2 These last years the cost of sequencing genomes has been greatly
3 reduced, and thus more and more genomes are sequenced. Therefore
4 automatic annotation tools are required to deal with this continuously
5 increasing amount of genomical data. Moreover, a reliable and accurate
6 genome annotation process is needed in order to provide strong
7 indicators for the study of life\cite{Eisen2007}.
9 Various annotation tools (\emph{i.e.}, cost-effective sequencing
10 methods\cite{Bakke2009}) producing genomic annotations at many levels
11 of detail have been designed by different annotation centers. Among
12 the major annotation centers we can notice NCBI\cite{Sayers01012011},
13 Dogma \cite{RDogma}, cpBase \cite{de2002comparative},
14 CpGAVAS \cite{liu2012cpgavas}, and
15 CEGMA\cite{parra2007cegma}. Usually, previous studies used one out of
16 three methods for finding genes in annoted genomes using data from
17 these centers: \textit{alignment-based}, \textit{composition based},
18 or a combination of both~\cite{parra2007cegma}. The alignment-based
19 method is used when trying to predict a coding gene (\emph{i.e.}.
20 genes that produce proteins) by aligning a genomic DNA sequence with a
21 cDNA sequence coding an homologous protein \cite{parra2007cegma}.
22 This approach is also used in GeneWise\cite{birney2004genewise}. The
23 alternative method, the composition-based one (also known
24 as \textit{ab initio}) is based on a probabilistic model of gene
25 structure to find genes according to the gene value probability
26 (GeneID \cite{parra2000geneid}). Such annotated genomic data will be
27 used to overcome the limitation of the first method described in the
28 previous section. In fact, the second method we propose finds core
29 genes from large amount of chloroplast genomes through genomic
32 Figure~\ref{Fig1} presents an overview of the entire method pipeline.
33 More precisely, the second method consists of three
34 stages: \textit{Genome annotation}, \textit{Core extraction},
35 and \textit{Features Visualization} which highlights the
36 relationships. To understand the whole core extraction process, we
37 describe briefly each stage below. More details will be given in the
38 coming subsections. The method uses as starting point some sequence
39 database chosen among the many international databases storing
40 nucleotide sequences, like the GenBank at NBCI \cite{Sayers01012011},
41 the \textit{EMBL-Bank} \cite{apweiler1985swiss} in Europe
42 or \textit{DDBJ} \cite{sugawara2008ddbj} in Japan. Different
43 biological tools can analyze and annotate genomes by interacting with
44 these databases to align and extract sequences to predict genes. The
45 database in our method must be taken from any confident data source
46 that stores annotated and/or unannotated chloroplast genomes. We have
47 considered the GenBank-NCBI \cite{Sayers01012011} database as sequence
48 database: 99~genomes of chloroplasts were retrieved. These genomes
49 lie in the eleven type of chloroplast families and Table \ref{Tab2}
50 summarizes their distribution in our dataset.
54 \includegraphics[width=0.75\textwidth]{generalView}
55 \caption{A general overview of the annotation-based approach}\label{Fig1}
58 Annotation, which is the first stage, is an important task for
59 extracting gene features. Indeed, to extract good gene feature, a good
60 annotation tool is obviously required. To obtain relevant annotated
61 genomes, two annotation techniques from NCBI and Dogma are used. The
62 extraction of gene feature, the next stage, can be anything like gene
63 names, gene sequences, protein sequences, and so on. Our method
64 considers gene names, gene counts, and gene sequence for extracting
65 core genes and producing chloroplast evolutionary tree. The final
66 stage allows to visualize genomes and/or gene evolution in
67 chloroplast. Therefore we use representations like tables,
68 phylogenetic trees, graphs, etc. to organize and show genomes
69 relationships, and thus achieve the goal of representing gene
70 evolution. In addition, comparing these representations with ones
71 issued from another annotation tool dedicated to large population of
72 chloroplast genomes give us biological perspectives to the nature of
73 chloroplasts evolution. Notice that a local database linked with each
74 pipe stage is used to store all the informations produced during the
77 \input{population_Table}
79 \subsection{Genome annotation techniques}
81 For the first stage, genome annotation, many techniques have been
82 developed to annotate chloroplast genomes. These techniques differ
83 from each others in the number and type of predicted genes (for
84 example: \textit{Transfer RNA (tRNA)} and \textit{Ribosomal RNA
85 (rRNA)} genes). Two annotation techniques from NCBI and Dogma are
86 considered to analyze chloroplast genomes.
