper presents a novel all-optical high-throughput method for aligning DNA, RNA, and protein sequences, named HELIOS. The HELIOS method employs highly sophisticated operations to locate character matches, single or multiple mutations, and single or multiple indels within various biological sequences. On the other hand, the HELIOS optical architecture exploits high-speed processing and operational parallelism in optics, by adopting wavelength and polarization of optical beams. For evaluation, the functionality and accuracy of the HELIOS method are approved through behavioral and optical simulation studies, while its complexity and performance are estimated through analytical computation. The accuracy evaluations indicate that the HELIOS method achieves a precise pairwise alignment of two sequences, highly similar to those of Smith-Waterman, Needleman-Wunsch, BLAST, MUSCLE, ClustalW, ClustalΩ, T-Coffee, Kalign, and MAFFT. According to our performance evaluations, the HELIOS optical architecture outperforms all alternative electrical and optical algorithms in terms of processing time and memory requirement, relying on its highly sophisticated method and optical architecture. Moreover, the employed compact coding scheme highly escalates the number of input characters, and hence, it offers reduced time and space complexities, compared to the electrical and optical alternatives. It makes the HELIOS method and optical architecture highly applicable for biomedical applications.

Lerna: transformer architectures for configuring error correction tools for short- and long-read genome sequencing

BACKGROUND

Sequencing technologies are prone to errors, making error correction (EC) necessary for downstream applications. EC tools need to be manually configured for optimal performance. We find that the optimal parameters (e.g., k-mer size) are both tool- and dataset-dependent. Moreover, evaluating the performance (i.e., Alignment-rate or Gain) of a given tool usually relies on a reference genome, but quality reference genomes are not always available. We introduce Lerna for the automated configuration of k-mer-based EC tools. Lerna first creates a language model (LM) of the uncorrected genomic reads, and then, based on this LM, calculates a metric called the perplexity metric to evaluate the corrected reads for different parameter choices. Next, it finds the one that produces the highest alignment rate without using a reference genome. The fundamental intuition of our approach is that the perplexity metric is inversely correlated with the quality of the assembly after error correction. Therefore, Lerna leverages the perplexity metric for automated tuning of k-mer sizes without needing a reference genome.

RESULTS

First, we show that the best k-mer value can vary for different datasets, even for the same EC tool. This motivates our design that automates k-mer size selection without using a reference genome. Second, we show the gains of our LM using its component attention-based transformers. We show the model's estimation of the perplexity metric before and after error correction. The lower the perplexity after correction, the better the k-mer size. We also show that the alignment rate and assembly quality computed for the corrected reads are strongly negatively correlated with the perplexity, enabling the automated selection of k-mer values for better error correction, and hence, improved assembly quality. We validate our approach on both short and long reads. Additionally, we show that our attention-based models have significant runtime improvement for the entire pipeline-18[Formula: see text] faster than previous works, due to parallelizing the attention mechanism and the use of JIT compilation for GPU inferencing.

CONCLUSION

Lerna improves de novo genome assembly by optimizing EC tools. Our code is made available in a public repository at: https://github.com/icanforce/lerna-genomics .

Generator based approach to analyze mutations in genomic datasets

In contrast to the conventional approach of directly comparing genomic sequences using sequence alignment tools, we propose a computational approach that performs comparisons between sequence generators. These sequence generators are learned via a data-driven approach that empirically computes the state machine generating the genomic sequence of interest. As the state machine based generator of the sequence is independent of the sequence length, it provides us with an efficient method to compute the statistical distance between large sets of genomic sequences. Moreover, our technique provides a fast and efficient method to cluster large datasets of genomic sequences, characterize their temporal and spatial evolution in a continuous manner, get insights into the locality sensitive information about the sequences without any need for alignment. Furthermore, we show that the technique can be used to detect local regions with mutation activity, which can then be applied to aid alignment techniques for the fast discovery of mutations. To demonstrate the efficacy of our technique on real genomic data, we cluster different strains of SARS-CoV-2 viral sequences, characterize their evolution and identify regions of the viral sequence with mutations.

