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Read mapping and variant calling

Roddy Pracana and Yannick Wurm

Introduction

There are several types of variants. Commonly, people look at single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, sometimes also known as single nucleotide variants, SNVs). Other classes include small insertions and deletions (known collectively as indels), as well as larger structural variants, such as large insertions, deletions, inversions and translocations.

There are several approaches to variant calling from short pair-end reads. We are going to use one of them. First, we will map the reads from each individual to a reference assembly similar to the one created in the previous practical (you can use your assembly too, but that is better left as an exercise for later!). Then we will find the positions where at least some of the individuals differ from the reference (and each other).

Pipeline

We will analyse subsets of whole-genome sequences of several fire ant individuals. The fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, is notable for being dimorphic in terms of colony organisation, with some colonies having one queen and other colonies having multiple queens. Interestingly, this trait is genetically determined. In this practical, we will try to find the genetic difference between ants from single queen and multiple queen colonies.

We will use a subset of the reads from whole-genome sequencing of 14 male fire ants. Samples 1B to 7B are from single-queen colonies, samples 1b to 7b are from multiple-queen colonies. Ants are haplodiploid, which means that females are diploid and males are haploid. Here we will use only males, so all our samples are haploid, which makes variant calling easier.

The aim of this practical is to genotype these 14 individuals. The steps in the practical are:

  1. Align the reads of each individual to a reference genome assembly using the aligner bowtie2.
  2. Find positions that differ between each individual and the reference with the software samtools and bcftools.
  3. Filter the SNP calls to produce a set of good-quality SNPs.
  4. Visualise the alignments and the SNP calls in the genome browser igv.

We recommend that you set up a directory for this work following the same principles as in the last few practicals (e.g., 2020-10-xx-mapping). You should have subdirectories called input, results and tmp and a WHATIDID.txt file in which to log your commands. Symlink the reference genome /shared/data/popgen/reference.fa and the directory containing the reads /shared/data/popgen/reads to input subdirectory:

2020-10-xx-mapping/
├── input
│   ├── -> /shared/data/popgen/reference.fa
│   └── -> /shared/data/popgen/reads
├── results
├── tmp
└── WHATIDID.txt

Check how many scaffolds there are in the reference genome:

grep "^>" input/reference.fa

Now have a look at the .fq.gz files (ls input/reads).

Aligning reads to a reference assembly

The first step in our pipeline is to align the paired end reads to the reference genome. We are using the software bowtie2, which was created to align short read sequences to long sequences such as the scaffolds in a reference assembly. bowtie2, like most aligners, works in two steps.

In the first step, the scaffold sequence (sometimes known as the database) is indexed, in this case using the Burrows-Wheeler Transform, which can help compress a large text into less memory. It thus allows for memory efficient alignment. Index files often require the original file to be present in the same directory. We thus start by linking scaffold sequences to tmp directory (where all output will be written first).

# Symlink reference.fa to tmp/
ln -s ~/2020-10-xx-mapping/input/reference.fa tmp/

# Build the index now.
bowtie2-build tmp/reference.fa tmp/reference

The second step is the alignment itself:

# Create directory for the alignments.
mkdir tmp/alignments

# Use bowtie2 to align paired reads from f1_B sample to the reference.
bowtie2 --local -x tmp/reference -1 input/reads/f1_B.1.fq.gz -2 input/reads/f1_B.2.fq.gz > tmp/alignments/f1_B.sam

The command produced a SAM file (Sequence Alignment/Map file), which is the standard file used to store sequence alignments. Have a quick look at the file using less. The file includes a header (lines starting with the @ symbol), and a line for every read aligned to the reference assembly. For each read, we are given a mapping quality value, the position of both reads in a pair, the actual sequence and its quality by base pair, and a series of flags with additional measures of mapping quality - can you tell, by looking at the SAM file specification linked above, which columns correspond to these information?

We now need to run bowtie2 for all the other samples. We could do this by typing the same command another 13 times (changing the sample name), or we can use the GNU parallel tool, which allows you to run the same command on several samples at once:

# Create a file with all sample names
ls input/reads/*fq.gz | cut -d '/' -f 3 | cut -d '.' -f 1 | sort | uniq > tmp/names.txt

# Run bowtie with each sample (will take a few minutes)
cat tmp/names.txt | parallel -t "bowtie2 --local -x tmp/reference -1 input/reads/{}.1.fq.gz -2 input/reads/{}.2.fq.gz > tmp/alignments/{}.sam"

Because SAM files include a lot of information, they tend to occupy a lot of space (even with our small example data). Therefore, SAM files are generally compressed into BAM files (Binary sAM). Most tools that use aligned reads require BAM files that have been sorted and indexed by genomic position. This is done using samtools, a set of tools created to manipulate SAM/BAM files:

# Sort the SAM file by scaffold position and output in BAM format.
samtools sort -O BAM tmp/alignments/f1_B.sam > tmp/alignments/f1_B.bam

# Index the BAM file generated above (creates f1_B.bam.bai).
samtools index tmp/alignments/f1_B.bam

Again, we can use parallel to run this step for all the samples:

# For each sample, sort the SAM file for each and convert to BAM.
cat tmp/names.txt | parallel -t "samtools sort -O BAM tmp/alignments/{}.sam > tmp/alignments/{}.bam"

# Index the BAM file for each sample.
cat tmp/names.txt | parallel -t "samtools index tmp/alignments/{}.bam"

Now check that a bam and a bai exist for each sample.

