Syntenic dotplot generated by SynMap between two substrains of Escherichia coli K12, DH10B and W3110. Results can be regenerated at http://genomevolution.org/r/3n89
SynMap allows you to generate a syntenic dotplot between two organisms and identify syntenic regions. This is done by:
Finding putative genes or regions of homology between two genomes
Identifying collinear sets of genes or regions of sequence similarity to infer synteny
Generating a dotplot of the results and coloring syntenic pairs.
If you choose, synonymous and non-synonymous site mutation data can be calculated for protein coding genes that are identified as syntenic. These genes will then be colored based on those values in the dotplot for rapid identification of different age-classes of syntenic regions.
SynMap Methods
Extract sequences for comparison; build fasta files
Create blastable databases (if necessary) and compare using
Last, a variant of Blast, much faster than lastz, nearly as sensitive. Last Homepage: http://last.cbrc.jp/
SynMap uses default blast parameters with an e-value cutoff of 0.001.
Identifies tandem gene duplicates using a program written by Haibao Tang and Brent Pedersen called blast2raw
Filters repetitive matches using a program written for SynMap by Brent Pedersen
Identify syntenic pairs of by finding collinear series of putative homologous sequences using DAGChainer [3]
Optional: calculate synonymous and nonsynonymous mutation rates for syntenic gene pairs using CodeML of the PAML package[4]
Generate dotplot of all putative homologous matches; dots are colored gray
Add syntenic pairs; dots are colored either green and red (same or opposite orientation), or based on the synonymous mutations, nonsynonymous mutations, or the ratio of nonsynonymous/synonymous mutations
↑ Altschul SF, Gish W, Miller W, Myers EW, Lipman DJ (1990) Basic local alignment search tool. Journal of Molecular Biology 215:403-410
↑ Haas BJ, Delcher AL, Wortman JR, Salzberg SL (2004) DAGchainer: a tool for mining segmental genome duplications and synteny. Bioinformatics 20: 3643–3646
↑ Yang Z (2007) PAML 4: Phylogenetic Analysis by Maximum Likelihood. Molecular Biology and Evolution 24:1586-1591
Specifying genomes
Selecting organisms in SynMap is done under the "select organisms" tab.
It is easy to search and select organisms in SynMap. Just select the "select organisms" tab and search for two organisms by either name or organism description. Just type part of either in the text box and SynMap automatically searches for any organism that contains your text. The results are displayed below the search boxes. Some organisms may have multiple versions of their genome and different types of sequences (e.g. masked versus unmasked). These will be displayed in a drop-down menu from which you can select the correct genome. Also, this is where you can select for comparing CDS sequence or genomic sequence. If the genome does not have CDS features, the option won't be display and a warning will be printed in below these drop-down menus. When selected, a brief description of the genome will be displayed below the drop-down menus. This will include the full organism name and description, followed by an overview of the genome. If you click on "Genome Information:" it will link to OrganismView and give you a full description of the genome. Otherwise, it will display source of the genome, the number of chromosomes in the genome, the total length of the genome in nucleotides, and whether the genome contains plasmids or contigs.
QuotaAlign options
QuotaAlign is a post-processing step to merge adjacent syntenic blocks, or select subset of syntenic blocks that reflect matching ratio of regions (for example, number of subgenomes in duplicated genomes). These two steps are essential for downstream analysis of genome rearrangements. Read more details on QuotaAlign.
NOTE: If you select a Quota Ratio of 1:1, a link will appear in the "Links and Downloads" section of the results called "Rearrangement Analysis (powered by GRIMM!)" This link will take you to the GRIMM: Genome Rearrangement Analysis in Man and Mouse server and automatically populate their submission box with your genomes from SynMap appropriate coded for rearrangement analysis. Please note that their algorithm will work on any pairs of genomes with a 1:1 syntenic mapping.