88 \subsubsection{Genome annotation from NCBI}
90 The objective is to generate sets of genes from each genome so that
91 genes are organized without any duplication. The input is a list of
92 chloroplast genomes annotated from NCBI. More precisely, all genomes
93 are stored as \textit{.fasta} files which consists in a collection of
94 protein coding genes\cite{parra2007cegma,RDogma} (gene that produce
95 proteins) organized in coding sequences. To be able build the set of
96 core genes, we need to preprocess these genomes
97 using \textit{BioPython} package \cite{chapman2000biopython}. This
98 step starts by converting each genome from FASTA file format to
99 GenVision \cite{geneVision} format from DNASTAR. Each genome is thus
100 converted in a list of genes, with gene names and gene counts. Gene
101 name duplications can be accumulated during the treatment of a genome.
102 These duplications come from gene fragments (\emph{e.g.} gene
103 fragments treated with NCBI) and from chloroplast DNA sequences. To
104 ensure that all the duplications are removed, each list of gene is
105 translated into a set of genes. Note that NCBI genome annotation
106 produces genes except \textit{Ribosomal (rRNA)} genes.
108 \subsubsection{Genome annotation from Dogma}
110 Dogma stands for \textit{Dual Organellar GenoMe Annotator}. It is an
111 annotation tool developed at University of Texas in 2004 for plant
112 chloroplast and animal mitochondrial genomes. This tool has its own
113 database for translating a genome in all six reading frames and
114 queries the amino acid sequence database using
115 BLAST \cite{altschul1990basic} (\emph{i.e.} Blastx) with various
116 parameters. Protein coding genes are identified in an input genome
117 using sequence similarity of genes in Dogma database. In addition in
118 comparison with NCBI annotation tool, Dogma can produce
119 both \textit{Transfer RNAs (tRNA)} and \textit{Ribosomal RNAs (rRNA)},
120 verify their start and end positions. Another difference is also that
121 there is no gene duplication with Dogma after solving gene
122 fragmentation. In fact, genome annotation with Dogma can be the key
123 difference when extracting core genes.
125 The Dogma annotation process is divided into two tasks. First, we
126 manually annotate chloroplast genomes using Dogma web tool. The output
127 of this step is supposed to be a collection of coding genes files for
128 each genome, organized in GeneVision file. The second task is to solve
129 the gene duplication problem and therefore we have use two
130 methods. The first method, based on gene name, translates each genome
131 into a set of genes without duplicates. The second method avoid gene
132 duplication through a defragment process. In each iteration, this
133 process starts by taking a gene from gene list, searches for gene
134 duplication, if a duplication is found, it looks on the orientation of
135 the fragment sequence. If it is positive it appends directly the
136 sequence to gene files. Otherwise reverse complement operations are
137 applied on the sequence, which is then also append to gene files.
138 Finally, a check for missing start and stop codons is performed. At
139 the end of the annotation process, all the genomes are fully
140 annotated, their genes are defragmented, and gene counts are
143 \subsection{Core genes extraction}
145 The goal of this stage is to extract maximum core genes from sets of
146 genes. To find core genes, the following methodology is applied.
148 \subsubsection{Preprocessing}
150 In order to extract core genomes in a suitable manner, the genomic
151 data are preprocessed with two methods: on the one hand a method based
152 on gene name and count, and on the other hand a method based on a
153 sequence quality control test.
155 In the first method, we extract a list of genes from each chloroplast
156 genome. Then we store this list of genes in the database under genome
157 nam and genes counts can be extracted by a specific length command.
158 The \textit{Intersection Core Matrix}, described in next subsection,
159 is then computed to extract the core genes. The problem with this
160 method can be stated as follows: how can we ensure that the gene which
161 is predicted in core genes is the same gene in leaf genomes? The
162 answer to this problem is that if the sequences of any gene in a
163 genome annotated from Dogma and NCBI are similar with respect to a
164 given threshold, then we do not have any problem with this
165 method. When the sequences are not similar we have a problem, because
166 we cannot decide which sequence belongs to a gene in core genes.
