Basic Local Alignment with Successive Refinement (BLASR) for PacBio

PacBio reads are long, but highly error-prone. Moreover, errors spread nearly uniformly over the entire reads. BLASR is an alignment tool designed to align such reads to error-free sequences. Researchers working on PacBio reads could access the software from github, but little information was available on the algorithm.

BLASR paper is out now for those few curious about the algorithm. Be ready with your differential calculus book.

[Mapping single molecule sequencing reads using Basic Local Alignment with Successive Refinement (BLASR): Theory and Application

Mark J Chaisson and Glenn Tesler

We describe the method BLASR (Basic Local Alignment with Successive Refinement) for mapping Single Molecule Sequencing (SMS) reads that are thousands to tens of thousands of bases long with divergence between the read and genome dominated by insertion and deletion error. We also present a combinatorial model of sequencing error that motivates why our approach is effective. The results indicate that mapping SMS reads is both highly specific and rapid.

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Installation:

Installing BLASR is easy, but make sure you install dynamic hdf5 libraries first.

Running BLASR:

(contributed by Jason Chin)

here is how I use the blasr to align PacBio reads to the contigs (target.fasta). The “target.fasta.sa” is the suffix array from “target.fasta” generated by sawriter.

blasr query.fa ./target.fasta -sa ./target.fasta.sa -bestn 40 -maxScore -500 -m 4 -nproc 24 -out target.m4 -maxLCPLength 15

the output format option “-m 4” generate the alignment coordinate. Not fully documented, but I can explain that to you. (Easier in a phone…)

I use a 24 cores / 48G ram server for the alignment. It took about 2 to 3 hours aligning 3G PacBio Reads to 10^6 sequences of short read contigs with a mean 3.5kbp length.