(B)LastZ: Nucleotide-nucleotide search. This is the LastZ implementation that has been parallelized to break up the query sequences into multiple pieces for searching. This is usually the best algorithm to pick in terms of sensitivity and speed.
tblastx takes 6 times longer than blastn and usually doesn't improve the ability to find synteny. If the DNA sequence is that diverged at the nucleotide level that a protein sequence search is needed to find putative homologous sequence, usually the genome structure is also very divergent and collinear gene sets are not likely to be found.
Filter Repetitive Matches: This option adjust the e-values of the blast hits to lower the significance of sequences that occur multiple times in a genome
DAGChainer options:
DAGChainer is the algorithm to identify syntenic regions between genomes. It works by searching some distance from a pair of genes for another pair. If some threshold number of gene pairs are identified, DAGChainer keeps that set of gene-pairs which will be reported back to SynMap. These sets of gene pairs are interpreted as two syntenic regions, and get colored in the dotplot for easy identification.
"Relative Gene Order" and "Nucleotide Distance".
This determines whether DAGChainer is searching by number of genes (or regions of sequence similarity) or by absolute genomic nucleotide distances. For the most part, using "relative gene order" is preferable. The absolute distance between genes in nucleotides varies widely between genomes, and even within a genome. For the former, gene spacing in a bacteria genome are orders of magnitude closer than for an animal genome. For the latter, genes near centromeres are often further from one another than genes distal to a centromere. This is very apparent in plant genomes.
Average distance expected between syntenic genes
Maximum distance between two matches
These two options are self explanatory. One thing to keep in mind is that the larger these values are set, the more generous DAGChainer is in including genes in a collinear set. In other words, as these values are increased, your false positive rate goes up. Also, the "average distance" should be lower than "maximum distance".
Minimum number of aligned pairs
This is the minimum number of gene-pairs that DAGChainer needs in a collinear gene set to keep. The higher this number, the more stringent DAGChainer will be for finding "good" collinear gene sets.
Merge Syntenic Blocks: Merges neighboring syntenic blocks into larger blocks. Useful if you are performing statistics on syntenic blocks.
Quota Align Merge: Use Haibao Tang's Quota Align method to merge syntenic blocks (recommended). Merge distance is the number of genes or nucleotides to use to link a neighboring syntenic region
Iterative DAGChainer: Recode the blocks into a new input file for DAGChainer and run DAGChainer again
This algorithm removes syntenic regions by enforcing a defined syntenic relationship between genomes. For example, a 1:1 syntenic depth will find a keep the best syntenic regions that cover each genome once. A 1:2 syntenic depth will find the best syntenic regions that cover one genome once and the other genome twice. This option is useful if you want to minimize noise in an analysis with false positive syntenic regions, are testing for multiple polyploidy events, or trying to mask older polyploidy events from an analysis.
Overlap Distance: How much syntenic regions may overlap and still be permitted. Some overlap is recommended as the algorithms for finding syntenic regions may have fuzzy ends that are have some overlap with one another.
CodeML: Turn on this option to calculate synonymous and non-synonymous mutation rates for identified syntenic gene pairs. The syntenic gene pairs get colored according to these values and a historgram with those color-metrics is displayed below the sytneic dotplot.
Advanced Options
Tandem duplication distance: This is the distance searched (in genes) when identifying tandem gene duplicates. A value of 10 means that if there are genes within 10 genes on one another that both match the same gene in the other genome, they will be considered tandem duplicates and condensed to a single representative. This option is used by blast_to_raw.py
C-score: This option filters low quality blast hits using a cutoff value between 0 and 1. From the documentation of blast_to_raw.py:
If a c-score value of 0.5 is used, this means that any hit to a given gene will be filtered if its score is less than 50% of that gene's best score.
Display Options
Regenerate dotplot images: Select this if you want the dotplot image regenerated. This are saved and can be out of date with regards to the methods used to generate them, or something bad happened during their original generation
Show non-syntenic matches (grey dots): Select this option if you wish to see all the putative homologous matches on the dotplot drawn as grey dots. Othewise, only syntenic matches are shown. This option may increase the time it takes to generate the dotplot as the additional dots are identified and drawn.
