mercury

Description

Mercury prepares and formats metadata and sequencing files located in GCP buckets for submission to national & international databases, currently NCBI & GISAID. The default organism (set with --organism) is "sars-cov-2" although "mpox" and "flu" are also accepted.

Important note: Mercury was designed to work with metadata tables that were processed after running the TheiaCoV workflows. If you are using a different pipeline, please ensure that the metadata table is formatted correctly.

For all organisms:

1. Required & optional metadata fields are retrieved from the Metadata.py file, dependent on the optional --organism and --skip_ncbi arguments.
2. The input TSV file is read (from the positional input_table and table_name argument) and the required/optional metadata is extracted for only the samples specified in the postiional samplenames argument.
3. The metadata is formatted according to the requirements of each database, dependent on the specified --organism argument.
4. If SRA submission is not skipped (if --skip_ncbi is indicated), the sequencing read files (fastq files) are uploaded to a Google Cloud Storage bucket (specified by --gcp_bucket_uri) for temporary storage until they can be retrieved by NCBI (specifically, SRA) during submission.
5. For BankIt, GenBank, and/or GISAID, The assembly files (fasta files) are concatenated and have the header lines renamed and are available for local download and submission to respective databases.

Default databases by organism:

• "sars-cov-2": BioSample, GenBank, GISAID, SRA
• "mpox": BankIt, BioSample, GISAID, SRA
• "flu": BioSample, SRA

Installation

Docker

We highly recommend using the following Docker image to run Mercury:

docker pull us-docker.pkg.dev/general-theiagen/theiagen/mercury:1.0.8

The entrypoint for this Docker image is the Mercury help message. To run this container interactively, use the following command:

docker run -it --entrypoint=/bin/bash us-docker.pkg.dev/general-theiagen/theiagen/mercury:1.0.8
# Once inside the container interactively, you can run the mercury tool
python3 /mercury/mercury/mercury.py -v
# v1.0.8

Locally with Python

Mercury is not yet available with pip or conda. To run Mercury in your local command-line environment, install the following dependencies:

• Python 3.9+
• pandas >= 1.4.2
• Google Cloud SDK 479.0.0+ and all its dependencies
• numpy >= 1.22.4

Outputs

Each organism will produce different output files. See the table below:

	<output_name>_bankit_combined.fasta	<output_name>.src	<output_name>_biosample_metadata.tsv	<output_name>_genbank_metadata.tsv	<output_name>_genbank_combined.fasta	<output_name>_gisaid_metadata.csv	<output_name>_gisaid_combined.fasta	<output_name>_sra_metadata.tsv	<output_name>_excluded_samples.tsv
organism	BankIt	BankIt	BioSample	GenBank	GenBank	GISAID	GISAID	SRA	N/A
"mpox"	✓	✓	✓			✓	✓	✓	✓
"sars-cov-2"			✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
"flu"			✓					✓	✓

Explanation of Arguments

Usage & Help Message

usage: python3 /mercury/mercury/mercury.py <input_table.tsv> <table_name> <samplenames> [<args>]

Mercury prepares and formats metadata for submission to national & international genomic databases

positional arguments:
  input_table
          The table containing the metadata for the samples to be submitted
  table_name
          The name of the first column in the table (A1); include the `_id` if data table is downloaded from Terra.bio
  samplenames
          The sample names to be extracted from the table

optional arguments:
  -h, --help
          show this help message and exit
  -v, --version
          show program's version number and exit
  -o, --output_prefix
          The prefix for the output files
          default="mercury"
  -b, --gcp_bucket_uri
          The GCP bucket URI to store the temporarily store the read files (required)

submission type arguments:
  options that determine submission type

  --organism
          The organism type of the samples in the table
          default="sars-cov-2"
  --skip_ncbi
          Add to skip NCBI metadata preparation; prep only for GISAID submission

metadata customization arguments:
  options that customize the metadata configuration

