Tag: Next-gen sequencing (NGS)
The Trace Archive at NCBI will be retired as of June 17, 2022. You may continue to retrieve Trace Archive content by searching the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) using TI number, organism, or center name at the time of retirement.
Continue reading “NCBI Trace database to be retired in June 2022. Data available in SRA.”
In response to your requests for compact and faster-to-deliver data, NIH’s Sequence Read Archive (SRA) now offers a new data format – SRA Lite (Figure 1). SRA Lite supports reliable and faster data transfer, downloads, and analysis using current tools. SRA Lite replaces the submitted base quality score (BQS) with a simplified read quality score, reducing the average read size by ~60% for more efficient analysis and storage of large datasets. This format was designed to reflect improvements in next-generation sequencing that include increases in average read length and sequence coverage. Indeed, the data has improved enough that that removing some quality scores increase genotype accuracy (PMCID: PMC4439189).
Figure 1. FASTQ dumped from SRA Lite format and the SRA configuration dialog. The FASTQ has the quality score for each base set to 30 (‘?’ in the ASCII encoding). Select “Prefer SRA Lite files with simplified base Quality scores” in the SRA configuration dialog to use SRA Lite. Continue reading “The Sequence Read Archive slims down your data with SRA Lite”
We’ve just released a new version (1.6.0) of Magic-BLAST, the BLAST-based next-gen alignment tool, with these improvements:
-sra or -sra_batch options. See the Magic-BLAST cookbook for more details.-out_unaligned <file name> option. You can also select the format ( SAM, tabular, or FASTA) with the -unaligned_fmt option. The default format is the same as one for the main report .The version 1.6.0 executables are available from the NCBI FTP site. See the release notes , the NCBI GitHub site , and the Magic-BLAST publication for more information.
Join us on May 19, 2021 at 12PM eastern time to learn how to use the new RAPT pilot service to assemble and annotate public or private Illumina genomic reads sequenced from bacterial or archaeal isolates at the click of a button. RAPT consists of two major components, the genome assembler SKESA and the Prokaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline (PGAP), and produces an annotated genome of quality comparable to RefSeq in a couple of hours.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information about attending the webinar. A few days after the live presentation, you can view the recording on the NCBI webinars playlist on the NLM YouTube channel. You can learn about future webinars on the Webinars and Courses page.
Join us December 2 to learn how to use the Read assembly and Annotation Pipeline Tool (RAPT). With RAPT, you can assemble and annotate a microbial genome right out of the sequencing machine! Provide the short genomic reads or an SRA run on input, and get back the sequence annotated with a complete gene set. The assembly is built with SKESA and annotated with PGAP. In addition, RAPT also verifies the taxonomic assignment of the genome with the Average Nucleotide Identity tool. In this webinar, you will learn how you can run RAPT on your own machine or on the Google Cloud Platform.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information about attending the webinar. A few days after the live presentation, you can view the recording on the NCBI YouTube channel. You can learn about future webinars on the Webinars and Courses page.
NIH’s Sequence Read Archive (SRA) is the largest, most diverse collection of next generation sequencing data from human, non-human and microbial sources. Hosted by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), SRA data is also available on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of the NIH Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative.
SRA currently contains more than 36 petabytes (PB) of data and is projected to grow to 43 PB by 2023. Though the value of this resource grows with each new sample, the exponential growth experienced over the last decade (Figure 1) threatens SRA sustainability. The storage footprint is growing more costly to maintain and the data more difficult to use at scale. The situation has reached a tipping point. SRA must be refactored to support FAIR data principles into the future.
Figure 1. SRA data has grown exponentially over the last decade.
NIH remains committed to the SRA and hopes to establish a long-range plan for sustained resource growth. Considerations include a model wherein normalized working files without Base Quality Scores (BQS) are readily available through cloud platforms and NCBI FTP sites, and larger source files and normalized files with base quality scores will be distributed on cloud platforms based on prevalent use cases and usage demands. Further details regarding data formats are available here.
It is critical that as an SRA user, you participate in the review and testing of proposed data formats and infrastructure by commenting on how these developments impact your data usage. NIH has prepared a Request for Information (RFI) that details planned developments and would greatly appreciate feedback from the scientific community.
