SUMMARY: The profusion of sequenced genomes across the bacterial and archeal domains offers unprecedented possibilities for phylogenetic and comparative genomic analyses. In general, phylogenetic reconstruction is improved by the use of more data. However, including all available data is (i) not computationally tractable, and (ii) prone to biases, as the abundance of genomes is very unequally distributed over the biological diversity. Thus, in most cases, subsampling taxa to build a phylogeny is necessary. Currently, though, there is no available software to perform that handily. Here we present TADA, a taxonomic-aware dataset selection workflow that allows sampling across user-defined portions of the prokaryotic diversity with variable granularity, while setting constraints on genome quality and balance between branches. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: TADA is implemented as a snakemake workflow and is freely available at https://github.com/emilhaegglund/TADA.

SUMMARY: Metagenomics and single-cell genomics have revolutionized the study of microorganisms, increasing our knowledge of microbial genomic diversity by orders of magnitude. A major issue pertaining to metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) and single-cell amplified genomes (SAGs) is to estimate their completeness and redundancy. Most approaches rely on counting conserved gene markers. In miComplete, we introduce a weighting strategy, where we normalize the presence/absence of markers by their median distance to the next marker in a set of complete reference genomes. This approach alleviates biases introduced by the presence/absence of shorter DNA pieces containing many markers, e.g. ribosomal protein operons. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: miComplete is written in Python 3 and released under GPLv3. Source code and documentation are available at https://bitbucket.org/evolegiolab/micomplete. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Summary: With the wealth of available genome sequences, a difficult and tedious part of inferring phylogenomic trees is now to select genomes with an appropriate taxon density in the different parts of the tree. The package described here offers tools to easily select the most representative organisms, following a set of simple rules based on taxonomy and assembly quality, to retrieve the genomes from public databases (NCBI, JGI), to annotate them if necessary, to identify given markers in these, and to prepare files for multiple sequence alignment. Availability and Implementation: phyloSkeleton is a Perl module and is freely available under GPLv3 at https://bitbucket.org/lionelguy/phyloskeleton/ . Contact: [email protected].

UNLABELLED: The amount of gene and genome data obtained by next-generation sequencing technologies generates a need for comparative visualization tools. Complementing existing software for comparison and exploration of genomics data, genoPlotR automatically creates publication-grade linear maps of gene and genomes, in a highly automatic, flexible and reproducible way. AVAILABILITY: genoPlotR is a platform-independent R package, available with full source code under a GPL2 license at R-Forge: http://genoplotr.r-forge.r-project.org/.

MOTIVATION: Lateral gene transfer is a major mechanism contributing to bacterial genome dynamics and pathovar emergence via pathogenicity island (PAI) spreading. However, since few of these genomic exchanges are experimentally reproducible, it is difficult to establish evolutionary scenarios for the successive PAI transmissions between bacterial genera. Methods initially developed at the gene and/or nucleotide level for genomics, i.e. comparisons of concatenated sequences, ortholog frequency, gene order or dinucleotide usage, were combined and applied here to homologous PAIs: we call this approach comparative PAI genometrics. RESULTS: YAPI, a Yersinia PAI, and related islands were compared with measure evolutionary relationships between related modules. Through use of our genometric approach designed for tracking codon usage adaptation and gene phylogeny, an ancient inter-genus PAI transfer was oriented for the first time by characterizing the genomic environment in which the ancestral island emerged and its subsequent transfers to other bacterial genera.