Evaluation of Alignment Algorithms for Discovery and Identification of Pathogens Using RNA-Seq
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Next-generation sequencing technologies provide an unparallelled opportunity for the characterization and discovery of known and novel viruses. Because viruses are known to have the highest mutation rates when compared to eukaryotic and bacterial organisms, we assess the extent to which eleven well-known alignment algorithms (BLAST, BLAT, BWA, BWA-SW, BWA-MEM, BFAST, Bowtie2, Novoalign, GSNAP, SHRiMP2 and STAR) can be used for characterizing mutated and non-mutated viral sequences--including those that exhibit RNA splicing--in transcriptome samples. To evaluate aligners objectively we developed a realistic RNA-Seq simulation and evaluation framework (RiSER) and propose a new combined score to rank aligners for viral characterization in terms of their precision, sensitivity and alignment accuracy. We used RiSER to simulate both human and viral read sequences and suggest the best set of aligners for viral sequence characterization in human transcriptome samples. Our results show that significant and substantial differences exist between aligners and that a digital-subtraction-based viral identification framework can and should use different aligners for different parts of the process. We determine the extent to which mutated viral sequences can be effectively characterized and show that more sensitive aligners such as BLAST, BFAST, SHRiMP2, BWA-SW and GSNAP can accurately characterize substantially divergent viral sequences with up to 15% overall sequence mutation rate. We believe that the results presented here will be useful to researchers choosing aligners for viral sequence characterization using next-generation sequencing data.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".