micropan (version 1.0)

bDist: Computes distances between sequences based on BLAST results

Description

Reads a complete set of result files from a BLAST search and computes distance between all sequences based on the BLAST bit-score.

Usage

bDist(blast.files,e.value=1,verbose=TRUE)

Arguments

blast.files

A text vector of filenames.

e.value

A threshold E-value to immediately discard (very) poor BLAST alignments. Default is 1.0.

verbose

A logical flag indicating if textual output should be given to monitor the progress.

Value

The function returns a data.frame with columns Sequence.A, Sequence.B and Distance. Each row corresponds to a pair of sequence having at least one BLAST hit between them. All pairs not listed in the output have distance 1.0 between them.

Details

Each input file must be a BLAST result file where all proteins of one genome have been queried against a database of all proteins from another genome. The result files must all have 12 columns of results, i.e. have been produced by the option -outfmt 6 in the BLAST+ software. The filenames must have the format GID111_vs_GID222.txt and are typically produced by blastAllAll. Setting a small e.value threshold can speed up the computation and reduce the size of the output, but you may loose some alignments that could produce smallish distances for short sequences. The distance computed is a relative score. If an alignment of query A against hit B has a bit-score of S(A;B), we compute an intermediate distance D(A;B)=1-S(A;B)/S(A;A) where S(A;A) is the bit-score of aligning A against itself. Reversing the search, we also get D(B;A)=1-S(B;A)/S(B;B), where B has been used as query and A is the hit. The final distance is D(A,B)=(D(A;B)+D(B;A))/2. A distance of 0.0 means A and B are identical. The maximum possible distance is 1.0, meaning there is no BLAST hit found either way. This distance should not be interpreted as lack of identity. A distance of 0.0 means 100% identity, but a distance of 0.25 does not mean 75% identity. It has some resemblance to an evolutinary (raw) distance, but since it is based on protein alignments, the type of mutations plays a significant role, not only the number of mutations.

See Also

blastAllAll, readBlastTable, bClust, isOrtholog.

Examples

# Using BLAST result files in this package
# We need to uncompress them first...
extdata.path <- file.path(path.package("micropan"),"extdata")
filenames <- c("GID1_vs_GID1.txt",
               "GID1_vs_GID2.txt",
               "GID1_vs_GID3.txt",
               "GID2_vs_GID1.txt",
               "GID2_vs_GID2.txt",
               "GID2_vs_GID3.txt",
               "GID3_vs_GID1.txt",
               "GID3_vs_GID2.txt",
               "GID3_vs_GID3.txt")
pth <- lapply( file.path( extdata.path, paste( filenames, ".xz", sep="" ) ), xzuncompress )

# ... reading the BLAST result files (textfiles)...
blast.distances <- bDist(file.path(extdata.path,filenames))

# ...and compressing them again...
pth <- lapply( file.path( extdata.path, filenames ), xzcompress )