  --skip_county
          Add to skip adding county to location in GISAID metadata
  --usa_territory
          Add if the country is a USA territory to use the territory name in the state column
  --using_clearlabs_data
          Add if using Clearlabs-generated data and metrics
  --using_reads_dehosted
          Add if using reads_dehosted instead of clearlabs data
  --single_end
          Add if the data is single-end

quality control arguments:
  options that control quality thresholds (currently only for SARS-CoV-2 samples)

  -a, --vadr_alert_limit
          The maximum number of VADR alerts allowed for SARS-CoV-2 samples
          default=0
  -n, --number_n_threshold
          The maximum number of Ns allowed in SARS-CoV-2 assemblies
          default=5000

logging arguments:
  options that change the verbosity of the stdout logging

  --verbose
          Add to enable verbose logging
  --debug
          Add to enable debug logging; overwrites --verbose

Please contact support@theiagen.com or sage.wright@theiagen.com with any questions

Positional & Required Arguments

To successful run Mercury, these arguments are required.

• input_table: The table containing the metadata for the samples to be submitted in TSV format
• table_name: The name of the first column in the table (A1) in its entirety
• samplenames: The sample names to be extracted from the table (or in other words, the names of the rows in the table) in a comma-delimited list
• --gcp_bucket_uri: The GCP bucket URI to store the temporarily store the read files (such as gs://bucket_with_sra_access_permissions; contact support@theiagen.com if you would like to use the GCP bucket we use for this purpose)

Optional Arguments

These arguments provide helpful information, or help customize the output file names.

• -h, --help: Show the help message and exit
• -v, --version: Show the program's version number and exit
• -o, --output_prefix: The prefix for the output files (default is "mercury")

Submission Type Arguments

These arguments change the type of submission Mercury prepares.

• --organism: The organism type of all the samples in the table (default is "sars-cov-2"; options include "sars-cov-2", "mpox", and "flu"; contact us if you would like any additional organisms/databases supported)
• --skip_ncbi: Add to skip NCBI metadata preparation; prepare metadata and sequencing files only for GISAID submission

Metadata Customization Arguments

These arguments customize the configuration of the required and/or optional metadata.

• --skip_county: Add to skip adding county to location in GISAID metadata
• --usa_territory: Add if the country is a USA territory to use the territory name in the state column; this is useful for territories like Puerto Rico (e.g., instead of "North America/USA/Puerto Rico", the location will be "North America/Puerto Rico")
• --using_clearlabs_data: Add if using Clearlabs-generated data and metrics
• --using_reads_dehosted: Add if using reads_dehosted instead of clearlabs data
• --single_end: Add if the data is single-end; this ensures that the read2 column is not included in the metadata

A note on --using_clearlabs_data & --using_reads_dehosted

The --using_clearlabs_data and --using_reads_dehosted arguments change the default values for the read1_column_name, assembly_fasta_column_name, and assembly_mean_coverage_column_name metadata columns. The default values are shown in the table below in addition to what they are changed to depending on what arguments are used.

Variable	Default Value	with --using_clearlabs_data	with --using_reads_dehosted	with both --using_clearlabs_data and --using_reads_dehosted
read1_column_name	"read1_dehosted"	"clearlabs_fastq_gz"	"reads_dehosted"	"reads_dehosted"
assembly_fasta_column_name	"assembly_fasta"	"clearlabs_fasta"	"assembly_fasta"	"clearlabs_fasta"
assembly_mean_coverage_column_name	"assembly_mean_coverage"	"clearlabs_assembly_coverage"	"assembly_mean_coverage"	"clearlabs_assembly_coverage"

Quality Control Arguments

These arguments are currently only implemented for SARS-CoV-2. If any samples do not meet the quality thresholds, they will not be submitted to the respective databases and will be found in the <output_prefix>_excluded_samples.tsv file. If provided for other organisms, they will be ignored.

• --vadr_alert_limit: The maximum number of VADR alerts allowed for SARS-CoV-2 samples (default is 0)
• --number_n_threshold: The maximum number of Ns allowed in SARS-CoV-2 assemblies (default is 5000)

Logging Arguments

These arguments control the amount of logging that is output to the console.

• --verbose: Add to enable verbose logging
• --debug: Add to enable debug logging; overwrites --verbose

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Happy submissions!