To view what’s in a BAM file, you have to use samtools view

# View the entire BAM file:
samtools view tmp/alignments/f1_B.bam | less -S

# View a particular region of the reference:
samtools view tmp/alignments/f1_B.bam scaffold_1:10000-10500 | less -S

Copy the .bam and .bai files to the results directory.

cp tmp/alignments/*.bam results/
cp tmp/alignments/*.bai results/

Variant calling

Set up a new directory for the second part of today’s practical (e.g., 2020-10-xx-genotyping). You will want to set up the relevant subdirectories and WHATIDID.txt file as before. Then symlink the reference genome /shared/data/popgen/reference.fa and the alignments from the mapping part of the practical (both .bam and .bai files) to your input directory. Remember to keep your commands in the WHATIDID.txt file.

2020-10-xx-genotyping/
├── input
│   ├── -> /shared/data/popgen/reference.fa
│   ├── -> ~/2020-10-xx-mapping/results/f1_B.bam
│   ├── -> ~/2020-10-xx-mapping/results/f1_B.bam.bai
│   └── -> ...
├── results
├── tmp
└── WHATIDID.txt

There are several approaches to call variants. The simplest approach is to look for positions where the mapped reads consistently have a different base than the reference assembly (the consensus approach). For this, we will use bcftools, a set of tools to call variants and manipulate them. We will run two commands, bcftools mpileup, which looks for inconsistencies between the reference and the aligned reads, and bcftools call, which interprets them as variants.

We will use multiallelic caller (option -m) of bcftools and set all individuals as haploid.

# Symlink reference.fa to tmp/
ln -s ~/2020-10-xx-genotyping/input/reference.fa tmp/

# Create index of the reference (different from that used by bowtie2)
samtools faidx tmp/reference.fa

# Call variants using bcftools: identify all differences between reference and reads using mpileup
# subcommand and pipe it to call subcommand to determine if the identified difference are variants.
bcftools mpileup -Ou -f tmp/reference.fa input/*.bam | bcftools call --ploidy 1 -v -m > tmp/calls.vcf

The file produced a VCF (Variant Call Format) format telling the position, nature and quality of the called variants.

Let’s take a look at the VCF file produced by typing less -S tmp/calls.vcf. The file is composed of a header and rows for all the variant positions. Have a look at the different columns and check what each is (the header includes labels). Notice that some columns include several fields.

Quality filtering of variant calls

Not all variants that we called are necessarily of good quality, so it is essential to have a quality filter step. The VCF includes several fields with quality information. The most obvious is the column QUAL, which gives us a Phred-scale quality score.

We will filter the VCF using bcftools filter. We can remove anything with quality call smaller than 30:

# Remove variant site with quality score less than 30. Then remove sites that have a missing genotype call.
bcftools filter --exclude 'QUAL < 30' tmp/calls.vcf | bcftools view -g ^miss > tmp/filtered_calls.vcf

In more serious analyses, it may be important to filter by other parameters.

In the downstream analysis, we only want to look at sites that are:

  1. snps (-v snps)
  2. biallelic (-m2 -M2)
  3. where the minor allele is present in at least one individual (because we do not care for the sites where all individuals are different from the reference, yet equal to each other)
# Select biallelic variant sites that are snps and at least one individual differs from the rest.
bcftools view -v snps -m2 -M2 --min-ac 1:minor tmp/filtered_calls.vcf > tmp/snp.vcf

In this practical we only looked at a subset of the fire ant genome. When calling variants for the entire genome and using hundreds or thousands of samples, the resulting VCF files can end up being very large (reaching terabytes for cancer genomics projects!). It is thus a good idea to compress and index a VCF file. This is typically done using bgzip (for compression) and tabix (for indexing - tabix requires the file to be compressed using bgzip).

# Compress the VCF file using bgzip. This will remove the
# snp.vcf file and produce snp.vcf.gz file in its place.
bgzip tmp/snp.vcf

# Index the compressed VCF file. This will produce a .tbi
# file alongsied snp.vcf.gz file.
tabix tmp/snp.vcf.gz

Now that we have a SNP set, we can copy it to results directory.

cp tmp/snp.vcf.gz results
cp tmp/snp.vcf.gz.tbi results

Viewing the results using IGV (Integrative Genome Viewer)

In this part of the practical, we will use the software IGV to visualise the alignments and the SNPs we generated, and verify some of the called SNPs.

Copy the BAM and their index files (.bai) to ~/www/igv/data.

Copy the snp.vcf.gz and its index file (.tbi) to ~/www/igv/data.

To visualise them, open IGV by clicking on the IGV link in your personal module page (e.g., bt007.genomicscourse.com).

Here, we use igv.js which is designed to be embedded in web pages and the installation is pre configured to use the assembly (reference.fa file) you used for variant calling.