SqueezeMeta: a fully automated metagenomics pipeline, from reads to bins

Find the SqueezeMeta paper at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2018.03349/full

1. What is SqueezeMeta?

SqueezeMeta is a full automatic pipeline for metagenomics/metatranscriptomics, covering all steps of the analysis. SqueezeMeta includes multi-metagenome support allowing the co-assembly of related metagenomes and the retrieval of individual genomes via binning procedures. Thus, SqueezeMeta features several unique characteristics:

Co-assembly procedure with read mapping for estimation of the abundances of genes in each metagenome
Co-assembly of a large number of metagenomes via merging of individual metagenomes
Includes binning and bin checking, for retrieving individual genomes
The results are stored in a database, where they can be easily exported and shared, and can be inspected anywhere using a web interface.
Internal checks for the assembly and binning steps inform about the consistency of contigs and bins, allowing to spot potential chimeras.
Metatranscriptomic support via mapping of cDNA reads against reference metagenomes

SqueezeMeta can be run in three different modes, depending of the type of multi-metagenome support. These modes are:

Sequential mode: All samples are treated individually and analysed sequentially. This mode does not include binning.
Coassembly mode: Reads from all samples are pooled and a single assembly is performed. Then reads from individual samples are mapped to the coassembly to obtain gene abundances in each sample. Binning methods allow to obtain genome bins.
Merged mode: if many big samples are available, co-assembly could crash because of memory requirements. This mode allows the co-assembly of an unlimited number of samples, using a procedure inspired by the one used by Benjamin Tully for analysing TARA Oceans data (https://dx.doi.org/10.17504/protocols.io.hfqb3mw ). Briefly, samples are assembled individually and the resulting contigs are merged in a single co-assembly. Then the analysis proceeds as in the co-assembly mode. This is not the recommended procedure (use co-assembly if possible) since the possibility of creating chimeric contigs is higher. But it is a viable alternative when standard co-assembly is not possible.

SqueezeMeta uses a combination of custom scripts and external software packages for the different steps of the analysis:

Assembly
RNA prediction and classification
ORF (CDS) prediction
Homology searching against taxonomic and functional databases
Hmmer searching against Pfam database
Taxonomic assignment of genes
Functional assignment of genes (OPTIONAL)
Blastx on parts of the contigs with no gene prediction or no hits
Taxonomic assignment of contigs, and check for taxonomic disparities
Coverage and abundance estimation for genes and contigs
Estimation of taxa abundances
Estimation of function abundances
Merging of previous results to obtain the ORF table
Binning with MaxBin
Binning with MetaBAT
Binning integration with DAS tool
Taxonomic assignment of bins, and check for taxonomic disparities
Checking of bins with CheckM
Merging of previous results to obtain the bin table
Merging of previous results to obtain the contig table
Prediction of kegg and metacyc patwhays for each bin
Final statistics for the run

Detailed information about the different steps of the pipeline can be found in the PDF manual.

2. Installation

For installing SqueezeMeta, download the latest release from the GitHub repository and uncompress the tarball in a suitable directory. The tarball includes the SqueezeMeta scripts as well as the third-party software redistributed with SqueezeMeta (see section 6). The INSTALL files contain detailed installation instructions, including all the external libraries required to make SqueezeMeta run in a vanilla Ubuntu 14.04 or CentOS7 (DVD iso) installation.

3. Downloading or building databases

SqueezeMeta uses several databases. GenBank nr for taxonomic assignment, and eggnog, KEGG and Pfam for functional assignment. The script download_databases.pl can be run to download a pre-formatted version of all the databases required by SqueezeMeta.

/path/to/SqueezeMeta/scripts/preparing_databases/download_databases.pl /download/path

, where <datapath> is the destination folder. This is the recommended option.

Alternatively, the script make_databases.pl can be run to download from source and format the latest version of the databases.

/path/to/SqueezeMeta/scripts/preparing_databases/make_databases.pl /download/path

The databases occupy 200Gb, but we recommend having at least 350Gb free disk space during the building process.

