MetaCRAST: Reference-guided extraction of CRISPR spacers from unassembled metagenomes
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Bioinformatics, Genomics, Microbiology, Computational Science
- Keywords
- Metagenomics, repetitive sequences, CRISPR, microbial ecology, virus-host interactions
- Copyright
- © 2016 Moller et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. MetaCRAST: Reference-guided extraction of CRISPR spacers from unassembled metagenomes. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2278v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2278v1
Abstract
Summary: Clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeat (CRISPR) systems are prokaryotic adaptive immune systems against phage infection. CRISPR spacer sequences can provide valuable ecological insights by linking environmental viruses to their microbial hosts. Despite this importance, metagenomic CRISPR detection remains a major challenge. Here we present a reference-guided CRISPR detection tool (Metagenomic CRISPR Reference-Aided Search Tool - MetaCRAST) that constrains searches based on user-specified direct repeats. These DRs could be expected from assembly or taxonomic profiles of metagenomic sequence data. Our evaluation shows MetaCRAST improves CRISPR spacer detection in real metagenomes compared to de novo detection methods. Simulations show it performs better than comparable tools when analyzing Illumina metagenomes.
Availability and implementation: MetaCRAST is implemented in Perl and takes metagenomic sequence reads and direct repeat queries in FASTA format as input. It is freely available for download at https://github.com/molleraj/MetaCRAST .
Author Comment
This is an Applications Note submission to Oxford Bioinformatics.
Supplemental Information
Supplementary Data
This document includes Supplementary Data (Figures and Tables) cited in the main manuscript itself and submitted with the manuscript to Oxford Bioinformatics.