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OMAmer: tree-driven and alignment-free protein assignment to subfamilies outperforms closest sequence approaches

Rossier, Victor, Warwick Vesztrocy, Alex, Robinson-Rechavi, Marc, Dessimoz, Christophe·2021·Bioinformatics
DOI 10.1093/bioinformatics/btab219PMC PMC8479680

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Abstract

Motivation: Assigning new sequences to known protein families and subfamilies is a prerequisite for many functional, comparative and evolutionary genomics analyses. Such assignment is commonly achieved by looking for the closest sequence in a reference database, using a method such as BLAST. However, ignoring the gene phylogeny can be misleading because a query sequence does not necessarily belong to the same subfamily as its closest sequence. For example, a hemoglobin which branched out prior to the hemoglobin alpha/beta duplication could be closest to a hemoglobin alpha or beta sequence, whereas it is neither. To overcome this problem, phylogeny-driven tools have emerged but rely on gene trees, whose inference is computationally expensive. Results: Here, we first show that in multiple animal and plant datasets, 18–62% of assignments by closest sequence are misassigned, typically to an over-specific subfamily. Then, we introduce OMAmer, a novel alignment-free protein subfamily assignment method, which limits over-specific subfamily assignments and is suited to phylogenomic databases with thousands of genomes. OMAmer is based on an innovative method using evolutionarily informed k-mers for alignment-free mapping to ancestral protein subfamilies. Whilst able to reject non-homologous family-level assignments, we show that OMAmer provides better and quicker subfamily-level assignments than approaches relying on the closest sequence, whether inferred exactly by Smith-Waterman or by the fast heuristic DIAMOND. Availabilityand implementation: OMAmer is available from the Python Package Index (as omamer), with the source code and a precomputed database available at https://github.com/DessimozLab/omamer. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

