bio-kmer_counter is a simple biogem for fingerprinting nucleotide sequences by counting the occurences of particular kmers in the sequence. The methodology is not new, for a reference see Teeling et. al. 2004. The default parameters are derived from the well explained methods section of Dick et. al. 2009.
This methodology is quite different to that of other software that counts kmer content with longer kmers, e.g. khmer. Here only small kmers are intended (e.g. 1-mer or 4-mer).
After installing Ruby itself, install the bio-kmer_counter rubygem:
gem install bio-kmer_counter
bio-kmer_counter is only tested on Linux, but probably works on OSX too. It might even work on Windows if the progress bar is turned off. Maybe.
The default parameters analyse a fasta file that contains one or more sequences in it for 4-mer (tetranucleotide) content. By default, any sequence in the fasta file 2kb or longer is included at least once. Sequences are split up into 5kb windows if they are that long, and each window is reported separately. If the leftover bit at the end after any 5kb windows is 2kb or longer then this is also included.
By default, each 4 base window in the input sequence is included exactly once in the output file.
To account for the fact
that the directions of sequences with respect to each other are presumed to be unknown (as is the
case for de-novo genome assembly), either the forward or reverse complement is included. Which one
(forward or reverse) depends on which one comes first alphabetically. So for instance if the window is CTTT, then AAAG
is used. Accounting for palindromic sequences like ATAT, there are 136 of these lowest lexigraphical 4-mers.
So there are 136 columns in the output, plus one for the name of the window. Using only 1 is
actually slightly different than the method outlined in Dick et. al. 2009, but we
don't expect the results to differ.
Example usage, if you wish to fingerprint a fasta file my_nucleotide_sequences.fasta:
kmer_counter.rb my_nucleotide_sequences.fasta >tetranucleotide_content.csv
The fingerprints are reported in percentages. Well, between 0 and 1, that is. From there it is up to you how to use the fingerprints, sorry. For the full gamut of options, see
kmer_counter.rb -h
Information on the source tree, documentation, examples, issues and how to contribute, see
http://github.com/wwood/bioruby-kmer_counter
The BioRuby community is on IRC server: irc.freenode.org, channel: #bioruby.
This software is currently unpublished, so please just cite the homepage (thanks!).
Please also cite the tools upon which it is based, one of:
Copyright (c) 2012 Ben J Woodcroft. See LICENSE.txt for further details.
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We found that bio-kmer_counter demonstrated a not healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released a year ago. It has 1 open source maintainer collaborating on the project.
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