If the SqueezeMeta databases are already built in another location in the system, a different copy of SqueezeMeta can be configured to use them with

/path/to/SqueezeMeta/scripts/preparing_databases/configure_nodb.pl /path/to/db

4. Execution, restart and running scripts

Scripts location

The scripts composing the SqueezeMeta pipeline can be found in the /path/to/SqueezeMeta/scripts directory. Other utility scripts can be found in the /path/to/SqueezeMeta/utils directory. See the PDF manual for more information on utility scripts.

Execution

The command for running SqueezeMeta has the following syntax:

SqueezeMeta.pl -m <mode> -p <projectname> -s <equivfile> -f <raw fastq dir> <options>

Arguments Mandatory parameters

-m <sequential, coassembly, merged>: Mode (REQUIRED)
-p <string>: Project name (REQUIRED in coassembly and merged modes)
-s|-samples <path>: Samples file (REQUIRED)
-f|-seq <path>: Fastq read files' directory (REQUIRED)

Filtering

--cleaning: Filters with Trimmomatic (Default: no)
-cleaning_options [string]: Options for Trimmomatic (default: LEADING:8 TRAILING:8 SLIDINGWINDOW:10:15 MINLEN:30)

Assembly

-a [megahit,spades]: assembler (Default:megahit)
-assembly_options [string]: Extra options for the assembler (refer to the manual of the specific assembler).
-c|-contiglen [number]: Minimum length of contigs (Default:200)
-extassembly [path]: Path to an external assembly provided by the user. The file must contain contigs in the fasta format. This overrides the assembly step of SqueezeMeta.

Annotation

--nocog: Skip COG assignment (Default: no)
--nokegg: Skip KEGG assignment (Default: no)
--nopfam: Skip Pfam assignment (Default: no)
-extdb [path]: List of additional user-provided databases for functional annotations. More information can be found in the manual.
--D|--doublepass: Run BlastX ORF prediction in addition to Prodigal (Default: no)

Mapping

-map [bowtie,bwa,minimap2-ont,minimap2-pb,minimap2-sr]: Read mapper (Default: bowtie)

Binning

--nobins: Skip binning (Default: no)
--nomaxbin: Skip MaxBin binning (Default: no)
--nometabat: Skip MetaBat2 binning (Default: no)

Performance

-t [number]: Number of threads (Default:12)
-b|-block-size [number]: Block size for DIAMOND against the nr database (Default: 8)
-canumem [number]: Memory for canu in Gb (Default: 32)
--lowmem: Run on less than 16 Gb of RAM memory (Default: no). Equivalent to: -b 3 -canumem 15

Other

--minion: Run on MinION reads (Default: no). Equivalent to -a canu -map minimap2-ont

Information

-v: Version number
-h: Display help

Example SqueezeMeta call: SqueezeMeta.pl -m coassembly -p test -s test.samples -f mydir --nopfam -miniden 60

This will create a project "test" for co-assembling the samples specified in the file "test.samples", using a minimum identity of 60% for taxonomic and functional assignment, and skipping Pfam annotation. The -p parameter indicates the name under which all results and data files will be saved. This is not required for sequential mode, where the name will be taken from the samples file instead. The -f parameter indicates the directory where the read files specified in the sample file are stored.

The samples file:

The samples file specifies the samples, the names of their corresponding raw read files and the sequencing pair represented in those files, separated by tabulators.

It has the format: <Sample> <filename> <pair1|pair2>

An example would be

Sample1	readfileA_1.fastq	pair1
Sample1	readfileA_2.fastq	pair2
Sample1	readfileB_1.fastq	pair1
Sample1	readfileB_2.fastq	pair2
Sample2	readfileC_1.fastq.gz	pair1
Sample2	readfileC_2.fastq.gz	pair2
Sample3	readfileD_1.fastq	pair1	noassembly
Sample3	readfileD_2.fastq	pair2	noassembly

The first column indicates the sample id (this will be the project name in sequential mode), the second contains the file names of the sequences, and the third specifies the pair number of the reads. A fourth optional column can take the "noassembly" value, indicating that these sample must not be assembled with the rest (but will be mapped against the assembly to get abundances). This is the case for RNAseq reads that can hamper the assembly but we want them mapped to get transcript abundance of the genes in the assembly. Notice also that paired reads are expected, and that a sample can have more than one set of paired reads. The sequence files can be in fastq or fasta format, and can be gzipped.