168 The second method is based on the underlying idea: we can predict the
169 the best annotated genome by merging the annotated genomes from NCBI
170 and Dogma according to a quality test on genes names and sequences. To
171 obtain all quality genes of each genome, we consider the following
172 hypothesis: any gene will appear in the predicted genome if and only
173 if the annotated genes in NCBI and Dogma pass a specific threshold
174 of \textit{quality control test}. In fact, the Needle-man Wunch
175 algorithm is applied to compare both sequences with respect to a
176 threshold. If the alignment score is above the threshold, then the
177 gene will be retained in the predicted genome, otherwise the gene is
178 ignored. Once the prediction of all genomes is done,
179 the \textit{Intersection Core Matrix} is computed on these new genomes
180 to extract core genes, as explained in Algorithm \ref{Alg3:thirdM}.
183 \caption{Extract new genome based on gene quality test}
186 \REQUIRE $Gname \leftarrow \text{Genome Name}, Threshold \leftarrow 65$
187 \ENSURE $geneList \leftarrow \text{Quality genes}$
188 \STATE $dir(NCBI\_Genes) \leftarrow \text{NCBI genes of Gname}$
189 \STATE $dir(Dogma\_Genes) \leftarrow \text{Dogma genes of Gname}$
190 \STATE $geneList=\text{empty list}$
191 \STATE $common=set(dir(NCBI\_Genes)) \cap set(dir(Dogma\_Genes))$
192 \FOR{$\text{gene in common}$}
193 \STATE $g1 \leftarrow open(NCBI\_Genes(gene)).read()$
194 \STATE $g2 \leftarrow open(Dogma\_Genes(gene)).read()$
195 \STATE $score \leftarrow geneChk(g1,g2)$
196 \IF {$score > Threshold$}
197 \STATE $geneList \leftarrow gene$
204 \textbf{geneChk} is a subroutine used to find the best similarity score between
205 two gene sequences after applying operations like \textit{reverse}, {\it complement},
206 and {\it reverse complement}. Algorithm~\ref{Alg3:genechk} gives the outline of
210 \caption{Find the Maximum Similarity Score between two sequences}
213 \REQUIRE $g1,g2 \leftarrow \text{NCBI gene sequence, Dogma gene sequence}$
214 \ENSURE $\text{Maximum similarity score}$
215 \STATE $score1 \leftarrow needle(g1,g2)$
216 \STATE $score2 \leftarrow needle(g1,Reverse(g2))$
217 \STATE $score3 \leftarrow needle(g1,Complement(g2))$
218 \STATE $score4 \leftarrow needle(g1,Reverse(Complement(g2)))$
219 \RETURN $max(score1,score2,score3,score4)$
223 \subsubsection{Intersection Core Matrix (\textit{ICM})}
225 To extract core genes, we iteratively collect the maximum number of
226 common genes between genomes and therefore during this stage
227 an \textit{Intersection Core Matrix} (ICM) is built. ICM is a two
228 dimensional symmetric matrix where each row and each column correspond
229 to one genome. Hence, an element of the matrix stores
230 the \textit{Intersection Score} (IS): the cardinality of the core
231 genes set obtained by intersecting one genome with another
232 one. Maximum cardinality results in selecting the two genomes having
233 the maximum score. Mathematically speaking, if we have $n$ genomes in
234 local database, the ICM is an $n \times n$ matrix whose elements
237 score_{ij}=\vert g_i \cap g_j\vert
240 \noindent where $1 \leq i \leq n$, $1 \leq j \leq n$, and $g_i, g_j$ are
241 genomes. The generation of a new core gene depends obviously on the
242 value of the intersection scores $score_{ij}$. More precisely, the
243 idea is to consider a pair of genomes such that their score is the
244 largest element in ICM. These two genomes are then removed from matrix
245 and the resulting new core genome is added for the next iteration.
246 The ICM is then updated to take into account the new core gene: new IS
247 values are computed for it. This process is repeated until no new core
248 gene can be obtained.
