PATRIC December 2014 Release Features Additional Support and Data for Antimicrobial Resistance and over 5,000 New Genomes, Including Archaea¶
This December Release sets the stage for new functionality and data in PATRIC. In 2015, our primary goals are as follows:
Revamp PATRIC infrastructure to support the hundreds of thousands of prokaryotic genomes that will become available over the next five years, providing real-time integration and release of data.
Support end-to-end analysis of prokaryotic genomes to allow researchers to upload their own sequencing reads to PATRIC, assemble genomes and annotate them using RAST. Researchers will be able to analyze their private genomes using the tools available at PATRIC, and then they can make their genomes publicly available at PATRIC if desired.
Incorporate all published Archaea genomes and selected Eukaryotic host genomes.
Integrate existing data analysis tools from the RAST/SEED systems into PATRIC.
Incorporate genome metadata related to antibiotic resistance and provide enhanced search and analysis tools to allow researchers to easily examine this data.
Enhance the user experience by providing improved functionality for searching and analyzing data in the PATRIC resource.
In order to enable these functions and other enhancements, we will make some changes to the existing PATRIC system and ask for your patience and support as we go through this period of transition.
Antimicrobial Resistance and other Clinical Metadata¶
In this release, we have started to incorporate antimicrobial resistance (AMR) information at the genome level. This is a first step, as the coverage and the search and analysis capabilities will become richer in future releases. This release includes curated metadata from nine sequencing projects from the NIAID-funded Genomic Centers for Infectious Diseases. This data covers 1247 genomes from 10 genera, including 53 antibiotics and 4 chemicals. We have also enhanced PATRIC support for the clinical metadata that is frequently generated in projects which sequence many clinical isolates to study AMR.
In this release, support for AMR metadata includes:
Antimicrobial Resistance metadata field. This field shows genomes that have been specifically tested against certain antibiotics and the resulting phenotype from that test. Note that a genome can have multiple antibiotic phenotypes, such as being resistant to one drug and susceptible to another. The values included in this field are:
‘Resistant’ (984 genomes)
‘Susceptible’ (687 genomes)
‘Intermediate’ (239 genomes)
Antimicrobial Resistance Evidence metadata field. Some of the genomes included in PATRIC have a specific phenotype that has been assigned, such as MRSA, and some of the genomes have been screened by broad, antimicrobial resistant panels (AMR panels). We have created a new field that identifies which metadata available on the PATRIC website contains the evidence supporting the resistance category assigned.
‘Phenotype’ (607 genomes). Genomes in this category were assigned their resistance category based on phenotype information provided by the sequencing center, for instance MRSA or MSSA. This phenotype data is available at PATRIC as well.
‘AMR Panel’ (588 genomes). Some genomes have been tested against a panel of antibiotics, with the results of the screening reported in a table using either a specific designation (such as ‘Susceptible,’ ‘Resistant,’ or ‘Intermediate’), or the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC). For genomes in this category, the panel data is available for download. In future releases, this data will be more fully integrated on the PATRIC website.
‘Comment’ (52 genomes). The basis for the resistance category for these genomes can be found in the comment metadata field. This information may have come from the comment field at GenBank, or in a comment field from data provided by the sequencing center or their sample provider. In some cases, the comment has been provided by literature-based curation by the PATRIC team; in these cases, a link to the corresponding publication is also available.
The Antimicrobial Resistance metadata field and the Antimicrobial Resistance Evidence metadata field are now available as filterable facets on the Genome list pages, which allows researchers to sort on the terms ‘Susceptible’, ‘Resistant’ or ‘Intermediate’ to locate the genomes tagged with that information. In addition, the researcher can filter on the source of the information, which provides the ability, for example, to only use genomes that have complete AMR panel information and exclude genomes where there is only a comment.
