tipp3 0.1b1

TIPP3 - A Phylogeney-Based Abundance Profiling Tool

Developer:

Chengze Shen

Table of contents

• News

• Method Overview

  • Note and Acknowledgment

• Installation

  • External Requirements

  • Install with PyPI (pip)

  • Install from source files

    • Requirements

    • Installation Steps

  • main.config

  • user-specified config file

• Usage

  • Examples

    • Scenario 1

    • Scenario 2

    • Scenario 3

• TODO list

News

• 1.20.2025 - TIPP3 now is feature complete for abundance profiling, for both the more accurate TIPP3 mode or the fast TIPP3-fast mode. By default, TIPP3-fast is used.

Method Overview

TIPP3 is a metagenomic profiling method that solves the following problems:

Taxonomic identification

• Input: A query read q

• Output: The taxonomic lineage of q (if identified)

Abundance profiling

• Input: A set Q of query reads

• Output: An abundance profile estimated on Q

TIPP3 continues the TIPP-family methods (prior methods: TIPP and TIPP2), which use a marker gene database to identify the taxonomic lineage of input reads (if the read comes from a marker gene). See the pipeline below for the TIPP3 workflow.

Publication(s)
(TIPP3) Shen, Chengze, Eleanor Wedell, Mihai Pop, and Tandy Warnow, “TIPP3 and TIPP3-fast: improved abundance profiling in metagenomics.” TBD.
(TIPP2) Nguyen, Nam, Siavash Mirarab, Bo Liu, Mihai Pop, and Tandy Warnow, “TIPP: Taxonomic identification and phylogenetic profiling.” Bioinformatics, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btu721
(TIPP) Shah, Nidhi, Erin K. Molloy, Mihai Pop, and Tandy Warnow, “TIPP2: metagenomic taxonomic profiling using phylogenetic markers.” Bioinformatics, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btab023

Note and Acknowledgment

TIPP3 includes and uses:

1. pplacer (v1.1.alpha19).

2. Batch-SCAMPP (v1.0.0).

Installation

TIPP3 was tested on Python 3.7 to 3.12.

There are two ways to install and use TIPP3: with PyPI (pip install) or directly with this GitHub repository. If you have any difficulties installing or running TIPP3, please contact Chengze Shen ([e-mail]).

External Requirements

BLAST is a hard requirement to run TIPP3. The software will automatically look for blastn in the $PATH environment variable. If you have not installed BLAST, you can find the latest version from https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/executables/blast+/LATEST/.

Install with PyPI (pip)

The easiest way to install TIPP3 is to use the PyPI distribution.

# 1. Install with pip (--user if no root access)
pip install tipp3 [--user]

# 2. Three binary executables will be installed. The first time running
#    any of the binaries will create the TIPP3 config file at
#    ~/.tipp3/main.config
tipp3 [-h]           # (recommended) running preset "TIPP3-fast", or
tipp3-accurate [-h]  # running preset "TIPP3", or
run_tipp3.py [-h]

Install from source files

Requirements

python>=3.7
configparser>=5.0.0
DendroPy>=4.5.2
numpy>=1.21.6
psutil>=5.0.0
setuptools>=60.0.0
treeswift>=1.1.28
witch-msa>=1.0.7
lz4>=4.3.2

Installation Steps

# 1. Install via GitHub repo
git clone https://github.com/c5shen/TIPP3.git

# 2. Install all requirements
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

# 3. Execute run_tipp3.py executable for the first time with "-h" to see
#    allowed commandline parameters and example usages
#    Running TIPP3 for the first time will also create the main config
#    file at "~/.tipp3/main.config", which stores the default behavior
#    for running TIPP3 (including all binary executable paths)
python3 run_tipp3.py [-h]

main.config

main.config file will be created the first time running TIPP3 at the user root directory (~/.tipp3/main.config). This file stores the default behavior for running TIPP3 and the paths to all binary executables that TIPP3 need to use.

user-specified config file

In addition, a user can specify a customized config file with -c or --config-file parameter option when running TIPP3 (e.g., run_tipp3.py -c user.config). The user.config file will override settings from main.config (if overlaps). Command-line arguments still have the highest priority and will override both config files, if any parameters overlap.

Usage

The general command to run TIPP3 is listed below. By default, TIPP3-fast is run, which is significantly faster than the more accurate TIPP3 mode. See Examples below for how to customize the TIPP3 pipeline.

# (Optional) change the logging level to DEBUG for more verbose logging
export TIPP_LOGGING_LEVEL=debug

# TIPP3 supports the following formats for "-i [query reads]"
# XXX.fasta[.gz, .gzip]
# XXX.fa[.gz, .gzip]
# XXX.fastq[.gz, .gzip]
# XXX.fq[.gz, .gzip]

python3 run_tipp3.py -r [reference package path] -i [query reads] -d [output directory]

Examples

Some examples of TIPP3 usage can be found at the bottom of the help text running:

python3 run_tipp3.py -h

All of the following examples can be found in the examples/run.sh bash script, with example data stored under examples/data. The default example data used is a small set of Illumina short reads denoted as illumina.small.queries.fasta.

Scenario 1

(TIPP3-fast) Use BLAST for query alignment, and Batch-SCAMPP (bscampp) for query placement.

python3 run_tipp3.py -i examples/illumina.small.queries.fasta \
   --reference-package [reference package dir] --outdir tipp3_scenario1 \
   --alignment-method blast --placement-method bscampp \
   -t 16

Scenario 2

Use BLAST for query alignment, and pplacer with the taxtastic package for query placement (pplacer-taxtastic).

python3 run_tipp3.py -i examples/illumina.small.queries.fasta \
   --reference-package [reference package dir] --outdir tipp3_scenario1 \
   --alignment-method blast --placement-method pplacer-taxtastic \
   -t 16

Scenario 3

(TIPP3) Use WITCH for query alignment, and pplacer-taxtastic for query placement. Keep all temporary files during the run.

python3 run_tipp3.py -i examples/illumina.small.queries.fasta \
   --reference-package [reference package dir] --outdir tipp3_scenario1 \
   --alignment-method witch --placement-method pplacer-taxtastic \
   -t 16 --keeptemp

TODO list

• 1.21.2025 - Add a script for downloading the latest reference package to a user specified directory, and record the directory to ~/.tipp3/refpkg.config. When the user did not specify a reference package in the command line, TIPP3 should automatically find the previously installed refpkg and the corresponding version number.