250 We can observe that the ICM is very large due to the amount of
251 data. As a consequence, the computation of the intersection scores is
252 both time and memory consuming. However, since ICM is a symetric
253 matrix we can reduce the computation overhead by considering only its
254 triangular upper part. The time complexity for this process after
255 enhancement is thus $O(\frac{n.(n-1)}{2})$. Algorithm ~\ref{Alg1:ICM}
256 illustrates the construction of the ICM matrix and the extraction of
257 the core genes, where \textit{GenomeList} represents the database
258 storing all genomes data. At each iteration, it computes the maximum
259 core genes with its two genomes parents.
261 % ALGORITHM HAS BEEN REWRITTEN
264 \caption{Extract Maximum Intersection Score}
267 \REQUIRE $L \leftarrow \text{genomes sets}$
268 \ENSURE $B1 \leftarrow \text{Max Core set}$
269 \FOR{$i \leftarrow 1:len(L)-1$}
270 \STATE $score \leftarrow 0$
271 \STATE $core1 \leftarrow set(GenomeList[L[i]])$
272 \STATE $g1 \leftarrow L[i]$
273 \FOR{$j \leftarrow i+1:len(L)$}
274 \STATE $core2 \leftarrow set(GenomeList[L[j]])$
275 \STATE $core \leftarrow core1 \cap core2$
276 \IF{$len(core) > score$}
277 \STATE $score \leftarrow len(core)$
278 \STATE $g2 \leftarrow L[j]$
281 \STATE $B1[score] \leftarrow (g1,g2)$
287 \subsection{Features visualization}
289 The goal is to visualize results by building a tree of evolution. All
290 core genes generated represent an important information in the tree,
291 because they provide ancestor information of two or more
292 genomes. Each node in the tree represents one chloroplast genome or
293 one predicted core and labelled as \textit{(Genes count:Family name\_Scientific
294 names\_Accession number)}. While an edge is labelled with the number of
295 lost genes from a leaf genome or an intermediate core gene. Such
296 numbers are very interesting because they give an information about
297 the evolution: how many genes were lost between two species whether
298 they belong to the same family or not. By the principle of
299 classification, a small number of genes lost among species indicates
300 that those species are close to each other and belong to same family,
301 while a large lost means that we have an evolutionary relationship
302 between species from different families. To depict the links between
303 species clearly, we built a phylogenetic tree showing the
304 relationships based on the distances among genes sequences. Many tools
305 are available to obtain a such tree, for example:
306 PHYML\cite{guindon2005phyml},
307 RAxML{\cite{stamatakis2008raxml,stamatakis2005raxml}, BioNJ, and
308 TNT\cite{goloboff2008tnt}}. In this work, we chose to use
309 RAxML\cite{stamatakis2008raxml,stamatakis2005raxml} because it is
310 fast, accurate, and can build large trees when dealing with a large
311 number of genomic sequences.
313 The procedure used to built a phylogenetic tree is as follows:
315 \item For each gene in a core gene, extract its sequence and store it in the database.
316 \item Use multiple alignment tools such as (****to be write after see christophe****)
317 to align these sequences with each others.
318 \item Use an outer-group genome from cyanobacteria to calculate distances.
319 \item Submit the resulting aligned sequences to RAxML program to compute
320 the distances and finally draw the phylogenetic tree.
324 \centering \includegraphics[width=0.75\textwidth]{Whole_system} \caption{Overview
325 of the pipeline}\label{wholesystem}
328 \section{Implementation}
330 The different algorithms have been implemented using Python version
331 2.7, on a laptop running Ubuntu~12.04~LTS. More precisely, the
332 computer is a Dell Latitude laptop - model E6430 with 6~GiB memory and
333 a quad-core Intel core~i5~processor with an operating frequency of
334 2.5~GHz. Many python packages such as os, Biopython, memory\_profile,
335 re, numpy, time, shutil, and xlsxwriter were used to extract core
336 genes from large amount of chloroplast genomes.