Alignment-Free Sequence Comparison With Multiple k Values

Alignment-free sequence comparison approaches have become increasingly popular in computational biology, because alignment-based approaches are inefficient to process large-scale datasets. Still, there is no way to determine the optimal value of the critical parameter k for alignment-free approaches in general. In this article, we tried to solve the problem by involving multiple k values simultaneously. The method counts the occurrence of each k-mer with different k values in a sequence. Two weighting schemes, based on maximizing deviation method and genetic algorithm, are then used on these counts. We applied the method to enhance the three common alignment-free approaches D₂, D₂^S, and D₂^*, and evaluated its performance on similarity search and functionally related regulatory sequences recognition. The enhanced approaches achieve better performance than the original approaches in all cases, and much better performance than some other common measures, such as Pcc, Eu, Ma, Ch, Kld, and Cos.

Technology dictates algorithms: recent developments in read alignment

Aligning sequencing reads onto a reference is an essential step of the majority of genomic analysis pipelines. Computational algorithms for read alignment have evolved in accordance with technological advances, leading to today's diverse array of alignment methods. We provide a systematic survey of algorithmic foundations and methodologies across 107 alignment methods, for both short and long reads. We provide a rigorous experimental evaluation of 11 read aligners to demonstrate the effect of these underlying algorithms on speed and efficiency of read alignment. We discuss how general alignment algorithms have been tailored to the specific needs of various domains in biology.

New evaluation methods of read mapping by 17 aligners on simulated and empirical NGS data: an updated comparison of DNA- and RNA-Seq data from Illumina and Ion Torrent technologies

During the last (15) years, improved omics sequencing technologies have expanded the scale and resolution of various biological applications, generating high-throughput datasets that require carefully chosen software tools to be processed. Therefore, following the sequencing development, bioinformatics researchers have been challenged to implement alignment algorithms for next-generation sequencing reads. However, nowadays selection of aligners based on genome characteristics is poorly studied, so our benchmarking study extended the “state of art” comparing 17 different aligners. The chosen tools were assessed on empirical human DNA- and RNA-Seq data, as well as on simulated datasets in human and mouse, evaluating a set of parameters previously not considered in such kind of benchmarks. As expected, we found that each tool was the best in specific conditions. For Ion Torrent single-end RNA-Seq samples, the most suitable aligners were CLC and BWA-MEM, which reached the best results in terms of efficiency, accuracy, duplication rate, saturation profile and running time. About Illumina paired-end osteomyelitis transcriptomics data, instead, the best performer algorithm, together with the already cited CLC, resulted Novoalign, which excelled in accuracy and saturation analyses. Segemehl and DNASTAR performed the best on both DNA-Seq data, with Segemehl particularly suitable for exome data. In conclusion, our study could guide users in the selection of a suitable aligner based on genome and transcriptome characteristics. However, several other aspects, emerged from our work, should be considered in the evolution of alignment research area, such as the involvement of artificial intelligence to support cloud computing and mapping to multiple genomes.

How Machine Learning and Statistical Models Advance Molecular Diagnostics of Rare Disorders Via Analysis of RNA Sequencing Data

Rare diseases, although individually rare, collectively affect approximately 350 million people worldwide. Currently, nearly 6,000 distinct rare disorders with a known molecular basis have been described, yet establishing a specific diagnosis based on the clinical phenotype is challenging. Increasing integration of whole exome sequencing into routine diagnostics of rare diseases is improving diagnostic rates. Nevertheless, about half of the patients do not receive a genetic diagnosis due to the challenges of variant detection and interpretation. During the last years, RNA sequencing is increasingly used as a complementary diagnostic tool providing functional data. Initially, arbitrary thresholds have been applied to call aberrant expression, aberrant splicing, and mono-allelic expression. With the application of RNA sequencing to search for the molecular diagnosis, the implementation of robust statistical models on normalized read counts allowed for the detection of significant outliers corrected for multiple testing. More recently, machine learning methods have been developed to improve the normalization of RNA sequencing read count data by taking confounders into account. Together the methods have increased the power and sensitivity of detection and interpretation of pathogenic variants, leading to diagnostic rates of 10-35% in rare diseases. In this review, we provide an overview of the methods used for RNA sequencing and illustrate how these can improve the diagnostic yield of rare diseases.

