FragGeneScan-plus for scalable high-throughput short-read open reading frame prediction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A fundamental step in the analysis of environmental sequence information is the prediction of potential genes or open reading frames (ORFs) encoding the metabolic potential of individual cells and entire microbial communities. FragGeneScan, a software designed to predict intact and incomplete ORFs on short sequencing reads combines codon usage bias, sequencing error models and start/stop codon patterns in a hidden Markov model to find the most likely path of hidden states from a given input sequence, provides a promising route for gene recovery in environmental datasets with incomplete assemblies. However, the current implementation of FragGeneScan does not scale efficiently with increasing input data size. Thus, FragGeneScan cannot be applied to contemporary environmental datasets that can exceed 100s of Gb. Here, we present FragGeneScan-Plus, an improved implementation of the FragGeneScan gene prediction model that leverages algorithmic thread synchronization and efficient in-memory data management to utilize multiple CPU cores without blocking I/O operations. FragGeneScan-Plus can process data approximately 5-times faster than FragGeneScan using a single core and approximately 50-times faster using eight hyper-threaded cores when benchmarked against simulated and real world environmental datasets.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".