Gene Prediction with BLAST+

BLAST is another option to predict genes in a sequence and it is less difficult to set up as it only needs a FASTA file with the collection of genes to use.

The examples here use Uniprot DBs to predict genes, as it enables the mapping to several DBs, including eggNOG and Kegg Orthologs. It also assumes that an assembly has been produced for the gene prediction and that a DB to use blast with is already set up. Also, the BLAST+ package is expected to be installed on the system.

Functional Prediction

Assuming that BLAST is correctly installed and that the Uniprot DB is indexed, the only required parameter required by the scripts is –outfmt 6, which produces the BLAST tab format required by scripts that convert a BLAST output to a GFF blast2gff - Convert BLAST output to GFF. An example of the command line is this:

$ blastx -query assembly.fasta -db uniprot_sprot.fasta -out assembly.uniprot.tab -outfmt 6

This will output a file that can be passed to the GFF creation script, blast2gff, with the following command:

$ blast2gff uniprot -b 40 -db UNIPROT-SP -dbq 10 assembly.uniprot.tab assembly.uniprot.gff

The script documentation blast2gff - Convert BLAST output to GFF offer more information on the parameters. Suffice to say that -b 40 excludes any BLAST hit with a bit score of less than 40 and -dbq 10 point to the DB quality, as per MGKit GFF Specifications, which is important to filter annotations coming from multiple DBs with varying quality.

Filter GFF

The amount of prediction can be huge and most of them are overlapping annotations, so filtering the GFF annotations is important. A script is included to filter annotations (filter-gff - Filter GFF annotations), whose overlap command filters overlapping annotations. An example of the script execution is:

$ filter-gff overlap assembly.uniprot.gff assembly.uniprot-filt.gff

This will considerably reduce the size of the GFF file.

Taxonomic Prediction

Once the functional annotations are filtered, the next step is to assign taxonomic information to them, with the process being a two step process, to further refine the assignments.

The base process is to use the taxonomic assignment associated with the Uniprot ID predicted by BLAST, with a possible refinement of this by using the nucleotidic sequence associated with an annotation, whose similarity is then predicted using BLAST against a large collection of sequences, like the nt DB in NCBI.

Taxonomic Refinement

This part is entirely optional, but should be executed before the next one, to speed the scripts that follow.

First the sequences from the GFF file needs to be extracted with the get-gff-info sequence (get-gff-info - Extract informations to GFF annotations) command; an example execution is:

$ get-gff-info sequence -f assembly.fasta assembly.uniprot.gff assembly.uniprot.frag.fasta

This will output a FASTA file called assembly.uniprot.fasta with the sequences used as query for the blastn command of the BLAST+ package against the nt DB:

$ blastn -query assembly.uniprot.frag.fasta -db nt -out assembly.uniprot.frag.tab -outfmt 6

The ouput file assembly.uniprot.frag.tab is then passed to the taxonomy command of the add-gff-info script to incorporate the assignments information into the GFF file, an example of the execution of this command is the following:

$ add-gff-info taxonomy -t gi_taxid_nucl.dmp.gz -b assembly.uniprot.frag.tab -s 40 -d NCBI-NT assembly.uniprot.gff assembly.uniprot-taxa.gff

More information about the options used can be found at the script documentation (get-gff-info - Extract informations to GFF annotations), with an LCA option being available for assignments.

Complete Annotations

The rest of the taxonomic assignments, if not all, as well as additional informations can be added with uniprot or unipfile commands of the add-gff-info add-gff-info - Add informations to GFF annotations script. The main difference is that the uniprot command may be slower, as it connects to the internet and on a large number of annotations it takes a long time. The unipfile uses a file provided by Uniprot with additional information (in particular the taxonomy).

An example execution of the command is:

$ add-gff-info unipfile -i idmapping.dat.gz -m NCBI_TaxID assembly.uniprot.gff assembly.uniprot-final.gff

Note

if you used the taxonomic refinement, use assembly.uniprot-taxa.gff instead of assembly.uniprot.gff