CAGEcleaner 1.4.0

Genomic redundancy removal tool for cblaster hit sets

CAGEcleaner

[!NOTE] CAGEcleaner supports all functional cblaster modes (remote, local, hmm). We do not recommend using one of the combi modes as we have found bugs in it.

[!TIP] CAGEcleaner will be integrated into cblaster! You can already check out the development version at this fork (currently integrates CAGECleaner v1.2.3).

Outline

CAGEcleaner removes genomic redundancy from gene cluster hit sets identified by cblaster. The redundancy in target databases used by cblaster often propagates into the result set, requiring extensive manual curation before downstream analyses and visualisation can be carried out.

Given a session file from a cblaster run (or from a CAGECAT run), CAGEcleaner retrieves all hit-associated genome assemblies, groups these into assembly clusters by ANI and identifies a representative assembly for each assembly cluster using skDER. In addition, CAGEcleaner can retain hits that are divergent at the gene cluster level but are associated with non-representative genomes. Finally, CAGEcleaner returns a filtered cblaster session file as well as a list of retained gene cluster IDs for more straightforward downstream analysis.

Installation and more

For installation instructions, usage, explanations and more, head over to the CAGEcleaner wiki!

[!IMPORTANT] CAGEcleaner has no direct Windows support. If you seem to have it installed successfully on your Windows system, you probably have just installed v1.1.0, an old version with known bugs! There are alternative options to run CAGEcleaner on Windows.

Citations

If you found CAGEcleaner useful, please cite our manuscript:

De Vrieze, L., Biltjes, M., Lukashevich, S., Tsurumi, K., Masschelein, J. (2025) CAGEcleaner: reducing genomic redundancy in gene cluster mining. Bioinformatics https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btaf373

CAGEcleaner relies heavily on the skDER genome dereplication tool and its main dependency skani, so please give these proper credit as well.

Salamzade, R., & Kalan, L. R. (2023). skDER: microbial genome dereplication approaches for comparative and metagenomic applications. bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.09.27.559801`
Shaw, J., & Yu, Y. W. (2023). Fast and robust metagenomic sequence comparison through sparse chaining with skani. Nature Methods, 20(11), 1661–1665. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-023-02018-3

License

CAGEcleaner is freely available under an MIT license.

Use of the third-party software, libraries or code referred to in the References section above may be governed by separate terms and conditions or license provisions. Your use of the third-party software, libraries or code is subject to any such terms and you should check that you can comply with any applicable restrictions or terms and conditions before use.