Mottle: Accurate pairwise substitution distance at high divergence through the exploitation of short-read mappers and gradient descent.

Autor: Prusokiene A; Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering, School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, Newcastle University, United Kingdom., Boonham N; Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering, School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, Newcastle University, United Kingdom., Fox A; Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering, School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, Newcastle University, United Kingdom.; Fera Ltd., Biotech Campus, York, United Kingdom., Howard TP; Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering, School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, Newcastle University, United Kingdom.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: PloS one [PLoS One] 2024 Mar 21; Vol. 19 (3), pp. e0298834. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Mar 21 (Print Publication: 2024).
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0298834
Abstrakt: Current tools for estimating the substitution distance between two related sequences struggle to remain accurate at a high divergence. Difficulties at distant homologies, such as false seeding and over-alignment, create a high barrier for the development of a stable estimator. This is especially true for viral genomes, which carry a high rate of mutation, small size, and sparse taxonomy. Developing an accurate substitution distance measure would help to elucidate the relationship between highly divergent sequences, interrogate their evolutionary history, and better facilitate the discovery of new viral genomes. To tackle these problems, we propose an approach that uses short-read mappers to create whole-genome maps, and gradient descent to isolate the homologous fraction and calculate the final distance value. We implement this approach as Mottle. With the use of simulated and biological sequences, Mottle was able to remain stable to 0.66-0.96 substitutions per base pair and identify viral outgroup genomes with 95% accuracy at the family-order level. Our results indicate that Mottle performs as well as existing programs in identifying taxonomic relationships, with more accurate numerical estimation of genomic distance over greater divergences. By contrast, one limitation is a reduced numerical accuracy at low divergences, and on genomes where insertions and deletions are uncommon, when compared to alternative approaches. We propose that Mottle may therefore be of particular interest in the study of viruses, viral relationships, and notably for viral discovery platforms, helping in benchmarking of homology search tools and defining the limits of taxonomic classification methods. The code for Mottle is available at https://github.com/tphoward/Mottle_Repo.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2024 Prusokiene et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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