BioCAT is a tool which is designed for searching potential producers of a given non-ribosomal peptide. The tool performs an alignment of the given NRP chemical structure against all possible biosytnthesis gene clusters (BGCs) found in the given genome and returns the final alignment score distributed from 0 to 1. Alignments with score higher than 0.5 can be considered as successful matches.
Identification of monomers is performed with the rBAN tool(https://jcheminf.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13321-019-0335-x). Annotation of nonribosomal peptide synthetase gene clusters is preformed with the antiSMASH 6 software(https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/49/W1/W29/6274535).
- antiSMASH 6
- sklearn 0.24.2
- pandas
- biopython
- numpy
- rdkit
- hmmer
rBAN is included into the BioCAT package.
conda create -n biocat_env -c bioconda -c rdkit antismash=6 hmmer rdkit
conda activate biocat_env
pip install biocat
There is no test data in the BioCAT package distributed via Pip. Several examples are available in this repository in the example folder.
For a minimal run, an NRP structure in SMILES format and a genome in FASTA format must be specified with the -smiles and -genome parameters, respectively. Optionally, you can specify the output directory using the -out parameter and the name of the given NRP using -name.
biocat -smiles '[H][C@@]1(CCC(O)=O)NC(=O)CC(CCCCCCCCCCC)OC(=O)[C@]([H])(CC(C)C)NC(=O)[C@@]([H])(CC(C)C)NC(=O)[C@]([H])(CC(O)=O)NC(=O)[C@@]([H])(NC(=O)[C@@]([H])(CC(C)C)NC(=O)[C@]([H])(CC(C)C)NC1=O)C(C)C' -name 'surfactin' -genome example/Surfactin/GCF_000015785.2_ASM1578v2_genomic.fna -out surfactin_results
In this case, the given chemical structure of surfactin is processed by rBAN and the given genome is processed by antiSMASH 6. Next, the resulting files are used for the alignment process. The main feature of BioCAT is a PSSM-based alignment algorithm, which includes an artificial shuffling of PSSMs to calculate the final score, so, the alignment process might be time-consuming in some cases (usually less than 1 minute).
The output directory surfactin_results contains the rBAN and the antiSMASH resulting files, PSSM matrices generated for BGCs which were aligned during the analysis, and the resulting file Results.tsv.
This file contains a detailed information about each possible NRP to BGC alignment, but in this minimal example we are interested only in the last two columns Relative score and Binary. Rows with relative score more than 0.5 are interpreted as successful alignments, thus, the given organism can be considered as a potential producer of surfactin.
usage: biocat [-h] [-antismash ANTISMASH] [-genome GENOME] [-name NAME]
[-smiles SMILES] [-file_smiles FILE_SMILES] [-rBAN RBAN]
[-NRPS_type NRPS_TYPE] [-iterations ITERATIONS] [-delta DELTA]
[-threads THREADS] [-out OUT] [-skip SKIP] [--disable_pushing_type_B]
[--disable_dif_strand] [--disable_exploration]
BioCAT is a tool, which estimates the likelihood that a given organism is
capable of producing of a given NRP
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
Genome arguments:
-antismash ANTISMASH antiSMASH *.json output file (either -antismash or
-genome parameter should be specified)
-genome GENOME Path to the fasta file with nucleotide sequence
(either -antismash or -genome parameter should be
specified)
Chemical arguments:
-name NAME Name of the given molecule (optional)
-smiles SMILES NRP chemical structure in the SMILES format (either
-smiles or -file_smiles parameter should be specified)
-file_smiles FILE_SMILES
.smi file with one or more NRPs. Each row should
contain two columns: name of the NRP and SMILES
string. Columns should be separated by tabulation.
(Either -smiles or -file_smiles parameter should be
specified.)
-rBAN RBAN rBAN peptideGraph.json output file
-NRPS_type NRPS_TYPE Expected NRPS type (default A+B)
Technical arguments:
-iterations ITERATIONS
Count of shuffling iterations (default 500)
-delta DELTA The maximum number of gaps in the molecule (default
3). Gaps are assigned as "nan".
-threads THREADS Number of threads (default 8)
-out OUT Output directory (default ./BioCAT_output)
Advanced arguments:
-skip SKIP Count of modules which can be skipped (default 0). Not
recommended to use unless the user is sure about
module skipping.
--disable_pushing_type_B
By defult, the algorithm tries to truncate peptide
fragments cutting edge monomers to find all possible
identical peptide fragments in the structure. If
disabled, only the identity of full peptide fragments
is considered.
--disable_dif_strand By default, the protoclusters predicted by antiSMASH
are subdivided according to the assumption that each
cluster should contain only genes located on the same
strand of the genome. If disabled, protoclusters
annotated by antiSMASH are used as minimal clusters.
--disable_exploration
By default, the algorithm tries to find the optimal
alignment combining alignment options in all possible
ways. If disabled, alignment is performed in according
to the given options strictly.
Konanov, D. N., Krivonos, D. V., Ilina, E. N., & Babenko, V. V. (2022). BioCAT: search for biosynthetic gene clusters producing nonribosomal peptides with known structure. Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal.[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csbj.2022.02.013]