Draw boxes around syntenic regions? : This option draws boxes around identified syntenic blocks. Using this option is useful when determining whether to merge neighboring syntenic blocks and how much overlap neighboring blocks may have during merging.
Sort Chromosomes by: Are chromosomes or contigs on the axes of the syntenic dotplot ordered by size or name.
Flip axes: Do you want to exchange the x and y axes?
Color diagonals by: By default, syntenic dots (diagonals) are colored green. You can select to color them by:
Inversion: positive sloped lines are green, negative sloped lines are blue
Diagonals: Each syntenic block gets a different color (actually, cycles through 6 colors). This is a method for visualizing the identified syntenic blocks. Try this and the "Draw boxes around syntenic regions".
Dotplot axis metric: Are the dotplot axis to be measured in nucleotide or gene units. Nucleotides accurately reflect the structure of the genome. Gene units help make collinear lines straighter if there are regions of the genome undergoing different rates of expansions (e.g. centromeres).
Master image width: How wide, in pixels, will the master dotplot image be? Dynamic scales it according to the size of the genome, but sometimes it is necessary to make them very large to see some details.
Calculate substitute rates for syntenic protein coding gene pairs and color syntenic dots accordingly
This is the option to set if you want to calculate synonymous, nonsynonymous, or the ratio of those and color syntenic gene pair dots based on those values. This is very helpful if there are whole genome duplication events in one or both genomes. When these values are generated, a histogram of the values will also be generated and displayed. The histogram will be color coded identically to the dots in the dotplot. This makes it easy to determine which sytnenic gene pair dots are older or newer than other syntenic dots. For an example, please see below. PLEASE NOTE: generating these values takes a long time. It takes a very long time for large genomes.
Order contigs by best syntenic path: this option will invoke a special algorithm to rearrange contigs in order to create the best order of contigs that make a continous syntenic path in relation to a reference genome. This is very useful for a genome sequences that have been assembled to contigs for which a reference genome is available. PLEASE NOTE: that this ordering of contigs may not be how the genome is actually structured. Some genomic changes, such as large-scale inversions will not be correctly placed if the contigs' break-points are at the end of the inversion. This is often the case as inversions happen in repetitive sequence, and these same repetitive sequence are often where genome assembly algorithms cannot assemble through. For an example, see Syntenic path assembly.
Calculating and displaying synonymous/non-synonymous (Ks, Kn) data
This option is selected under the "SynMap Options" tab
To select, just set the option "Calculate substitution rates for syntenic protein coding gene pairs and color syntenic dots accordingly" to what rate you desire:
Ks -- synonymous
Kn -- non-synonymous
Kn/Ks -- ratio of non-synonymous to synonymous changes. This is often used to detected neutral (Kn/Ks == 1), positive (Kn/Ks > 1), and purifying (Kn/Ks < 1) selection acting on a pair of genes.
Synonymous (Ks) and non-synonymous (Kn) site changes are calculated by:
Performing a global sequence alignment of the protein sequences using the using the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm implemented in nwalign and written and maintained by Brent Pedersen using the BLOSOM62 scoring matrix.
Back translating the protein sequence into aligned codons
Using codeml of the PAML software package written and maintained by Ziheng Yang. We modified codeml for implementation in SynMap in order to minimize the number of read/write cycles to the hard drives, as well as allow it to be more easily run in parallel on multi-core servers. For each pairwise comparison of aligned codon sequences, codeml is run 5 times using its default parameter sets, and the lowest Ks is kept.
Running SynMap
Just press "Generate SynMap" when everything is configured. While SynMap runs, messages will be displayed as to the stage of the analysis that is being processed.
Interacting with results
Main results
Cross-hairs help visually align syntenic region from different parts of the genome.
Clicking on a chromosome panel in the initial results creates a zoomed-in panel.
