/last-genome-alignments

last-genome-alignments

Here are some pair-wise genome alignments made with LAST.

2017 human-ape alignments

The human genome (hg38) was aligned to chimp (panTro5) and gorilla (gorGor5), as follows. This alignment recipe is very accurate-but-slow. A faster recipe would mask repeats during alignment, and/or omit -m50.

First, an "index" of the human genome was prepared, suitable for comparing it to highly-similar sequences:

lastdb -P0 -uNEAR -R01 hg38-NEAR hg38_no_alt_analysis_set.fa

Then, substitution and gap frequencies were determined:

last-train -P0 --revsym --matsym --gapsym -E0.05 -C2 hg38-NEAR panTro5.fa > hg38-panTro5.mat

Next, many-to-one ape-to-human alignments were made:

lastal -m50 -E0.05 -C2 -p hg38-panTro5.mat hg38-NEAR panTro5.fa | last-split -m1 > hg38-panTro5-1.maf

The above command was the slowest step (3 CPU-weeks). You can "easily" parallelize it, by processing each sequence within panTro5.fa separately (in parallel). But each process uses quite a lot of memory, so take care that multiple parallel runs don't exceed your memory.

Next, one-to-one ape-to-human alignments were made:

maf-swap hg38-panTro5-1.maf |
awk '/^s/ {$2 = (++s % 2 ? "panTro5." : "hg38.") $2} 1' |
last-split -m1 |
maf-swap > hg38-panTro5-2.maf

The awk command prepends the assembly name to each chromosome name (e.g. chr7 -> hg38.chr7).

Finally, simple-sequence alignments were discarded, the alignments were converted to tabular format, and alignments with error probability > 10^-5 were discarded:

last-postmask hg38-panTro5-2.maf |
maf-convert -n tab |
awk -F'=' '$2 <= 1e-5' > hg38-panTro5.tab

2017 human-mouse alignments

The human genome (hg38) was aligned to mouse (mm10). This alignment recipe is even more slow-and-sensitive.

First, an "index" of the human genome was prepared, suitable for comparing it to less-similar sequences:

lastdb -P0 -uMAM4 -R01 hg38-MAM4 hg38_no_alt_analysis_set.fa

Then, substitution and gap frequencies were determined:

last-train -P0 --revsym --matsym --gapsym -E0.05 -C2 hg38-MAM4 mm10.fa > hg38-mm10.mat

Next, many-to-one mouse-to-human alignments were made:

lastal -m100 -E0.05 -C2 -p hg38-mm10.mat hg38-MAM4 mm10.fa | last-split -m1 > hg38-mm10-1.maf

Finally, one-to-one MAF alignments, and high-confidence tabular alignments, were made in the same way as above.