SeqScreen: a biocuration platform for robust taxonomic and biological process characterization of nucleic acid sequences of interest Rapid advancements in synthetic biology and nucleic acid synthesis, in particular concerns about its intentional or accidental misuse, call for more sophisticated screening tools to identify genes of interest within short sequence fragments. One major gap in predicting genes of concern is the inadequacy of current tools and ontologies to describe the specific biological processes of pathogenic proteins. The objective of this work is to design software that sensitively assigns taxonomic classifications, functional annotations, and biological processes of interest to short nucleotide sequences of unknown origin (50bp1,000bp). The overarching goal is to perform sensitive characterization of short sequences and highlight specific pathogenic biological processes of interest (BPoIs). The SeqScreen software executes these tasks in analytical workflows with Nextflow and outputs results in a tabdelimited report. Local and global alignments differentiate hits to taxonomicallyrelated sequences from similar but unrelated sequences, and an ensemble approach leverages multiple tools and databases to assign a variety of functional terms to each query sequence. Final biological process assessments are made from the predicted functional annotations, which leverage information in preexisting databases, as well as new custom biocurations. Machine learning models predict each biological process of interest on large protein databases before incorporation into the SeqScreen framework to streamline computational efficiency, ensure reproducible results, allow for version control, and facilitate the review of the automated predictions by expert biocurators. The SeqScreen source code is available at https:gitlab.comtreangenlabseqscreen.

Gclust: A Parallel Clustering Tool for Microbial Genomic Data Abstract   The accelerating growth of the public microbial genomic data imposes substantial burden on the research community that uses such resources. Building databases for nonredundant reference sequences from massive microbial genomic data based on clustering analysis is essential. However, existing clustering algorithms perform poorly on long genomic sequences. In this article, we present Gclust, a parallel program for clustering complete or draft genomic sequences, where clustering is accelerated with a novel parallelization strategy and a fast sequence comparison algorithm using sparse suffix arrays (SSAs). Moreover, genome identity measures between two sequences are calculated based on their maximal exact matches (MEMs). In this paper, we demonstrate the high speed and clustering quality of Gclust by examining four genome sequence datasets. Gclust is freely available for noncommercial use at  https:github.comniulabgclust . We also introduce a web server for clustering useruploaded genomes at  http:niulab.scgrid.cngclust .