skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: CoreCruncher : Fast and Robust Construction of Core Genomes in Large Prokaryotic Data Sets
Abstract The core genome represents the set of genes shared by all, or nearly all, strains of a given population or species of prokaryotes. Inferring the core genome is integral to many genomic analyses, however, most methods rely on the comparison of all the pairs of genomes; a step that is becoming increasingly difficult given the massive accumulation of genomic data. Here, we present CoreCruncher; a program that robustly and rapidly constructs core genomes across hundreds or thousands of genomes. CoreCruncher does not compute all pairwise genome comparisons and uses a heuristic based on the distributions of identity scores to classify sequences as orthologs or paralogs/xenologs. Although it is much faster than current methods, our results indicate that our approach is more conservative than other tools and less sensitive to the presence of paralogs and xenologs. CoreCruncher is freely available from: https://github.com/lbobay/CoreCruncher. CoreCruncher is written in Python 3.7 and can also run on Python 2.7 without modification. It requires the python library Numpy and either Usearch or Blast. Certain options require the programs muscle or mafft.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1930776 2344788
PAR ID:
10250798
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Editor(s):
Ouangraoua, Aida
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Molecular Biology and Evolution
Volume:
38
Issue:
2
ISSN:
1537-1719
Page Range / eLocation ID:
727 to 734
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Abstract Rice is a vital staple crop, sustaining over half of the global population, and is a key model for genetic research. To support the growing need for comprehensive and accessible rice genomic data, GrameneOryza (https://oryza.gramene.org) was developed as an online resource adhering to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles of data management. It distinguishes itself through its comprehensive multispecies focus, encompassing a wide variety of Oryza genomes and related species, and its integration with FAIR principles to ensure data accessibility and usability. It offers a community curated selection of high-quality Oryza genomes, genetic variation, gene function, and trait data. The latest release, version 8, includes 28 Oryza genomes, covering wild rice and domesticated cultivars. These genomes, along with Leersia perrieri and seven additional outgroup species, form the basis for 38 K protein-coding gene family trees, essential for identifying orthologs, paralogs, and developing pan-gene sets. GrameneOryza’s genetic variation data features 66 million single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) anchored to the Os-Nipponbare-Reference-IRGSP-1.0 genome, derived from various studies, including the Rice Genome 3 K (RG3K) project. The RG3K sequence reads were also mapped to seven additional platinum-quality Asian rice genomes, resulting in 19 million SNVs for each genome, significantly expanding the coverage of genetic variation beyond the Nipponbare reference. Of the 66 million SNVs on IRGSP-1.0, 27 million acquired standardized reference SNP cluster identifiers (rsIDs) from the European Variation Archive release v5. Additionally, 1200 distinct phenotypes provide a comprehensive overview of quantitative trait loci (QTL) features. The newly introduced Oryza CLIMtools portal offers insights into environmental impacts on genome adaptation. The platform’s integrated search interface, along with a BLAST server and curation tools, facilitates user access to genomic, phylogenetic, gene function, and QTL data, supporting broad research applications. Database URL: https://oryza.gramene.org 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    Most genomes within the species complex of Fusarium oxysporum are organized into two compartments: the core chromosomes (CCs) and accessory chromosomes (ACs). As opposed to CCs, which are conserved and vertically transmitted to carry out essential housekeeping functions, lineage- or strain-specific ACs are believed to be initially horizontally acquired through unclear mechanisms. These two genomic compartments are different in terms of gene density, the distribution of transposable elements, and epigenetic markers. Although common in eukaryotes, the functional importance of ACs is uniquely emphasized among fungal species, specifically in relationship to fungal pathogenicity and their adaptation to diverse hosts. With a focus on the cross-kingdom fungal pathogen F. oxysporum, this review provides a summary of the differences between CCs and ACs based on current knowledge of gene functions, genome structures, and epigenetic signatures, and explores the transcriptional crosstalk between the core and accessory genomes. 