Restart

Any interrupted SqueezeMeta run can be restarted using the program restart.pl. It has the syntax:

restart.pl <projectname>

This command must be issued in the upper directory to the project , and will restart the run of that project by reading the progress.txt file to find out the point where the run stopped.

Alternatively, the run can be restarted from a specific step by issuing the command:

restart.pl <projectname> -step <step_to_restart_from>

e.g. restart.pl <projectname> -step 6 would restart the pipeline from the taxonomic assignment of genes. The different steps of the pipeline are listed in section 1.

Running scripts

Also, any individual script of the pipeline can be run in the upper directory to the project using the same syntax:

script <projectname> (for instance, 04.rundiamond.pl <projectname> to repeat the DIAMOND run for the project)

5. Analizing an user-supplied assembly

An user-supplied assembly can be passed to SqueezeMeta with the flag -extassembly <your_assembly.fasta>. The contigs in that fasta file will be analyzed by the SqueezeMeta pipeline starting from step 2.

6. Using external databases for functional annotation

Version 1.0 implements the possibility of using one or several user-provided databases for functional annotation. This is invoked using the -extdb option. Please refer to the manual for details.

7. Extra sensitive detection of ORFs

Version 1.0 implements the --D option (doublepass), that attempts to provide a more sensitive ORF detection by combining the Prodigal prediction with a BlastX search on parts of the contigs where no ORFs were predicted, or where predicted ORFs did not match anything in the taxonomic and functional databases.

8. Testing SqueezeMeta

The download_databases.pl and make_databases.pl scripts also download two datasets for testing that the program is running correctly. Assuming either was run with the directory /download/path as its target the test run can be executed with

cd </download/path/test>
SqueezeMeta.pl -m coassembly -p Hadza -s test.samples -f raw

Alternatively, -m sequential or -m merged can be used.

9. Working with Oxford Nanopore MinION and PacBio reads

Since version 0.3.0, SqueezeMeta is able to seamlessly work with single-end reads. In order to obtain better mappings of MinION and PacBio reads agains the assembly, we advise to use minimap2 for read counting, by including the -map minimap2-ont (MinION) or -map minimap2-pb (PacBio) flags when calling SqueezeMeta. We also include the canu assembler, which is specially tailored to work with long, noisy reads. It can be selected by including the -a canu flag when calling SqueezeMeta. As a shortcut, the --minion flag will use both canu and minimap2 for Oxford Nanopore MinION reads.

10. Working on a low memory environment

In our experience, assembly and DIAMOND against the nr database are the most memory-hungry parts of the pipeline. DIAMOND memory usage can be controlled via the -b parameter (DIAMOND will consume ~5*b Gb of memory). Assembly memory usage is trickier, as memory requirements increase with the number of reads in a sample. We have managed to run SqueezeMeta with as much as 42M 2x100 Illumina HiSeq pairs on a virtual machine with only 16Gb of memory. Conceivably, larger samples could be split an assembled in chunks using the merged mode. We include the shortcut flag --lowmem, which will set DIAMOND block size to 3, and canu memory usage to 15Gb. This is enough to make SqueezeMeta run on 16Gb of memory, and allows the in situ analysis of Oxford Nanopore MinION reads. Under such computational limitations, we have been able to coassemble and analyze 10 MinION metagenomes (taken from SRA project SRP163045) in less than 4 hours.

11. Setting up the MySQL database

SqueezeMeta includes a built in MySQL database that can be queried via a web-based interface, in order to facilitate the exploration of metagenomic results. Code and instruction installations can be found at https://github.com/jtamames/SqueezeMdb.

12. Updating SqueezeMeta

Assuming your databases are not inside the SqueezeMeta directory, just remove it, download the new version and configure it with