MOTIVATION: Networks are used to relate topological structure to system dynamics and function, particularly in ecology systems biology. Network analysis is often guided or complemented by data-driven visualization. Hive one of many network visualizations, distinguish themselves as providing a general, consistent and coherent rule-based representation to motivate hypothesis development and testing. RESULTS: Here, we present HyPE, Hive Panel Explorer, a software application that creates a panel of interactive hive plots. HyPE enables network exploration based on user-driven layout rules and parameter combinations for simultaneous of multiple network views. We demonstrate HyPE's features by exploring a microbial co-occurrence network constructed from forest soil microbiomes. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: HyPE is available under the GNU license: https://github.com/hallamlab/HivePanelExplorer. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

FAST is a multi-threaded, I/O optimized Seed-and-Extend alignment program. FAST is extensible to nucleotide sequences making it comparable to both BLASTn and BLASTp, and also features several new usage flags reporting only HSPs meeting user defined e-value cut-offs. FASTs threaded database construction allows fast, low memory database construction e.g., RefSeq (9.4GB) can be indexed in under 5 minutes using 20 threads. The threaded database construction gives users the ability to create custom databases on demand which is useful for tasks requiring self-alignment, such as network construction [30]. Finally, FAST supports incremental database construction enabling users to keep their databases up-to-date by adding sequences without suffering the cost of reformatting the entire database. The FAST source is freely available through GitHub https:// github.com/hallamlab/FAST and test datasets can be found on Dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/sh/xvvavweuzgqybc4/ AAAWCrRnol67ZsXi2qLQWUuOa?

Accurate description of the microbial communities driving matter and energy transformations in complex ecosystems such as soils cannot yet be effectively accomplished using assembly-based approaches despite the rise of next generation sequencing technologies. Here we present SOFA, an open source pipeline enabling comparative functional annotation of unassembled short-read data. The pipeline attempts to merge mate pairs in fastq files, predicts open reading frames (ORFs) on merged and unmerged reads as small as 70 bps, and completes an additional step, we term `deduplication'. Deduplication prevents the double counting of ORFs predicted from unmerged paired-end reads by checking for homologous annotations that span the same ORF, allowing for quantitatively accurate predictions. The effectiveness of SOFA is validated with both simulated and bone fide soil metagenomes, and empirical results are compared to existing strategies for obtaining accurate ORF counts, and an analytical model of read duplication. SOFA enables downstream processing stages within the existing MetaPathways pipeline, and is available for download as a stand alone application at https://github.com under the MIT license.

A fundamental step in the analysis of environmental sequence information is the prediction of potential genes or open reading frames (ORFs) encoding the metabolic potential of individual cells and entire microbial communities. FragGeneScan, a software designed to predict intact and incomplete ORFs on short sequencing reads combines codon usage bias, sequencing error models and start/stop codon patterns in a hidden Markov model to find the most likely path of hidden states from a given input sequence, provides a promising route for gene recovery in environmental datasets with incomplete assemblies. However, the current implementation of FragGeneScan does not scale efficiently with increasing input data size. Thus, FragGeneScan cannot be applied to contemporary environmental datasets that can exceed 100s of Gb. Here, we present FragGeneScan-Plus, an improved implementation of the FragGeneScan gene prediction model that leverages algorithmic thread synchronization and efficient in-memory data management to utilize multiple CPU cores without blocking I/O operations. FragGeneScan-Plus can process data approximately 5-times faster than FragGeneScan using a single core and approximately 50-times faster using eight hyper-threaded cores when benchmarked against simulated and real world environmental datasets.

UNLABELLED: Next-generation sequencing is producing vast amounts of sequence information from natural and engineered ecosystems. Although this data deluge has an enormous potential to transform our lives, knowledge creation and translation need software applications that scale with increasing data processing and analysis requirements. Here, we present improvements to MetaPathways, an annotation and analysis pipeline for environmental sequence information that expedites this transformation. We specifically address pathway prediction hazards through integration of a weighted taxonomic distance and enable quantitative comparison of assembled annotations through a normalized read-mapping measure. Additionally, we improve LAST homology searches through BLAST-equivalent E-values and output formats that are natively compatible with prevailing software applications. Finally, an updated graphical user interface allows for keyword annotation query and projection onto user-defined functional gene hierarchies, including the Carbohydrate-Active Enzyme database. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: MetaPathways v2.5 is available on GitHub: http://github.com/hallamlab/metapathways2. CONTACT: [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.