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1. A space and time-efficient index for the compacted colored de Bruijn graph

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/bty292  

   Almodaresi, Fatemeh ; Sarkar, Hirak ; Srivastava, Avi ; Patro, Rob ( June 2018 , Bioinformatics)

   Indexing reference sequences for search—both individual genomes and collections of genomes—is an important building block for many sequence analysis tasks. Much work has been dedicated to developing full-text indices for genomic sequences, based on data structures such as the suffix array, the BWT and the FM-index. However, the de Bruijn graph, commonly used for sequence assembly, has recently been gaining attention as an indexing data structure, due to its natural ability to represent multiple references using a graphical structure, and to collapse highly-repetitive sequence regions. Yet, much less attention has been given as to how to best index such a structure, such that queries can be performed efficiently and memory usage remains practical as the size and number of reference sequences being indexed grows large.

   We present a novel data structure for representing and indexing the compacted colored de Bruijn graph, which allows for efficient pattern matching and retrieval of the reference information associated with each k-mer. As the popularity of the de Bruijn graph as an index has increased over the past few years, so have the number of proposed representations of this structure. Existing structures typically fall into two categories; those that are hashing-based and provide verymore »fast access to the underlying k-mer information, and those that are space-frugal and provide asymptotically efficient but practically slower pattern search. Our representation achieves a compromise between these two extremes. By building upon minimum perfect hashing and making use of succinct representations where applicable, our data structure provides practically fast lookup while greatly reducing the space compared to traditional hashing-based implementations. Further, we describe a sampling scheme for this index, which provides the ability to trade off query speed for a reduction in the index size. We believe this representation strikes a desirable balance between speed and space usage, and allows for fast search on large reference sequences.

   Finally, we describe an application of this index to the taxonomic read assignment problem. We show that by adopting, essentially, the approach of Kraken, but replacing k-mer presence with coverage by chains of consistent unique maximal matches, we can improve the space, speed and accuracy of taxonomic read assignment.

   pufferfish is written in C++11, is open source, and is available at https://github.com/COMBINE-lab/pufferfish.

   Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

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2. Scalable, ultra-fast, and low-memory construction of compacted de Bruijn graphs with Cuttlefish 2

   https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-022-02743-6  

   Khan, Jamshed ; Kokot, Marek ; Deorowicz, Sebastian ; Patro, Rob ( September 2022 , Genome Biology)

   The de Bruijn graph is a key data structure in modern computational genomics, and construction of its compacted variant resides upstream of many genomic analyses. As the quantity of genomic data grows rapidly, this often forms a computational bottleneck. We present Cuttlefish 2, significantly advancing the state-of-the-art for this problem. On a commodity server, it reduces the graph construction time for 661K bacterial genomes, of size 2.58Tbp, from 4.5 days to 17–23 h; and it constructs the graph for 1.52Tbp white spruce reads in approximately 10 h, while the closest competitor requires 54–58 h, using considerably more memory.
3. Constructing small genome graphs via string compression

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btab281  

   Qiu, Yutong ; Kingsford, Carl ( July 2021 , Bioinformatics)

   The size of a genome graph—the space required to store the nodes, node labels and edges—affects the efficiency of operations performed on it. For example, the time complexity to align a sequence to a graph without a graph index depends on the total number of characters in the node labels and the number of edges in the graph. This raises the need for approaches to construct space-efficient genome graphs.

   We point out similarities in the string encoding mechanisms of genome graphs and the external pointer macro (EPM) compression model. We present a pair of linear-time algorithms that transform between genome graphs and EPM-compressed forms. The algorithms result in an upper bound on the size of the genome graph constructed in terms of an optimal EPM compression. To further reduce the size of the genome graph, we propose the source assignment problem that optimizes over the equivalent choices during compression and introduce an ILP formulation that solves that problem optimally. As a proof-of-concept, we introduce RLZ-Graph, a genome graph constructed based on the relative Lempel–Ziv algorithm. Using RLZ-Graph, across all human chromosomes, we are able to reduce the disk space to store a genome graph on average by 40.7% comparedmore »to colored compacted de Bruijn graphs constructed by Bifrost under the default settings. The RLZ-Graph scales well in terms of running time and graph sizes with an increasing number of human genome sequences compared to Bifrost and variation graphs produced by VGtoolkit.

