UNLABELLED: Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs) are used to address a variety of research questions in a variety of fields (e.g. population genetics, phylogenetics, forensics, etc.), due to their high mutability within and between species. Here, we present an innovative algorithm, SA-SSR, based on suffix and longest common prefix arrays for efficiently detecting SSRs in large sets of sequences. Existing SSR detection applications are hampered by one or more limitations (i.e. speed, accuracy, ease-of-use, etc.). Our algorithm addresses these challenges while being the most comprehensive and correct SSR detection software available. SA-SSR is 100% accurate and detected >1000 more SSRs than the second best algorithm, while offering greater control to the user than any existing software. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: SA-SSR is freely available at http://github.com/ridgelab/SA-SSR CONTACT: [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

BACKGROUND: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have effectively identified genetic factors for many diseases. Many diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), have epistatic causes, requiring more sophisticated analyses to identify groups of variants which together affect phenotype. RESULTS: Based on the GWAS statistical model, we developed a multi-SNP GWAS analysis to identify pairs of variants whose common occurrence signaled the Alzheimer's disease phenotype. CONCLUSIONS: Despite not having sufficient data to demonstrate significance, our preliminary experimentation identified a high correlation between GRIA3 and HLA-DRB5 (an AD gene). GRIA3 has not been previously reported in association with AD, but is known to play a role in learning and memory.

BACKGROUND: Analyzing next-generation sequencing data is difficult because datasets are large, second generation sequencing platforms have high error rates, and because each position in the target genome (exome, transcriptome, etc.) is sequenced multiple times. Given these challenges, numerous bioinformatic algorithms have been developed to analyze these data. These algorithms aim to find an appropriate balance between data loss, errors, analysis time, and memory footprint. Typical analysis pipelines require multiple steps. If one or more of these steps is unnecessary, it would significantly decrease compute time and data manipulation to remove the step. One step in many pipelines is PCR duplicate removal, where PCR duplicates arise from multiple PCR products from the same template molecule binding on the flowcell. These are often removed because there is concern they can lead to false positive variant calls. Picard (MarkDuplicates) and SAMTools (rmdup) are the two main softwares used for PCR duplicate removal. RESULTS: Approximately 92 % of the 17+ million variants called were called whether we removed duplicates with Picard or SAMTools, or left the PCR duplicates in the dataset. There were no significant differences between the unique variant sets when comparing the transition/transversion ratios (p = 1.0), percentage of novel variants (p = 0.99), average population frequencies (p = 0.99), and the percentage of protein-changing variants (p = 1.0). Results were similar for variants in the American College of Medical Genetics genes. Genotype concordance between NGS and SNP chips was above 99 % for all genotype groups (e.g., homozygous reference). CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that PCR duplicate removal has minimal effect on the accuracy of subsequent variant calls.

BACKGROUND: Since the advent of next-generation sequencing many previously untestable hypotheses have been realized. Next-generation sequencing has been used for a wide range of studies in diverse fields such as population and medical genetics, phylogenetics, microbiology, and others. However, this novel technology has created unanticipated challenges such as the large numbers of genetic variants. Each caucasian genome has more than four million single nucleotide variants, insertions and deletions, copy number variants, and structural variants. Several formats have been suggested for storing these variants; however, the variant call format (VCF) has become the community standard. RESULTS: We developed new software called the Variant Tool Chest (VTC) to provide much needed tools to work with VCF files. VTC provides a variety of tools for manipulating, comparing, and analyzing VCF files beyond the functionality of existing tools. In addition, VTC was written to be easily extended with new tools. CONCLUSIONS: Variant Tool Chest brings new and important functionality that complements and integrates well with existing software. VTC is available at https://github.com/mebbert/VariantToolChest.

Abstract Motivation: Multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) are at the heart of bioinformatics analysis. Recently, a number of multiple protein sequence alignment benchmarks (i.e. BAliBASE, OXBench, PREFAB and SMART) have been released to evaluate new and existing MSA applications. These databases have been well received by researchers and help to quantitatively evaluate MSA programs on protein sequences. Unfortunately, analogous DNA benchmarks are not available, making evaluation of MSA programs difficult for DNA sequences. Results: This work presents the first known multiple DNA sequence alignment benchmarks that are (1) comprised of protein-coding portions of DNA (2) based on biological features such as the tertiary structure of encoded proteins. These reference DNA databases contain a total of 3545 alignments, comprising of 68 581 sequences. Two versions of the database are available: mdsa_100s and mdsa_all. The mdsa_100s version contains the alignments of the data sets that TBLASTN found 100% sequence identity for each sequence. The mdsa_all version includes all hits with an E-value score above the threshold of 0.001. A primary use of these databases is to benchmark the performance of MSA applications on DNA data sets. The first such case study is included in the Supplementary Material. Availability: The databases, further details and the Supplementary Material are publicly available at http://csl.cs.byu.edu/mdsas/http://csl.cs.byu.edu/mdsas/ Contact: [email protected] Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.