Athena: Automated Tuning of k-mer based Genomic Error Correction Algorithms using Language Models

The performance of most error-correction (EC) algorithms that operate on genomics reads is dependent on the proper choice of its configuration parameters, such as the value of k in k-mer based techniques. In this work, we target the problem of finding the best values of these configuration parameters to optimize error correction and consequently improve genome assembly. We perform this in an adaptive manner, adapted to different datasets and to EC tools, due to the observation that different configuration parameters are optimal for different datasets, i.e., from different platforms and species, and vary with the EC algorithm being applied. We use language modeling techniques from the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain in our algorithmic suite, Athena, to automatically tune the performance-sensitive configuration parameters. Through the use of N-Gram and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) language modeling, we validate the intuition that the EC performance can be computed quantitatively and efficiently using the “perplexity” metric, repurposed from NLP. After training the language model, we show that the perplexity metric calculated from a sample of the test (or production) data has a strong negative correlation with the quality of error correction of erroneous NGS reads. Therefore, we use the perplexity metric to guide a hill climbing-based search, converging toward the best configuration parameter value. Our approach is suitable for both de novo and comparative sequencing (resequencing), eliminating the need for a reference genome to serve as the ground truth. We find that Athena can automatically find the optimal value of k with a very high accuracy for 7 real datasets and using 3 different k-mer based EC algorithms, Lighter, Blue, and Racer. The inverse relation between the perplexity metric and alignment rate exists under all our tested conditions—for real and synthetic datasets, for all kinds of sequencing errors (insertion, deletion, and substitution), and for high and low error rates. The absolute value of that correlation is at least 73%. In our experiments, the best value of k found by Athena achieves an alignment rate within 0.53% of the oracle best value of k found through brute force searching (i.e., scanning through the entire range of k values). Athena’s selected value of k lies within the top-3 best k values using N-Gram models and the top-5 best k values using RNN models With best parameter selection by Athena, the assembly quality (NG50) is improved by a Geometric Mean of 4.72X across the 7 real datasets.

Prostate Cancer Genomic Subtypes

Over the last decade, advancements in massively-parallel DNA sequencing and computational biology have allowed for unprecedented insights into the fundamental mutational processes that underlie virtually every major cancer type. Two major cancer genomics consortia-The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC)-have produced rich databases of mutational, pathological, and clinical data that can be mined through web-based portals, allowing for correlative studies and testing of novel hypotheses on well-powered patient cohorts.In this chapter, we will review the impact of these technological developments on the understanding of molecular subtypes that promote prostate cancer initiation, progression, metastasis, and clinical aggression. In particular, we will focus on molecular subtypes that define clinically-relevant patient cohorts and assess how a better understanding of how these subtypes-in both somatic and germline genomes-may influence the clinical course for individual men diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Developing computational biology at meridian 23° E, and a little eastwards

Modern biology is experiencing a deep transformation by the expansion of molecular-level measurements at all scales, using omics technologies. A key element in this transformation is the field of bioinformatics, that has—in the meanwhile—permeated pretty much all of biological and biomedical research and is now emerging as a key inter-disciplinary area that connects the natural sciences, chemical and electrical engineering, science education and science policy, on a number of science and technology fronts. The strong tradition of open access for large volumes of raw data, collections of complex results and high-quality algorithm implementations in bioinformatics makes the field a unique, special case of open science. We report on our recent research activities, the development of training initiatives in the wider region during the past years, and the lessons learned regarding our efforts away from major epicenters, within the general context of open science.