nf-core/multiplesequencealign

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Introduction

*nf-core/multiplesequencealign* is a bioinformatics pipeline to run and systematically evaluate Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) methods.

The pipeline is built using Nextflow, a workflow tool to run tasks across multiple compute infrastructures in a very portable manner. It uses Docker/Singularity containers making installation trivial and results highly reproducible. The Nextflow DSL2 implementation of this pipeline uses one container per process which makes it much easier to maintain and update software dependencies. Where possible, these processes have been submitted to and installed from nf-core/modules in order to make them available to all nf-core pipelines, and to everyone within the Nextflow community!

On release, automated continuous integration tests run the pipeline on a full-sized dataset on the AWS cloud infrastructure. This ensures that the pipeline runs on AWS, has sensible resource allocation defaults set to run on real-world datasets, and permits the persistent storage of results to benchmark between pipeline releases and other analysis sources.The results obtained from the full-sized test can be viewed on the nf-core website.

1. *Stats*: computation of summary statistics on the input fasta file, such as the average similarity across sequences, their length, etc.
2. *Collect dress-up infos*: any external information required by the downstream steps will be retrieved. For example, in the case of protein sequences, subworkflows of the proteinfold pipeline can be used to run de novo protein structure prediction software, alternatively, a database search followed by the fetching of the structures.
3. *Align*: runs multiple sequence alignment software. If possible, distance metrics computation, guide tree rendering and assembly steps will be kept separate to evaluate their individual contribution to the final result.
4. *Evaluate*: here the MSAs are evaluated with different metrics: Sum Of Pairs (SoP), Total Column score (TC), iRMSD, Total Consistency Score (TCS), etc.
5. *Visualize*: colour the MSA according to TCS, visualize summary plots about performance etc.
6. *Compress*: as the final MSA files are very large, compression tools will be used before storing the final result

Usage

:::note
If you are new to Nextflow and nf-core, please refer to this page on how
to set-up Nextflow. Make sure to test your setup
with -profile test before running the workflow on actual data.
:::

Now, you can run the pipeline using:

nextflow run nf-core/multiplesequencealign \  
   -profile test \  
   --input samplesheet.csv \  
   --tools toolsheet.csv \  
   --outdir outdir  

:::warning
Please provide pipeline parameters via the CLI or Nextflow -params-file option. Custom config files including those
provided by the -c Nextflow option can be used to provide any configuration *except for parameters*;
see docs.
:::

For more details and further functionality, please refer to the usage documentation and the parameter documentation.

Pipeline output

To see the results of an example test run with a full size dataset refer to the results tab on the nf-core website pipeline page.
For more details about the output files and reports, please refer to the
output documentation.

Credits

nf-core/multiplesequencealign was originally written by Luisa Santus (@luisas) and Jose Espinosa-Carrasco (@JoseEspinosa) from The Comparative Bioinformatics Group at The Centre for Genomic Regulation, Spain.

We thank the following people for their extensive assistance in the development of this pipeline:

Contributions and Support

If you would like to contribute to this pipeline, please see the contributing guidelines.

For further information or help, don't hesitate to get in touch on the Slack #multiplesequencealign channel (you can join with this invite).

Citations

An extensive list of references for the tools used by the pipeline can be found in the CITATIONS.md file.

You can cite the nf-core publication as follows:

*The nf-core framework for community-curated bioinformatics pipelines.*

Philip Ewels, Alexander Peltzer, Sven Fillinger, Harshil Patel, Johannes Alneberg, Andreas Wilm, Maxime Ulysse Garcia, Paolo Di Tommaso & Sven Nahnsen.

Nat Biotechnol. 2020 Feb 13. doi: 10.1038/s41587-020-0439-x.