DESCRIPTION.rst

beast2_constsites: Update BEAST2 XML to account for constant sites

Introduction

Based on this suggestion by Remco, we can correctly account for constant sites in a BEAST2 analysis by adding the following data tag below your current data tag:

<data id="xyz" spec="FilteredAlignment" filter="-" data="@xyzOriginal" constantSiteWeights="100 200 300 400"/>

This assumes that your original <data> tag had id=xyz and was renamed to id=xyzOriginal, and that you have 1000 constant sites that were removed from the alignment, with:

• 100 As
• 200 Cs
• 300 Gs
• 400 Ts

What does this do?

This script will take a FASTA file with a single DNA sequence (e.g., a bacterial chromosome), a VCF file containing the position of SNPs along the FASTA file (e.g., as outputted from snippy-core) and the XML file produced by BEAUTi containing only variable sites. It will output a new XML file named <original_xml_name>_plus_const.xml with the added information to account for constant sites. There is nothing else you need to do but run BEAST2.

It will optionally also take a BED file with positions to mask (e.g., positions of phage).

How to install?

pip3 install b2constsites

How to run it?

If installed correctly, a scripted called run_b2cs should be available in your path:

run_b2cs --help

At a minimum, you need to supply a sequence file with your reference (assuming it has a single chromosome entry --- this was designed for bacterial genomics, but may work with viral too), a VCF file with variants, and the XML output from BEAUTi.

run_b2cs myref.fasta myvar.vcf myxml.xml

A new file called myxml_plus_const.xml will be created in the same folder as myxml.xml.

ASSUMPTIONS and CAVEATS

This script will:

• Only take in to account SNPs and MNPs annotated in the VCF. Other variant types will be ignored.
• Will only take into consideration A, C, G, and T bases in your reference sequence. All other characters will be ignored.
• Has not been tested with BEAST1.8, and as far as I know it will not work with that version of BEAST. This was designed for use with BEAST2.

The output will be, therefore, an approximation. However, it should be a close enough approximation that it will provide a better inference from BEAST2 than if one uses only variable sites, and then corrects in some post hoc manner.

Authors

Anders Gonçalves da Silva

Sarah Baines

Jean Lee

Torsten Seemann

Maintainer

Anders Gonçalves da Silva

Issues or Questions

GitHub Issues