This release also adds enhanced support to allow storing and retrieving some clinical metadata that is available for only some of the genomes available at PATRIC. This includes new typing methods that are specific to a small number of genomes (such as spa type or wzi type), but are still important to researchers. This data is stored as a key-value pair so that researchers using Global Search can find genomes that contain any data for that field (e.g., search for ‘wzi’) or for genomes with specific values for that field (e.g., search for ‘wzi:29’)
Researchers can now use the Show/Hide capability on Genome lists to expose or hide the new metadata fields. The information is also available on each Genome Summary page by selecting clicking on the Summary information. When a list of genomes is downloaded, all of the new metadata fields are also included in the list of metadata available.
Changes in the Identifier Scheme¶
In order to prepare PATRIC for the continuing rapid growth of genomes and other data types over next five years, and to achieve tighter integration with the RAST annotation service, we have made the following changes in the PATRIC identifier scheme.
Archived identifiers. For all genomes included in PATRIC up to this point, the following identifiers have been archived and will continue to be available as alternate identifiers. However, new genomes added in PATRIC, beginning with this release, will not be assigned these identifiers.
Genome_info_id or gid. This numeric identifier used to uniquely identify any genome in PATRIC. Old identifiers for genomes will be archived as “p2_genome_id.”
Feature_info_id or fid. These are numeric identifiers that are used to uniquely identify a genomic feature, such as a gene, CDS, or RNAs. Old identifiers for features will be archived as “p2_feature_id.”
VBI Locus Tag. Previously, we provided locus tags for genes, CDSs, and RNAs that start with a VBI prefix; this practice will be discontinued. The old VBI prefix locus tags will be archived as “Alt_locus_tag.”
New Identifiers.
Genome_ID. A numeric identifier scheme adopted from RAST/SEED genome ids in the form taxon_id.version (i.e., 83332.12) will be assigned to every genome in PATRIC. This identifier will be used in both the PATRIC and RAST systems.
PATRIC_ID. A new identifier, also adopted from RAST/SEED, will be assigned to genomic features annotated using RAST. This identifier scheme is in the form fig|83332.12.peg.1. This will replace the VBI locus tag.
Feature_ID. PATRIC will now include a new identifier that is composed of annotation source, genome_id, sequence_accession, feature_type, start, end, and strand. For example:
RefSeq.83332.12.NC_000962.CDS.1.1524.fwd
PATRIC.83332.12.NC_000962.CDS.34.1524.fwd
The Feature_ID will not be displayed prominently on the website, but will be used to uniquely identify features in the database and generate mappings. Other more popular identifiers such as RefSeq locus_tag and the new PATRIC_ID will be displayed in tables and download files.
Upcoming Changes to the FTP site¶
In order to support multiple genomes that have the same name, we will be reorganizing the PATRIC FTP file download area. This is a work in progress and we hope to release these genomes on the FTP site by the end of January 2015.
Upcoming Updates to BLAST¶
We are currently working to improve the BLAST search available at PATRIC, both in terms of its usability and performance. As of this release, the new genomes have not been added to the BLAST search. New genomes will be added to BLAST search when the improved version of BLAST is released early in 2015.
New Genomes and Annotations¶
Archaeal Genomes¶
The PATRIC December Release includes 421 Archaea genomes with both GenBank and RAST annotations. Researchers can now analyze these genomes using all the tools available in PATRIC. We will routinely pick up new Archaea genomes available at GenBank and make them available at PATRIC.
New Bacterial Genomes¶
In this release, 4942 new bacterial genomes have been added to PATRIC.
Removal of Plasmid Only / Deprecated / Obsolete / Erroneous genomes¶
In this release, we have removed 482 bacterial genomes from PATRIC. Many of these genomes were only plasmids and lacked chromosomal sequences, and size limitations meant that they could not be annotated by RAST. Other genomes that were removed included genomes that were identified as obsolete at GenBank, or that had multiple versions of the same genome grouped together. Removing these genomes was a necessary part of database clean up. If any of these genomes or their corresponding genes were included in your workspace groups, they are no longer visible. If you need this data, please contact us at patric@vbi.vt.edu and we will work with you to retrieve the information you need.