From molecules to genomic variations: Accelerating genome analysis via intelligent algorithms and architectures

RUBICON: a framework for designing efficient deep learning-based genomic basecallers

Nanopore sequencing generates noisy electrical signals that need to be converted into a standard string of DNA nucleotide bases using a computational step called basecalling. The performance of basecalling has critical implications for all later steps in genome analysis. Therefore, there is a need to reduce the computation and memory cost of basecalling while maintaining accuracy. We present RUBICON, a framework to develop efficient hardware-optimized basecallers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RUBICON by developing RUBICALL, the first hardware-optimized mixed-precision basecaller that performs efficient basecalling, outperforming the state-of-the-art basecallers. We believe RUBICON offers a promising path to develop future hardware-optimized basecallers.

An overlooked phenomenon: complex interactions of potential error sources on the quality of bacterial de novo genome assemblies

BACKGROUND

Parameters adversely affecting the contiguity and accuracy of the assemblies from Illumina next-generation sequencing (NGS) are well described. However, past studies generally focused on their additive effects, overlooking their potential interactions possibly exacerbating one another's effects in a multiplicative manner. To investigate whether or not they act interactively on de novo genome assembly quality, we simulated sequencing data for 13 bacterial reference genomes, with varying levels of error rate, sequencing depth, PCR and optical duplicate ratios.

RESULTS

We assessed the quality of assemblies from the simulated sequencing data with a number of contiguity and accuracy metrics, which we used to quantify both additive and multiplicative effects of the four parameters. We found that the tested parameters are engaged in complex interactions, exerting multiplicative, rather than additive, effects on assembly quality. Also, the ratio of non-repeated regions and GC% of the original genomes can shape how the four parameters affect assembly quality.

CONCLUSIONS

We provide a framework for consideration in future studies using de novo genome assembly of bacterial genomes, e.g. in choosing the optimal sequencing depth, balancing between its positive effect on contiguity and negative effect on accuracy due to its interaction with error rate. Furthermore, the properties of the genomes to be sequenced also should be taken into account, as they might influence the effects of error sources themselves.

Physics-Based Signal Analysis of Genome Sequences: An Overview of GenomeBits

A comprehensive overview of the recent physics-inspired genome analysis tool, GenomeBits, is presented. This is based on traditional signal processing methods such as discrete Fourier transform (DFT). GenomeBits can be used to extract underlying genomics features from the distribution of nucleotides, and can be further used to analyze the mutation patterns in viral genomes. Examples of the main GenomeBits findings outlining the intrinsic signal organization of genomics sequences for different SARS-CoV-2 variants along the pandemic years 2020-2022 and Monkeypox cases in 2021 are presented to show the usefulness of GenomeBits. GenomeBits results for DFT of SARS-CoV-2 genomes in different geographical regions are discussed, together with the GenomeBits analysis of complete genome sequences for the first coronavirus variants reported: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Epsilon and Eta. Interesting features of the Delta and Omicron variants in the form of a unique 'order-disorder' transition are uncovered from these samples, as well as from their cumulative distribution function and scatter plots. This class of transitions might reveal the cumulative outcome of mutations on the spike protein. A salient feature of GenomeBits is the mapping of the nucleotide bases (A,T,C,G) into an alternating spin-like numerical sequence via a series having binary (0,1) indicators for each A,T,C,G. This leads to the derivation of a set of statistical distribution curves. Furthermore, the quantum-based extension of the GenomeBits model to an analogous probability measure is shown to identify properties of genome sequences as wavefunctions via a superposition of states. An association of the integral of the GenomeBits coding and a binding-like energy can, in principle, also be established. The relevance of these different results in bioinformatics is analyzed.

Sigmoni: classification of nanopore signal with a compressed pangenome index

Improvements in nanopore sequencing necessitate efficient classification methods, including pre-filtering and adaptive sampling algorithms that enrich for reads of interest. Signal-based approaches circumvent the computational bottleneck of basecalling. But past methods for signal-based classification do not scale efficiently to large, repetitive references like pangenomes, limiting their utility to partial references or individual genomes. We introduce Sigmoni: a rapid, multiclass classification method based on the r-index that scales to references of hundreds of Gbps. Sigmoni quantizes nanopore signal into a discrete alphabet of picoamp ranges. It performs rapid, approximate matching using matching statistics, classifying reads based on distributions of picoamp matching statistics and co-linearity statistics. Sigmoni is 10-100× faster than previous methods for adaptive sampling in host depletion experiments with improved accuracy, and can query reads against large microbial or human pangenomes.

Variant calling and benchmarking in an era of complete human genome sequences

Genetic variant calling from DNA sequencing has enabled understanding of germline variation in hundreds of thousands of humans. Sequencing technologies and variant-calling methods have advanced rapidly, routinely providing reliable variant calls in most of the human genome. We describe how advances in long reads, deep learning, de novo assembly and pangenomes have expanded access to variant calls in increasingly challenging, repetitive genomic regions, including medically relevant regions, and how new benchmark sets and benchmarking methods illuminate their strengths and limitations. Finally, we explore the possible future of more complete characterization of human genome variation in light of the recent completion of a telomere-to-telomere human genome reference assembly and human pangenomes, and we consider the innovations needed to benchmark their newly accessible repetitive regions and complex variants.

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.