Bio::ToolBox

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Application Examples

The BioToolBox package comes complete with a suite of high-quality, production-ready applications (Perl scripts) ready for a variety of analyses. A sampling of what can be done include the following:

The Applications page describes each one.

The following are just a few examples of highlighted scripts and their usage for solutions to common situations. Refer to the applications’ documentation for details on options shown and not shown.

Convert or extract gene annotation

Gene annotation from UCSC frequently come in UCSC specific formats, including refFlat and genePred, whereas gene annotation from Ensembl frequently come in GTF or GFF3 formats. At some point, some tool will specifically need annotation in a different format than what you have (since most of bioinformatics seem to be converting from one format to another), get_features.pl can help here.

Simple conversion:

 get_features.pl --in file.gff3.gz --refflat

Extract only protein-coding genes, collapsing alternate transcripts into one combined meta-transcript, as a GTF:

 get_features.pl --in file.gff3.gz --feature mRNA --collapse --gtf

Pull specific biotype lincRNA transcripts from standard chromosomes:

 get_features.pl --in file.gff3 --feature transcript --biotype lincRNA \
 --chrskip 'contig|scaffold|unmapped' --gtf

Storing annotation in a SQL database isn’t used frequently any more (at least by the author), but support is still present using the Bio::Perl adapter Bio::DB::SeqFeature::Store. To pull annotation from a local SQLite database file for use in downstream applications:

 get_features.pl --db annotation.sqlite --feature gene --out genes.txt

Extract specific gene regions

Not all parts of genes that you might be interested in are explicitly defined or encoded into a gene annotation table; rather, they are inferred. The get_gene_regions.pl script can extract these inferred regions.

Extract only the alternate exons from multi-transcript genes:

get_gene_regions.pl --region altExon --in genes.gtf --out altExons

Extract all the transcription start sites of protein coding transcripts, but only report those of alternate transcripts once if they’re within 200 bp, and expand the site by 200 bp in both directions, as a bed file:

get_gene_regions.pl --region tss --in genes.gtf --bed --out tss200.bed \
--feature gene --transcript mRNA --unique --slop 200 --start -200 --end 200

Generate wig file representation of a bam file

Lots of existing programs can generate a coverage file from a bam file, but bam2wig.pl will generate wig files in every which way imaginable. Some common scenarios include:

ChIPSeq normalized fragment coverage with empirical fragment size determination (single-end):

bam2wig.pl --extend --shift --model --rpm --bw --in file1.bam --out file1.bw

ChIPSeq normalized fragment coverage with explicit extension, explicit scaling factor, averaged over 3 replicates, excluding repeat elements and certain chromosomes:

bam2wig.pl --extend --extval 200 --bw --out file.bw --rpm --mean \
--scale 0.0133 --blacklist repeats.bed.gz --chrskip 'chrM|contig|scaffold' \
--cpu 12 replicate1.bam replicate2.bam replicate3.bam

ATACSeq cut sites, where cut sites are represented by 50 bp pileup centered over the cut site at the 5’ end:

bam2wig.pl --shift --shiftval -25 --extend --extval 50 --in file1.bam

RNASeq stranded coverage, where 2 wig files are generated for each strand, ignoring multi-mappers, with output basename of ‘experiment’:

bam2wig.pl --span --splice --strand --nosecondary --rpm --bw \
--in file1.bam --out experiment

Simple point representation of all fragments for counting:

bam2wig.pl --start --bw --in file1.bam --out file1.bw

Simple data collection

Sometimes you just need simple, summarized scores over a list of genes or regions. The get_datasets.pl script can collect data summarized data from bigWig, bigBed, Bam, USeq, and more.

Collect mean values over Bed intervals:

get_datasets.pl --in file.bed --method mean score1.bw score2.bw score3.bw

In general, bam2wig.pl has much better controls for filtering and scoring bam alignments, but in a pinch get_datasets.pl will also work with bam files. A method of mean or median will work with raw coverage, while count, name count (ncount), or precise count (pcount) will work with alignment counts.

get_datasets.pl --in file.bed --method ncount file1.bam file2.bam

Collect mean sense RNASeq coverage from a collection of stranded bigWig files in a folder (as shown above) over transcript exons:

get_datasets.pl --in annotation.gtf --feature transcript --subfeature exon \
--strand sense --ddb /path/to/stranded/bigWigs/ --data experiment --out file.txt

Collect data around a reference point

Rather than collect a single score for region, you need to collect a range of scores relative to a single reference point, for example a transcription start site. The get_relative_data.pl script will collect data in a defined number of windows on both sides of a specified reference point.

Collect mean values in twenty 500 bp windows (+/- 10 kb) from the transcription start site:

get_relative_data.pl --in mRNA.gtf --method mean --win 500 --num 20 \
--pos 5 --data scores.bw --out mRNA_TSS_10kb.txt

Collect profile data across an region

Instead of collecting a single score for a region, you need to generate a profile across a region. The get_binned_data.pl script will collect scores in defined fractional windows across a region, setting length to each region an artificial 1000 bp.

To collect an average profile expression across transcripts, excluding introns, and generate a summary (average profile):

get_binned_data.pl --in mRNA.gtf --method mean --subfeature exon --bins 50 \
--strand sense --ddb /path/to/stranded/bigWigs/ --data experiment \
--sum --out mRNA_sense_profile.txt

Manipulate collected dataset file

Inevitably, you need to manipulate your data files: add or remove columns, perform mathematical functions on columns, etc. You could open the file in a spreadsheet application, or in an R session, or get creative with cut, sed, or awk commands in the terminal, or just simply run manipulate_datasets.pl.

manipulate_datasets.pl file.txt

This script is designed to run interactively, allowing you to choose functions via letter options from a menu. Press m for the menu, q to save the file and quit, and Q to just quit without saving.

Alternatively, single functions can be specified on the command line for a programmatic approach in a bash script, for example.

manipulate_datasets.pl --in file.txt --func multiply --index 5 --target 0.0133

Be careful when specifying functions on the command line: the program will overwrite the input file unless an output file is specified with --out. Also, manipulations to columns of data are automatically written to new columns unless specified otherwise with --place n.