   The RLZ-Graph software is available at: https://github.com/Kingsford-Group/rlzgraph.

   Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

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4. An incrementally updatable and scalable system for large-scale sequence search using the Bentley–Saxe transformation

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btac142  

   Almodaresi, Fatemeh ; Khan, Jamshed ; Madaminov, Sergey ; Ferdman, Michael ; Johnson, Rob ; Pandey, Prashant ; Patro, Rob ; Boeva, ed., Valentina ( March 2022 , Bioinformatics)

   In the past few years, researchers have proposed numerous indexing schemes for searching large datasets of raw sequencing experiments. Most of these proposed indexes are approximate (i.e. with one-sided errors) in order to save space. Recently, researchers have published exact indexes—Mantis, VariMerge and Bifrost—that can serve as colored de Bruijn graph representations in addition to serving as k-mer indexes. This new type of index is promising because it has the potential to support more complex analyses than simple searches. However, in order to be useful as indexes for large and growing repositories of raw sequencing data, they must scale to thousands of experiments and support efficient insertion of new data.

   In this paper, we show how to build a scalable and updatable exact raw sequence-search index. Specifically, we extend Mantis using the Bentley–Saxe transformation to support efficient updates, called Dynamic Mantis. We demonstrate Dynamic Mantis’s scalability by constructing an index of ≈40K samples from SRA by adding samples one at a time to an initial index of 10K samples. Compared to VariMerge and Bifrost, Dynamic Mantis is more efficient in terms of index-construction time and memory, query time and memory and index size. In our benchmarks, VariMerge and Bifrostmore »scaled to only 5K and 80 samples, respectively, while Dynamic Mantis scaled to more than 39K samples. Queries were over 24× faster in Mantis than in Bifrost (VariMerge does not immediately support general search queries we require). Dynamic Mantis indexes were about 2.5× smaller than Bifrost’s indexes and about half as big as VariMerge’s indexes.

   Dynamic Mantis implementation is available at https://github.com/splatlab/mantis/tree/mergeMSTs.

   Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

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5. An Efficient, Scalable and Exact Representation of High-Dimensional Color Information Enabled via de Bruijn Graph Search

   Almodaresi, Fatemeh ; Pandey, Prashant ; Ferdman, Michael ; Johnson, Rob ; Patro, Robert ( April 2019 , Research in Computational Molecular Biology)

   The colored de Bruijn graph (cdbg) and its variants have become an important combinatorial structure used in numerous areas in genomics, such as population-level variation detection in metagenomic samples, large scale sequence search, and cdbg-based reference sequence indices. As samples or genomes are added to the cdbg, the color information comes to dominate the space required to represent this data structure. In this paper, we show how to represent the color information efficiently by adopting a hierarchical encoding that exploits correlations among color classes—patterns of color occurrence—present in the de Bruijn graph (dbg). A major challenge in deriving an efficient encoding of the color information that takes advantage of such correlations is determining which color classes are close to each other in the high-dimensional space of possible color patterns. We demonstrate that the dbg itself can be used as an efficient mechanism to search for approximate nearest neighbors in this space. While our approach reduces the encoding size of the color information even for relatively small cdbgs (hundreds of experiments), the gains are particularly consequential as the number of potential colors (i.e. samples or references) grows into the thousands. We apply this encoding in the context of two different applications;more »the implicit cdbg used for a large-scale sequence search index, Mantis, as well as the encoding of color information used in population-level variation detection by tools such as Vari and Rainbowfish. Our results show significant improvements in the overall size and scalability of representation of the color information. In our experiment on 10,000 samples, we achieved more than 11× better compression compared to RRR.« less