340 \caption{Type of annotation, execution time, and core genes
341 for each method}\label{Etime}
343 \begin{tabular}{p{2cm}p{0.5cm}p{0.25cm}p{0.5cm}p{0.25cm}p{0.5cm}p{0.25cm}p{0.5cm}p{0.25cm}p{0.5cm}p{0.2cm}}
345 Method & \multicolumn{2}{c}{Annotation} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{Features} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{Exec. time (min.)} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{Core genes} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{Bad genomes} \\
346 ~ & N & D & Name & Seq & N & D & N & D & N & D \\
348 Gene prediction & $\surd$ & - & - & $\surd$ & ? & - & ? & - & 0 & -\\[0.5ex]
349 Gene features & $\surd$ & $\surd$ & $\surd$ & - & 4.98 & 1.52 & 28 & 10 & 1 & 0\\[0.5ex]
350 Gene quality & $\surd$ & $\surd$ & $\surd$ & $\surd$ & \multicolumn{2}{c}{$\simeq$3 days + 1.29} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{4} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{1}\\[1ex]
359 Table~\ref{Etime} presents for each method the annotation type,
360 execution time, and the number of core genes. We use the following
361 notations: \textbf{N} denotes NCBI, while \textbf{D} means DOGMA,
362 and \textbf{Seq} is for sequence. The first {\it Annotation} columns
363 represent the algorithm used to annotate chloroplast genomes, the {\it
364 Features} columns mean the kind of gene feature used to extract core
365 genes: gene name, gene sequence, or both of them. It can be seen that
366 almost all methods need low {\it Execution time} to extract core genes
367 from large chloroplast genome. Only the gene quality method requires
368 several days of computation (about 3-4 days) for sequence comparisons,
369 once the quality genomes are construced it takes just 1.29~minutes to
370 extract core gene. Thanks to this low execution times we can use these
371 methods to extract core genes on a personal computer rather than main
372 frames or parallel computers. The lowest execution time: 1.52~minutes,
373 is obtained with the second method using Dogma annotations. The number
374 of {\it Core genes} represents the amount of genes in the last core
375 genome. The main goal is to find the maximum core genes that simulate
376 biological background of chloroplasts. With NCBI we have 28 genes for
377 96 genomes, instead of 10 genes for 97 genomes with
378 Dogma. Unfortunately, the biological distribution of genomes with NCBI
379 in core tree do not reflect good biological perspective, whereas with
380 DOGMA the distribution of genomes is biologically relevant. {\it Bad
381 genomes} gives the number of genomes that destroy core genes due to
382 low number of gene intersection. \textit{NC\_012568.1 Micromonas
383 pusilla} is the only genome which destroyed the core genome with NCBI
384 annotations for both gene features and gene quality methods.
386 The second important factor is the amount of memory being used by each
387 methodology. Table \ref{mem} shows the memory usage of each
388 method. We used a package from PyPI~(\textit{the Python Package
389 Index}) named \textit{Memory\_profile} (located at~{\tt
390 https://pypi.python.org/pypi}) to extract all the values in
391 table~\ref{mem}. In this table, the values are presented in megabyte
392 unit and \textit{gV} means genevision~file~format. We can notice that
393 the level of memory which is used is relatively low for all methods
394 and is available on any personal computer. The different values also
395 show that the gene features method based on Dogma annotations has the
396 more reasonable memory usage, except when extracting core
397 sequences. The third method gives the lowest values if we already have
398 the quality genomes, otherwise it will consume far more
399 memory. Moreover, the amount of memory used by the third method also
400 depends on the size of each genome.
404 \caption{Memory usages in (MB) for each methodology}\label{mem}
406 \begin{tabular}{p{2.5cm}p{1.5cm}p{1cm}p{1cm}p{1cm}p{1cm}p{1cm}p{1cm}}
408 Method& & Load Gen. & Conv. gV & Read gV & ICM & Core tree & Core Seq. \\
410 Gene prediction & ~ & ~ & ~ & ~ & ~ & ~ & ~\\
411 \multirow{2}{*}{Gene Features} & NCBI & 15.4 & 18.9 & 17.5 & 18 & 18 & 28.1\\
412 & DOGMA& 15.3 & 15.3 & 16.8 & 17.8 & 17.9 & 31.2\\
413 Gene Quality & ~ & 15.3 & $\le$3G & 16.1 & 17 & 17.1 & 24.4\\