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Fig. 1. The closest sequence to a query does not necessarily belong to the same subfamily. This figure conceptualizes the four possible closest sequence locations relative to the query. On each tree, the true position of the query is indicated by a dashed branch, while its closest sequence(s) in the family is indicated by a star. The circle represents a duplication event leading to two subfamilies depicted as color boxes. Scenario A is the only one in which the closest sequence is in the same subfamily as the query. Note that for scenarios B and C to happen, the rate of evolution needs to vary across the tree (departure from a ‘molecular clock’), whereas scenario D can even happen under a uniform rate of evolution
Fig. 1. The closest sequence to a query does not necessarily belong to the same subfamily. This figure conceptualizes the four possible closest sequence locations relative to the query. On each tree, the true position of the query is indicated by a dashed branch, while its closest sequence(s) in the family is indicated by a star. The circle represents a duplication event leading to two subfamilies depicted as color boxes. Scenario A is the only one in which the closest sequence is in the same subfamily as the query. Note that for scenarios B and C to happen, the rate of evolution needs to vary across the tree (departure from a ‘molecular clock’), whereas scenario D can even happen under a uniform rate of evolutionCC BY · PubMed Central
Fig. 2. OMAmer algorithm for compact k-mer table precomputation. (A) To efficiently preprocess the k-mer table, a suffix array is first built from concatenated protein sequences of reference HOGs, encoding families (root-HOGs) and subfamilies (sub-HOGs). Numbers indicate suffix offsets in the concatenated protein array and bold characters highlight k-mers at the beginning of suffixes. (B) The k-mer ancestral HOG (where the k-mer has arisen) is approximated within each root-HOG as the LCA among HOGs with the given k-mer. For example, since both the orange and purple sub-HOGs contain the ‘AC’ k-mer, the ancestral HOG for that k-mer is the green root-HOG. (C) The compact k-mer table includes an k-mer index mapping to a buffer that stores each k-mer ancestral HOGs. Note that each offset of the index corresponds to a k-mer integer encoding. As illustrated with the gray boxes, the ‘AC’ k-mer (encoded as ‘1’) maps to the green and pink HOGs since these two lie within the [0,2[ offset interval in the buffer
Fig. 2. OMAmer algorithm for compact k-mer table precomputation. (A) To efficiently preprocess the k-mer table, a suffix array is first built from concatenated protein sequences of reference HOGs, encoding families (root-HOGs) and subfamilies (sub-HOGs). Numbers indicate suffix offsets in the concatenated protein array and bold characters highlight k-mers at the beginning of suffixes. (B) The k-mer ancestral HOG (where the k-mer has arisen) is approximated within each root-HOG as the LCA among HOGs with the given k-mer. For example, since both the orange and purple sub-HOGs contain the ‘AC’ k-mer, the ancestral HOG for that k-mer is the green root-HOG. (C) The compact k-mer table includes an k-mer index mapping to a buffer that stores each k-mer ancestral HOGs. Note that each offset of the index corresponds to a k-mer integer encoding. As illustrated with the gray boxes, the ‘AC’ k-mer (encoded as ‘1’) maps to the green and pink HOGs since these two lie within the [0,2[ offset interval in the bufferCC BY · PubMed Central
Fig. 3. OMAmer algorithm for protein assignment to family and subfamily. (A) Coarse alignment-free similarities are obtained by searching the k-mer table. (B) These similarities are normalized into OMAmer-scores to account for varying query lengths, composition biases and sizes of reference HOGs. (C) The family (root-HOG) with the highest HOG-score is retained (shown with an asterisk). (D) The assignment is refined to the most specific subfamily on the highest scoring root to leaf path (shown with an asterisk)
Fig. 3. OMAmer algorithm for protein assignment to family and subfamily. (A) Coarse alignment-free similarities are obtained by searching the k-mer table. (B) These similarities are normalized into OMAmer-scores to account for varying query lengths, composition biases and sizes of reference HOGs. (C) The family (root-HOG) with the highest HOG-score is retained (shown with an asterisk). (D) The assignment is refined to the most specific subfamily on the highest scoring root to leaf path (shown with an asterisk)CC BY · PubMed Central
Fig. 4. Frequency of closest sequence configurations defined in Figure 1 and OMAmer accuracy for each. (A) The closest sequence to a query was often found in another subfamily. Smith-Waterman alignments were used as proxies for closest sequences. (B) ‘Over-specific’ configurations were especially well dealt with by OMAmer. Each curve displays the range of trade-offs between precision and recall when varying the threshold on the OMAmer-score and on the DIAMOND E-value. They were computed by breaking down queries by closest sequence configurations as in A, before the validation procedure itself. Crosses indicate the location of F1max values. ‘Over-specific’ F1max values are specifically annotated
Fig. 4. Frequency of closest sequence configurations defined in Figure 1 and OMAmer accuracy for each. (A) The closest sequence to a query was often found in another subfamily. Smith-Waterman alignments were used as proxies for closest sequences. (B) ‘Over-specific’ configurations were especially well dealt with by OMAmer. Each curve displays the range of trade-offs between precision and recall when varying the threshold on the OMAmer-score and on the DIAMOND E-value. They were computed by breaking down queries by closest sequence configurations as in A, before the validation procedure itself. Crosses indicate the location of F1max values. ‘Over-specific’ F1max values are specifically annotatedCC BY · PubMed Central
Fig. 5. Comparison of subfamily assignments with OMAmer and by closest sequence (DIAMOND and Smith-Waterman). Each curve displays the range of trade-offs between precision and recall when varying the threshold either on the OMAmer-score, on the DIAMOND E-value or on the Smith-Waterman alignment score. F1max values are indicated by crosses on each curve
Fig. 5. Comparison of subfamily assignments with OMAmer and by closest sequence (DIAMOND and Smith-Waterman). Each curve displays the range of trade-offs between precision and recall when varying the threshold either on the OMAmer-score, on the DIAMOND E-value or on the Smith-Waterman alignment score. F1max values are indicated by crosses on each curveCC BY · PubMed Central
Fig. 6. Comparison of the computational performance of family and subfamily assignments between OMAmer and DIAMOND. OMAmer scales better than DIAMOND in terms of real and CPU time (total time on the left, and sequence/second on the right), but requires somewhat more memory (center). Error bars shown for 95% confidence interval, estimated using 10 000 bootstraps
Fig. 6. Comparison of the computational performance of family and subfamily assignments between OMAmer and DIAMOND. OMAmer scales better than DIAMOND in terms of real and CPU time (total time on the left, and sequence/second on the right), but requires somewhat more memory (center). Error bars shown for 95% confidence interval, estimated using 10 000 bootstrapsCC BY · PubMed Central

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Metadata

Authors
Rossier, V., Warwick Vesztrocy, A., Robinson-Rechavi, M., & Dessimoz, C.
Affiliations
  • Department of Computational Biology, University of Lausanne , 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
  • SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics , 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
ORCID
Venue
Bioinformatics
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
2021-03-31
Volume
37
Issue
18
Pages
2866-2873
ISSN
  • 1367-4803
  • 1367-4811
DOI
10.1093/bioinformatics/btab219
PMC
PMC8479680
Cited by
25
References
4
Language
en
Licence
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (vor)
Funders
Swiss National Foundation (167276, 183723)

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: OMAmer: tree-driven and alignment-free protein assignment to subfamilies outperforms closest sequence approaches. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/bioinformatics/btab219
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Rossier, V., Warwick Vesztrocy, A., Robinson-Rechavi, M., & Dessimoz, C. (2021). OMAmer: tree-driven and alignment-free protein assignment to subfamilies outperforms closest sequence approaches. Bioinformatics. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btab219