Zoomed-in results
Cross-hairs turn red when the mouse is over a gene pair that is a link to GEvo with that pair pre-loaded. GEvo can then be used to perform a high-resolution analysis of those genomic regions.
Output Files
SynMap provides links to all the output files generated during its analysis. Most of the files are located in a box below the dotpot named "Links and Downloads".
Log File
Analysis Log (id: SynMap_52205333):
This file contains a list of every computational action taking throughout SynMap's analytical pipeline. This includes the exact command line used to run each program. This file is very useful for reproducing an analysis yourself, and figuring out errors in the pipeline should they occur.
These are the data files that are used and processed to identify putative homologous genes between the selected genomes
Fasta file for Escherichia coli K12 strain K-12 substrain DH10B (v1): CDS
Fasta file for Escherichia coli K12 strain K-12 substrain MG1655 (v2): CDS
These are the fasta files used in the whole genome comparison. May be CDS or genomic sequences.
Unfiltered (B)lastZ results
This is the output from the whole genome comparison. The output will depend on the sequence comparison algorithm selected.
Filtered (B)lastZ results (no tandem duplicates)
Tandem Duplicates for Escherichia coli K12 strain K-12 substrain DH10B (v1)
Tandem Duplicates for Escherichia coli K12 strain K-12 substrain MG1655 (v2)
Tandem duplicates are removed from the whole genome comparison. The filtered blast file is sent to DAGChainer, and the tandem duplicates are saved for each genome. Each line of the tandem duplicate file contains one set of tandem duplicates and links to CoGe to extract those sequences. The format for the tandem duplicate files is as follows:
FeatList_link: Generate a feature lits of the tandem duplicates (this tool links to many other tools in CoGe for analyzing and processing lists of genomic features)
GEvo_link: Compare the tandem duplicates and their genomic region
FastaList_link: Generate fasta sequences of the tandem duplicates
Each tandem duplicate the follows these links and contain the following information delimited by "||"
Chromosome
Start position
Stop position
Strand
Genomic feature type (CDS, tRNA, rRNA)
CoGe database id (useful for constructing links to CoGe's various tools
Order within the genome
Diagonals
These are the files that will be sent into DAGChainer to identify syntenic regions and gene pairs. Different files will be present depending on the options used in the analysis:
DAGChainer Initial Input file
The whole genome comparison file (post tandem gene removal) converted into the input type for DAGChainer
DAGChainer Input file converted to gene order
If relative gene order is used to specify gene positions within a genome, this file will be generated. The chromosomal start/stop positions will be replaced with the gene position along a chromosome. For example if the position is 1123, that feature is the 1123rd feature along that chromosome.
DAGChainer Input file post repetivive matches filter
This file has the e-values adjusted such that genomic features which match multiple regions in the genome get higher (less significant) e-values. This is the "Filter repetitive matches" in the "Analysis Options" tab.
<org a chromosome>: This is coded with an "a" or "b", followed by the coge database id for the genome, followed by an "_", followed by the chromosome name. This is create a unique "name" for each chromosome in DAGChainer even if the same genome is compared against itself
<org a gene name>: This is a "||" delimited format that contains the following information:
Chromosome
Start position
Stop position
Gene name
Strand
Genomic feature type (CDS, tRNA, rRNA)
CoGe database id (useful for constructing links to CoGe's various tools
Order within the genome
Blast hit identity of pair
<org a gene start position>
<org a gene stop position>: Note: will be same as start if relative gene order on chromosome is used (as shown in the example above)
DAGChainer output files contain type types of data lines:
"\#": lines separate identified syntenic blocks. The information contained in this line is:
<syntenic block number> (NOTE: this is not a unique number: each chromosome-chromosome (contig-contig) comparison has this number reset)
Score for syntenic block
Organism A chromosome in syntenic block
Organism B chromosome in syntenic block
Orientation of syntenic block: f == same orientation, positive slope on dotplot; r == opposite orientation, negative slope on dotplot
Number of syntenic gene pairs identified in syntenic block
All other lines: contain a syntenic match
Org A Chromosome
Gene/region in org A
Start position in org A (may be relative gene order or absolute nucleotide position)
Stop position in org A (may be relative gene order or absolute nucleotide position)
Org B Chromosome
Gene/region in org B
Start position in org B (may be relative gene order or absolute nucleotide position)
Stop position in org B (may be relative gene order or absolute nucleotide position)
Evalue of match
Accumulative score of diagonal including this gene match (number increases with additional syntenic gene pairs within a syntenic block)
Merged DAGChainer output
This file is generated if the analysis option is selected for merging neighboring syntenic regions
Quota Alignment output
This file is generated if the analysis option for Quota Align is selected for enforcing a specific syntenic depth relationship between the analyzed genomes
DAGChainer output in genomic coordinates
This file is the same as the DAGChainer output file but the genomic coordinates have been converted from gene order to nucleotide positions.
