[Bioc-sig-seq] SNP counting (Biostrings ?) question

Wolfgang Raffelsberger wraff at titus.u-strasbg.fr
Thu Oct 30 16:33:09 CET 2008


Hi Herve,

thank you for your helpful answer.
Initially I was wondering if there are already some functions/packages
directly for my tasks available, as Bioconducter and CRAN are very
strong resources.

Since your Biostrings package provides all the basic functionalities,
I've built a few (additional) functions (on top of Biostrings) doing the
job.
To be more precise, yes, I'm interested in detecting all alterations
(mutations+ insertions + deletions). However, within the project's
biological context mutations are the prime focus. Right now I'm rather
in an exploratory/pilot phase for the nucleotide-alteration/SNP
counting, so I'll probably improve & expand some of my quickly written code.

For the sequence alignments I prefer global, since I'd rather want the
'best' match possible (ie the default setting with pairwiseAlignment()
).  Concerning the choice of (custom) substitution matrices I'm not very
decided.  Right now I'm using very generic ones (like in the Biostrings
vignette). Recently I've learned that there are several 'versions' of
the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm (ie various improvements to the original
one), so I'm not any more surprised of seeing different scores from
different implementations...
Anyway, once it's clear which sample/target (ie sequencer output) should
be compared with which reference sequence (ie the consenus genomic
sequence of the very region to be tested) I don't use the score any more
and luckily my test-data contain few completely unexpected 'alien'
sequences.  For this initial step now I use matchPattern() - thank's for
your hint- where I primarily need to test if sequences have to be read
as inverse/complement.
Again, after a bit more digging I found the corresponding functions and
I'm quite happy with the performance !

At the core of SNP/alterations counting I dissect the pairwise alignment
and record what kind of changes have happened (at this level I noted
some changes to the new BioC 2.3 implementation ...see also code below).
Here I use (so far) strsplit() to make two vectors with individual
nucleotides (and gaps) to extract the positions&changes from each of the
lines of the pairwise alignment (see code below). I guess there may be
other more elegant/faster ways to do this...
As I'm primarily interested in 'simple mutations', so far I took a
shortcut consisting in simply looking at the first of inserted
nucleotide in cases of insertions (some additional lines not part of the
code below). Maybe later I'll get back to expand this ... After all I
end up with a simple matrix where each row corresponds to a position of
the reference sequence and the columns contain counts of the
events/alterations observed (where at least I'm able to tell if any
insertions have happened at all) where I can run classical statistical
tests.

Cheers,
Wolfgang

# here the way I 'parse' pairwise alignments :

library(Biostrings)
mat <- matrix(-3, nrow = 5, ncol = 5)
diag(mat) <- 1
mat[,5] <- 0; mat[5,] <- 0
rownames(mat) <- colnames(mat) <- DNA_ALPHABET[c(1:4,15)]

ref <- DNAString("ACTTCACCAGCTCCCTGGC")                # the consensus
reference sequence
samp <-
DNAStringSet(c("CTTCTCCAGCTCCCTGG","ACTTCTCCAGCTACCTGG","TTCACCAGCTCCCTG")) 

# the 3rd one has no mutations, it's simply shorter ...
# here (simplified) I already know that my sequence is oriented correctly
alignRes <- matrix(nr=nchar(ref),nc=length(samp))
for(i in 1:length(samp)) {
   x <- pairwiseAlignment(as.character(ref), samp[[i]],
substitutionMatrix= mat, gapOpening= -5, gapExtension= -2,scoreOnly=F,
type="global")
   cutsamp <- unlist(strsplit(as.character(x at subject),""))
   cutref <- unlist(strsplit(as.character(x at pattern),""))
   if(nchar(ref) != length(cutref)) {
     origRefNt <- unlist(strsplit(as.character(ref),""))
     offS <- 1
     while(origRefNt[1+offS] != cutref[1]) offS <- offS+1
   }
   out <- rep("Z",nchar(ref))                                    # use
"Z" for (default) constant
   if( !identical(cutsamp,cutref)) {
     mutPos <- !(cutref== cutsamp)
     out[mutPos+offS] <- cutsamp[mutPos+offS]
     if(sum(cutref=="-")>0) out <- out[-which(cutref=="-")]    # remove
gaps in reference
     # gaps could/can be retained at this stage only to a limited degree
by additional subsitutions
   }
  alignRes[,i] <- out
}

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.8.0 (2008-10-20)
i386-pc-mingw32

locale:
LC_COLLATE=French_France.1252;LC_CTYPE=French_France.1252;LC_MONETARY=French_France.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=French_France.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] Biostrings_2.10.0 IRanges_1.0.1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] grid_2.8.0         lattice_0.17-15    Matrix_0.999375-16



