The multicomparative 2-n-way genome suite
- Gennady Churakov1,3,
- Fengjun Zhang1,3,
- Norbert Grundmann2,
- Wojciech Makalowski2,
- Angela Noll1,4,
- Liliya Doronina1 and
- Jürgen Schmitz1
- 1Institute of Experimental Pathology, ZMBE, University of Münster, 48149 Münster, Germany;
- 2Institute of Bioinformatics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Münster, 48149 Münster, Germany
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↵3 These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract
To effectively analyze the increasing amounts of available genomic data, improved comparative analytical tools that are accessible to and applicable by a broad scientific community are essential. We built the “2-n-way” software suite to provide a fundamental and innovative processing framework for revealing and comparing inserted elements among various genomes. The suite comprises two user-friendly web-based modules. The 2-way module generates pairwise whole-genome alignments of target and query species. The resulting genome coordinates of blocks (matching sequences) and gaps (missing sequences) from multiple 2-ways are then transferred to the n-way module and sorted into projects, in which user-defined coordinates from reference species are projected to the block/gap coordinates of orthologous loci in query species to provide comparative information about presence (blocks) or absence (gaps) patterns of targeted elements over many entire genomes and phylogroups. Thus, the 2-n-way software suite is ideal for performing multidirectional, non-ascertainment-biased screenings to extract all possible presence/absence data of user-relevant elements in orthologous sequences. To highlight its applicability and versatility, we used 2-n-way to expose approximately 100 lost introns in vertebrates, analyzed thousands of potential phylogenetically informative bat and whale retrotransposons, and novel human exons as well as thousands of human polymorphic retrotransposons.
Footnotes
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[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
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Article published online before print. Article, supplemental material, and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.262261.120.
- Received February 11, 2020.
- Accepted July 10, 2020.
This article is distributed exclusively by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the first six months after the full-issue publication date (see http://genome.cshlp.org/site/misc/terms.xhtml). After six months, it is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