Join us on May 20th to learn how to use Google’s BigQuery to quickly search the data from the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) in the cloud to speed up your bioinformatic research and discovery projects. BigQuery is a tool for exploring cloud-based data tables with SQL-like queries. In this webinar, we’ll introduce you to using BigQuery to mine SRA submitter-supplied metadata and the results of taxonomic analysis for SRA runs. You’ll see real-world case studies that demonstrate how to find key information about SRA runs and identify data sets for your own analysis pipelines.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information about attending the webinar. A few days after the live presentation, you can view the recording on the NCBI YouTube channel. You can learn about future webinars on the Webinars and Courses page.
Now that the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) is publicly available on the cloud, you can harness the power of high-performance cloud computing to analyze all the data you wish without having to download a single byte. To help you programmatically find datasets of interest to you, we’ve loaded BigQuery with the SRA Metadata Table, which contains the descriptive information supplied at the time of sequence submission. Searches of the SRA Metadata Table are dependent on the quality and consistency of the metadata as submitted which means it can sometimes be a challenge to identify a complete and relevant set of suitable sequences. However, the Taxonomy Analysis Table can be a useful tool to overcome this challenge. Here’s why.
NCBI indexes SRA runs with one or more taxonomy terms when species-specific sequence k-mers are matched in the submitted sequences. The Taxonomy Analysis Table (tax_analysis) thus becomes a catalog of all taxonomic IDs detected in every run, based on the specificity and accuracy characteristics of these unique hashes sampled from reference genomes. We have now added the Taxonomy Analysis Table to BigQuery so you can filter hundreds of thousands of runs by this calculated taxonomic content to gather target datasets. Use this in conjunction with the BigQuery Taxonomy Table (which connects scientific names to taxonomic IDs) and link back to the BigQuery Metadata Table.
Explore/link to these four new tables in BigQuery:
Figure 1. SRA runs found using the taxonomy tables and BigQuery for taxid:694002, Betacoronavirus.
Check out our helpful summary information for additional information on taxonomic analysis.
We are actively working on new tools and ways to help you use the cloud to access and compute on SRA data. We are piloting this new feature in BigQuery, and plan to add this information to Amazon Cloud’s (AWS) Athena soon.
Contact us at sra@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov to let us know what you think!
If you need help getting started, refer to our tutorials and how-to video playlist on YouTube!
We recently announced that we made all of the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) publicly available on two cloud platforms. This archive of genetic sequences is a treasure trove of information and the cloud environments provide high-performance computing capabilities via a GCP or AWS account – right from your own device. High-throughput sequencing has made generating data extremely fast and inexpensive, which has fueled the rapid growth of SRA. Putting it on the cloud makes it possible to analyze “the high-throughput, unassembled sequence data, across all such sequences”.
So, what are some of the potential discoveries that await? To investigate some of the possibilities, we have held a series of codeathons to see if known and unknown viruses could be found lurking within SRA cloud datasets. Spoiler alert – they are! And just recently, a team from Stanford reported that they were able to identify a 2019-nCoV-like Coronavirus in pangolins by examining data sets identified via a meta-metagenomic search of SRA and downloaded using the SRA Toolkit. One challenge this team faced was downloading the datasets: 2.5TB corresponding to approximately 1013 bases took over 48 hours to gather. How might cloud-based SRA tools have made this task easier/faster? Here’s how:
We are continually adding new functionality to better support your cloud workflows and are happy to help! Contact us at sra@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov if you have questions or need help getting started. If you need assistance setting up GCP or AWS, please follow the steps in our how-to videos on YouTube.
On Wednesday, April 8, 2019 at 12 PM, NCBI staff will show you how to leverage the cloud to speed up your research and discovery. You’ll be introduced to new and existing tools and data including BigQuery, SRA Toolkit, and more. You’ll hear about real workflows in the cloud featuring an example of the work NCBI was able to accomplish in the cloud using SRA data and a case study from an SRA cloud customer
By the end of this webinar, you will know where to look for new cloud products from NCBI, access help information to get you started, and will see how to run your analyses efficiently in the cloud.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information about attending the webinar. A few days after the live presentation, you can view the recording on the NCBI YouTube channel. You can learn about future webinars on the Webinars and Courses page.