    more » « less
  3. Green plants play a fundamental role in ecosystems, human health, and agriculture. As de novo genomes are being generated for all known eukaryotic species as advocated by the Earth BioGenome Project, increasing genomic information on green land plants is essential. However, setting standards for the generation and storage of the complex set of genomes that characterize the green lineage of life is a major challenge for plant scientists. Such standards will need to accommodate the immense variation in green plant genome size, transposable element content, and structural complexity while enabling research into the molecular and evolutionary processes that have resulted in this enormous genomic variation. Here we provide an overview and assessment of the current state of knowledge of green plant genomes. To date fewer than 300 complete chromosome-scale genome assemblies representing fewer than 900 species have been generated across the estimated 450,000 to 500,000 species in the green plant clade. These genomes range in size from 12 Mb to 27.6 Gb and are biased toward agricultural crops with large branches of the green tree of life untouched by genomic-scale sequencing. Locating suitable tissue samples of most species of plants, especially those taxa from extreme environments, remains one of the biggest hurdles to increasing our genomic inventory. Furthermore, the annotation of plant genomes is at present undergoing intensive improvement. It is our hope that this fresh overview will help in the development of genomic quality standards for a cohesive and meaningful synthesis of green plant genomes as we scale up for the future. 
    more » « less
  4. Alanio, Alexandre (Ed.)
    ABSTRACT Modern taxonomic classification is often based on phylogenetic analyses of a few molecular markers, although single-gene studies are still common. Here, we leverage genome-scale molecular phylogenetics (phylogenomics) of species and populations to reconstruct evolutionary relationships in a dense data set of 710 fungal genomes from the biomedically and technologically important genusAspergillus. To do so, we generated a novel set of 1,362 high-quality molecular markers specific forAspergillusand provided profile Hidden Markov Models for each, facilitating their use by others. Examining the resulting phylogeny helped resolve ongoing taxonomic controversies, identified new ones, and revealed extensive strain misidentification (7.59% of strains were previously misidentified), underscoring the importance of population-level sampling in species classification. These findings were corroborated using the current standard, taxonomically informative loci. These findings suggest that phylogenomics of species and populations can facilitate accurate taxonomic classifications and reconstructions of the Tree of Life.IMPORTANCEIdentification of fungal species relies on the use of molecular markers. Advances in genomic technologies have made it possible to sequence the genome of any fungal strain, making it possible to use genomic data for the accurate assignment of strains to fungal species (and for the discovery of new ones). We examined the usefulness and current limitations of genomic data using a large data set of 710 publicly available genomes from multiple strains and species of the biomedically, agriculturally, and industrially important genusAspergillus. Our evolutionary genomic analyses revealed that nearly 8% of publicly availableAspergillusgenomes are misidentified. Our work highlights the usefulness of genomic data for fungal systematic biology and suggests that systematic genome sequencing of multiple strains, including reference strains (e.g., type strains), of fungal species will be required to reduce misidentification errors in public databases. 
    more » « less
  5. Aquatic insects comprise 10% of all insect diversity, can be found on every continent except Antarctica, and are key components of freshwater ecosystems. However, aquatic insect genome biology lags dramatically behind that of terrestrial insects. If genomic effort was spread evenly, one aquatic insect genome would be sequenced for every ~9 terrestrial insect genomes. Instead, ~24 terrestrial insect genomes have been sequenced for every aquatic insect genome. This discrepancy is even more dramatic if the quality of genomic resources is considered; for instance, while no aquatic insect genome has been assembled to the chromosome level, 29 terrestrial insect genomes spanning four orders have. We argue that a lack of aquatic insect genomes is not due to any underlying difficulty (e.g., small body sizes or unusually large genomes), yet it is severely hampering aquatic insect research at both fundamental and applied scales. By expanding the availability of aquatic insect genomes, we will gain key insight into insect diversification and empower future research for a globally important taxonomic group. 
    more » « less