UNIQmin: An alignment-independent tool for the study of viral sequence diversity at any given rank of taxonomy lineage

Brief Description

Sequence variation among viruses, even of a single amino acid, can expand their host repertoire or enhance the infection ability. Alignment-independent or -free approach represents an alternative to the study of viral diversity, which is devoid of the need for sequence conservation to perform comparative analyses. Herein, we present UNIQmin, a tool that utilises an alignment independent method to generate the minimal set of viral sequences, as a way to study their diversity, across any rank of taxonomic lineage. The minimal set refers to the smallest possible number of sequences required to capture the entire repertoire of viral peptidome diversity present in a sequence dataset.

Installation

pip install uniqmin

Upgrade installed UNIQmin

pip install uniqmin --upgrade

Usage

uniqmin [-h] [-i INPUT] [-o OUTPUT] [-k KMERLENGTH] [-t THREADS]

For example, the UNIQmin tool is applied to generate a minimal set (in an output folder, e.g. result) with a sample input file ("exampleinput.fas"). A k-mer window size of nine (9; nonamer) is used and utilising 4-threads:

uniqmin -i exampleinput.fas -o result -k 9 -t 4

Command-line Arguments

For more information, please visit UNIQmin GitHub page.

License

© 2021 Chong LC

This repository is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.