Herve Pages a écrit :
> Hi Wolfgang,
>
> If I understand correctly you want to compare a collection of "sample"
> sequences against a "reference" sequence.
>
> There are many ways to "compare" 2 sequences and to get a score from this
> comparison: Do you want to allow indels or just substitutions (aka replacements)?
> Do you want the alignment to be global or local? Do you want the score to be
> determined by a custom substitution matrix or just to reflect the "edit
> distance" between the 2 sequences (i.e. the minimum number of replacements
> + insertions + deletions required to transform sequence 1 into sequence 2).
>
> If you are trying to get the edit distance between the sample sequences
> and the reference sequence then you might want to look at this post:
>
>   https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/bioc-sig-sequencing/2008-July/000067.html
>
> Note that the 'type' argument is omitted in this post so pairwiseAlignment()
> is used to perform "global" alignments, that is, the score that is returned
> indicates the min nb of edit operations needed to transform the *complete*
> sequences in 'pattern' (your "sample" sequences) into the *complete* 'subject'
> (your "reference" sequence).
> One nice property of "global" alignment is that it is a symetric operation on
> the 2 sequences to align. You can take advantage of this by inverting the roles
> of the "sample" and the "reference" sequences so 'samp' can be the pattern
> and 'ref' the subject. Then you can benefit from the fact that
> pairwiseAlignment() is vectorized on the pattern.
>
> But then you say that you would primarily be interested in finding where
> a given nucleotide differs from the query. This suggests that you are in fact
> looking for a much simpler form of alignment where only mismatches (i.e.
> replacements) are allowed but no indels. Also you say that your
> sample-sequences may start or end slightly later/earlier.
> This means that you can use the matchPattern() function for your problem.
>
>   > m2 <- matchPattern(samp[[2]], ref, max.mismatch=3)
>   > m2
>     Views on a 19-letter DNAString subject
>   subject: ACTTCACCAGCTCCCTGGC
>   views:
>       start end width
>   [1]     1  18    18 [ACTTCACCAGCTCCCTGG]
>
> Then use the mismatch() function to get the position(s) of the mismatche(s):
>
>   > mismatch(samp[[2]], m2)[[1]]
>   [1]  6 13
>
> Cheers,
> H.
>
>
> Wolfgang Raffelsberger wrote:
>   
>> Dear list,
>>
>> I would like to count the occurrence of (mostly single) nucleotide
>> polymorphisms from nucleotide sequences.
>> I got across the Biostrings package and pairwiseAlignment() that allows
>> me to get closer to what I want but
>> 1) I noticed that the score produced from pairwiseAlignment() is quite
>> different to other implementations of the Needlaman-Wunsch alogorithm
>> (eg in EMBOSS)
>> 2) the score is not directly the information I 'm looking for since it's
>> a mixture of the gaps & mismatches (and I don't see if/how one could
>> modify that).
>>
>> However, I would primarily be interested in finding where a given
>> nucleotide differs from the query (from a pairwise alignment) to some
>> statistics on them, ie at which position I get which other element
>> instead. Note, that my sample-sequences may start or end slightly
>> later/earlier.
>> Any suggestions ?
>>
>> Sample code might look like (of course, my real sequences are longer ...):
>>
>> ref <- DNAString("ACTTCACCAGCTCCCTGGC")
>> samp <-
>> DNAStringSet(c("CTTCTCCAGCTCCCTGG","ACTTCTCCAGCTACCTGG","TTCACCAGCTCCCTG"))  
>> # the 3rd one has no mutations, it's simply shorter ...
>>  pairwiseAlignment(ref, samp[[1]], substitutionMatrix = mat, gapOpening
>> = -5, gapExtension = -2)
>> alignScores <- numeric()
>> for(i in 1:3) alignScores[i] <- pairwiseAlignment(ref, samp[[i]],
>> substitutionMatrix = mat, gapOpening = -5, gapExtension = -2, scoreOnly=T)
>> alignScores     # the 3rd sequence without mismatches gets worst score
>>
>>
>> (Based on a previous post on BioC) I just subscribed to
>> bioc-sig-sequencing at r-project.org, but I don't know if I don't mange to
>> search the previous mail archives (on http://search.gmane.org/) since I
>> keep getting (general) Bioconductor messages.
>>
>> Thank's in advance,
>> Wolfgang
>>
>>
>> By the way, if that matters, I'm (still) running R-2.7.2
>>     
>>> sessionInfo()
>>>       
>> R version 2.7.2 (2008-08-25)
>> i386-pc-mingw32
>>
>> locale:
>> LC_COLLATE=French_France.1252;LC_CTYPE=French_France.1252;LC_MONETARY=French_France.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=French_France.1252
>>
>>
>> attached base packages:
>> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices datasets  tcltk     utils    
>> methods   base   
>> other attached packages:
>> [1] Biostrings_2.8.18 svSocket_0.9-5    svIO_0.9-5       
>> R2HTML_1.59       svMisc_0.9-5      svIDE_0.9-5    
>> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
>> [1] tools_2.7.2
>>     

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wolfgang Raffelsberger, PhD
Laboratoire de BioInformatique et Génomique Intégratives
CNRS UMR7104, IGBMC
1 rue Laurent Fries,  67404 Illkirch  Strasbourg,  France
Tel (+33) 388 65 3300         Fax (+33) 388 65 3276
wolfgang.raffelsberger at igbmc.fr



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