MOTIVATION: Alignment-based sequence similarity searches, while accurate for some type of sequences, can produce incorrect results when used on more divergent but functionally related sequences that have undergone the sequence rearrangements observed in many bacterial and viral genomes. Here, we propose a classification model that exploits the complementary nature of alignment-based and alignment-free similarity measures with the aim to improve the accuracy with which DNA and protein sequences are characterized. RESULTS: Our model classifies sequences using a combined sequence similarity score calculated by adaptively weighting the contribution of different sequence similarity measures. Weights are determined independently for each sequence in the test set and reflect the discriminatory ability of individual similarity measures in the training set. Because the similarity between some sequences is determined more accurately with one type of measure rather than another, our classifier allows different sets of weights to be associated with different sequences. Using five different similarity measures, we show that our model significantly improves the classification accuracy over the current composition- and alignment-based models, when predicting the taxonomic lineage for both short viral sequence fragments and complete viral sequences. We also show that our model can be used effectively for the classification of reads from a real metagenome dataset as well as protein sequences. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: All the datasets and the code used in this study are freely available at https://collaborators.oicr.on.ca/vferretti/borozan_csss/csss.html. CONTACT: [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

BACKGROUND: It is now well established that nearly 20% of human cancers are caused by infectious agents, and the list of human oncogenic pathogens will grow in the future for a variety of cancer types. Whole tumor transcriptome and genome sequencing by next-generation sequencing technologies presents an unparalleled opportunity for pathogen detection and discovery in human tissues but requires development of new genome-wide bioinformatics tools. RESULTS: Here we present CaPSID (Computational Pathogen Sequence IDentification), a comprehensive bioinformatics platform for identifying, querying and visualizing both exogenous and endogenous pathogen nucleotide sequences in tumor genomes and transcriptomes. CaPSID includes a scalable, high performance database for data storage and a web application that integrates the genome browser JBrowse. CaPSID also provides useful metrics for sequence analysis of pre-aligned BAM files, such as gene and genome coverage, and is optimized to run efficiently on multiprocessor computers with low memory usage. CONCLUSIONS: To demonstrate the usefulness and efficiency of CaPSID, we carried out a comprehensive analysis of both a simulated dataset and transcriptome samples from ovarian cancer. CaPSID correctly identified all of the human and pathogen sequences in the simulated dataset, while in the ovarian dataset CaPSID's predictions were successfully validated in vitro.