PIRATE: A fast and scalable pangenomics toolbox for clustering diverged orthologues in bacteria

  1. Sion C Bayliss
  2. Harry A Thorpe
  3. Nicola M Coyle
  4. Samuel K Sheppard
  5. Edward J Feil

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Abstract

Background

Cataloguing the distribution of genes within natural bacterial populations is essential for understanding evolutionary processes and the genetic basis of adaptation. Advances in whole genome sequencing technologies have led to a vast expansion in the amount of bacterial genomes deposited in public databases. There is a pressing need for software solutions which are able to cluster, catalogue and characterise genes, or other features, in increasingly large genomic datasets.

Results

Here we present a pangenomics toolbox, PIRATE (Pangenome Iterative Refinement and Threshold Evaluation), which identifies and classifies orthologous gene families in bacterial pangenomes over a wide range of sequence similarity thresholds. PIRATE builds upon recent scalable software developments to allow for the rapid interrogation of thousands of isolates. PIRATE clusters genes (or other annotated features) over a wide range of amino acid or nucleotide identity thresholds and uses the clustering information to rapidly identify paralogous gene families and putative fission/fusion events. Furthermore, PIRATE orders the pangenome using a directed graph, provides a measure of allelic variation, and estimates sequence divergence for each gene family.

Conclusions

We demonstrate that PIRATE scales linearly with both number of samples and computation resources, allowing for analysis of large genomic datasets, and compares favorably to other popular tools. PIRATE provides a robust framework for analysing bacterial pangenomes, from largely clonal to panmictic species.

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  1. GigaScience

    Now published in GigaScience doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giz119

    Sion C. Bayliss 1The Milner Centre for Evolution, Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AYFind this author on Google ScholarFind this author on PubMedSearch for this author on this siteORCID record for Sion C. BaylissFor correspondence: s.bayliss@bath.ac.ukHarry A. Thorpe 1The Milner Centre for Evolution, Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AYFind this author on Google ScholarFind this author on PubMedSearch for this author on this siteORCID record for Harry A. ThorpeNicola M. Coyle 1The Milner Centre for Evolution, Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AYFind this author on Google ScholarFind this author on PubMedSearch for this author on this siteORCID record for Nicola M. CoyleSamuel K. Sheppard 1The Milner Centre for Evolution, Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AYFind this author on Google ScholarFind this author on PubMedSearch for this author on this siteORCID record for Samuel K. SheppardEdward J. Feil 1The Milner Centre for Evolution, Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AYFind this author on Google ScholarFind this author on PubMedSearch for this author on this siteORCID record for Edward J. Feil

    A version of this preprint has been published in the Open Access journal GigaScience (see paper https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giz119 ), where the paper and peer reviews are published openly under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

    These peer reviews were as follows:

    Reviewer 1: http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/REVIEW.101935 Reviewer 2: http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/REVIEW.101936 Reviewer 3: http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/REVIEW.101937

  2. Version published to 10.1093/gigascience/giz119
  3. Version published to 10.1101/598391v1 on bioRxiv