Introduction

nf-core/genomeannotator is a bioinformatics best-practice analysis pipeline for the annotation of eukaryote genomes. It was developed with a focus on metazoans - although other groups should work as well.

The pipeline is built using Nextflow, a workflow tool to run tasks across multiple compute infrastructures in a very portable manner. It uses Docker/Singularity containers making installation trivial and results highly reproducible. The Nextflow DSL2 implementation of this pipeline uses one container per process which makes it much easier to maintain and update software dependencies. Where possible, these processes have been submitted to and installed from nf-core/modules in order to make them available to all nf-core pipelines, and to everyone within the Nextflow community!

Pipeline summary

1. Preprocess assembly (filter out small contigs, clean sequence names)
2. Align evidences (proteins, transcripts, RNAseq)
3. Convert alignments to annotation support
4. Build gene models using AUGUSTUS and optionally PASA
5. Compute consensus gene build using EvidenceModeler

Optional steps include de-novo transcriptome assembly (Trinity) and annotation mapping from related genomes (Satsuma2 and Kraken).

Quick Start

1. Install Nextflow (>=21.10.3)

2. Install any of Docker, Singularity, Podman, Shifter or Charliecloud for full pipeline reproducibility (please only use Conda as a last resort; see docs)

3. Download the pipeline and test it on a minimal dataset with a single command:

   console nextflow run nf-core/genomeannotator -profile test,YOURPROFILE --outdir <OUTDIR>

   Note that some form of configuration will be needed so that Nextflow knows how to fetch the required software. This is usually done in the form of a config profile (YOURPROFILE in the example command above). You can chain multiple config profiles in a comma-separated string.

   • The pipeline comes with config profiles called docker, singularity, podman, shifter, charliecloud and conda which instruct the pipeline to use the named tool for software management. For example, -profile test,docker.
   • Please check nf-core/configs to see if a custom config file to run nf-core pipelines already exists for your Institute. If so, you can simply use -profile <institute> in your command. This will enable either docker or singularity and set the appropriate execution settings for your local compute environment.
   • If you are using singularity, please use the nf-core download command to download images first, before running the pipeline. Setting the NXF_SINGULARITY_CACHEDIR or singularity.cacheDir Nextflow options enables you to store and re-use the images from a central location for future pipeline runs.
   • If you are using conda, it is highly recommended to use the NXF_CONDA_CACHEDIR or conda.cacheDir settings to store the environments in a central location for future pipeline runs.

4. Start running your own analysis!

   console nextflow run nf-core/genomeannotator --input samplesheet.csv --outdir <OUTDIR> --genome GRCh37 -profile <docker/singularity/podman/shifter/charliecloud/conda/institute>

Documentation

The nf-core/genomeannotator pipeline comes with documentation about the pipeline usage, parameters and output.

Credits

nf-core/genomeannotator was originally written by Marc P. Hoeppner.

We thank the following people for their extensive assistance in the development of this pipeline:

Montserrat Torres-Oliva (@MontseTor)

Contributions and Support

If you would like to contribute to this pipeline, please see the contributing guidelines.

For further information or help, don't hesitate to get in touch on the Slack #genomeannotator channel (you can join with this invite).

Citations

An extensive list of references for the tools used by the pipeline can be found in the CITATIONS.md file.

You can cite the nf-core publication as follows:

The nf-core framework for community-curated bioinformatics pipelines.

Philip Ewels, Alexander Peltzer, Sven Fillinger, Harshil Patel, Johannes Alneberg, Andreas Wilm, Maxime Ulysse Garcia, Paolo Di Tommaso & Sven Nahnsen.

Nat Biotechnol. 2020 Feb 13. doi: 10.1038/s41587-020-0439-x.