Monthly Archives: October 2019

Download a genome and remove the ribosomal RNA operon

For our search SRA engine, we want to remove the ribosomal RNA operon (not just the 16S gene, the whole opeon) before we run the search, otherwise all our hits are to the rRNA genes!

Here’s who you can use PATRIC to download a genome and remove the 16S region. For the example, we’re going to use a Faecalibacterium prausnitzii genome, because, well why not!

First, we download the genome and convert the GTO to fasta

p3-gto 657322.3
rast-export-genome -i 657322.3.gto contig_fasta > 657322.3.fna

Next, we use a couple of helper scripts from the EdwardsLab Git Repo. We start by converting the gto to a tab separated file with features and their locations

python3.7 ~/EdwardsLab/patric/parse_gto.py -f 657322.3.gto -p > 657322.3.tab

Then we can grep through that file for the ribosomal genes:

grep rna 657322.3.tab | grep Subunit

We only find two of the genes:

fig|657322.3.rna.5      Large Subunit Ribosomal RNA; lsuRNA; LSU rRNA   FP929046 586941 - 589785 (-)

fig|657322.3.rna.6      Small Subunit Ribosomal RNA; ssuRNA; SSU rRNA   FP929046 590567 - 591540 (-)

Now we can trim out the sequences and keep only the non-rRNA regions. Note that here I trim a little extra off the sequences, but you may not wish to do that

python3.7 ~/EdwardsLab/manipulate_genomes/trim_fasta.py -f 657322.3.fna -e 576941 -c FP929046 > FP929046.fna
python3.7 ~/EdwardsLab/manipulate_genomes/trim_fasta.py -f 657322.3.fna -b 601540 -c FP929046 >> FP929046.fna

We run this twice, which is suboptimal, but this is definitely not the most computationally challenging thing we will do with those sequences!

Connecting to an anvi’o server on tatabox

We use anvi’o for all sorts of ‘omics analysis, but it is a pain to run on your laptop as you can’t watch netflix and youtube, check facebook, and post to twitter at the same time (well, you can, but why would you?).

Instead, we have the latest version of anvi’o installed on tatabox, one of the machines in our HPC environment. After you have run all the anvi-commands, very often you want to launch anvi-interactive, but tatabox is safely behind a firewall. 

We can make a two step connection to tatabox using port tunneling. Depending on how you do this, you will need three terminals open.

First, start anvi-interactive on tatabox, and keep that window open (or use screen or tmux which are much better alternatives).

Next, open a terminal on your computer, and use this command. Change XXXX to a port near the on that you ssh to on edwards-data, change YYYY to the port that you normally use, and change USERNAME to your USERNAME.

ssh -L 5555:localhost:XXXX -N -p YYYY USERNAME@edwards-data.sdsu.edu

Next, open another terminal (or if you are using screen or tmux, open a new terminal emulator), and login to edwards-data.sdsu.edu using your normal account (the USERNAME from above).

On edwards-data, run this command:

 ssh -L XXXX:localhost:8080 -N USERNAME@tatabox

Finally, on your laptop, you should open a new browser window and paste this URL:

http://localhost:5555/

You should see the anvi-interactive interface appear, and you can get to work.