Results with synonymous/nonsynonymous rate values
This file will be generated if synonymous or non-synonymous rates were calculated for syntenic gene pairs. This file is identical to the DAGChainer output file but also contains synonymous and non-synonymous rates in the first two positions of each syntenic gene pair line. Also contains a link to GEvo for comparing the genomic regions in which the syntenic gene pair resides at the end of the line
#This file contains synonymous rate values in the first two columns:
#1 133556.0 a4241_1 b7117_1 f 2673 Mean Ks: 0.1334 Mean Kn: 0.0258
#Ks Kn a<db_dataset_group_id>_<chr> chr1||start1||stop1||name1||strand1||type1||db_feature_id1||percent_id1 start1 stop1 b<db_dataset_group_id>_<chr> chr2||start2||stop2||name2||strand2||type2||db_feature_id2||percent_id2 start2 stop2 eval ??? GEVO_link
0.0093 0.0000 a4241_1 1||1397989||1398285||ECDH10B_1366||-1||CDS||24909233||1293||99.7 1398285 1397989 b7117_1 1||1290089||1290385||E4401_1219||-1||CDS||41621513||1231||99.7 1290385 1290089 1.000000e-250 50 http://genomevolution.org/CoGe/GEvo.pl?fid1=24909233;fid2=41621513;dsgid1=4241;dsgid2=7117
0.0000 0.0000 a4241_1 1||1398509||1399228||ECDH10B_1367||1||CDS||24909270||1294||100.0 1398509 1399228 b7117_1 1||1290594||1291328||E4401_1220||1||CDS||41621516||1232||100.0 1290594 1291328 1.000000e-250 100 http://genomevolution.org/CoGe/GEvo.pl?fid1=24909270;fid2=41621516;dsgid1=4241;dsgid2=7117
Final syntenic gene-set output with GEvo links
Same at the output file but also contains links to GEvo at the end of each line for pairs of syntenic genes. This link will load GEvo with the gene pair loaded into two of the sequence submission boxes to the genomic regions in which they are contained may be examined.
Condensed syntelog file with GEvo links
This file assembled sets of syntenic genes so that if one gene in organism A is syntenic to multiple regions in organism B, those are listed together. This is useful if there are duplications in one genome (e.g. segmental or whole genome):
Link to GEvo to analyse the syntenic gene set
Link to GEvo formatted for a web-browser. When this link is clicked, GEvo will automatically start running the analysis
Each gene in the syntenic gene set separated by tabs
After a SynMap analysis completes, SynMap will return a link that will reload SynMap with the exact configuration of your analysis. This permits using that link to save in your notes, send to a collaborator, or publish. You can find this link under the "Links and Downloads" section of the results. It is a green button labeled "Regenerate this analysis: http://genomevolution.org/r/2o29". To copy this link, just right click on the button and choose to "copy link location". Otherwise, the shortened link will be sent to a URL detransmogifier, and will be expanded to a large link.