--- title: "Assessing synteny identification" author: - name: Fabricio Almeida-Silva affiliation: VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology, Ghent, Belgium - name: Yves Van de Peer affiliation: VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology, Ghent, Belgium output: BiocStyle::html_document: toc: true number_sections: yes bibliography: vignette_03.bib vignette: > %\VignetteIndexEntry{Assessing synteny identification} %\VignetteEngine{knitr::rmarkdown} %\VignetteEncoding{UTF-8} --- ```{r setup, include = FALSE} knitr::opts_chunk$set( collapse = TRUE, comment = "#>", crop = NULL ) ``` # Introduction Synteny analysis allows the identification of conserved gene content and gene order (collinearity) in a genomic segment, and it is often used to study how genomic rearrangements have shaped genomes during the course of evolution. However, accurate detection of syntenic blocks is highly dependent on parameters such as number of top hits in similarity searches (e.g., with BLAST [@altschul1990basic] or DIAMOND [@buchfink2015fast]), number of anchors, and number of upstream and downstream genes to search for syntenic blocks. @zhao2019network proposed a network-based synteny analysis that allows the identification of optimal parameters using the network's **average clustering coefficient** and **number of nodes**. The algorithm for synteny network inference has been implemented in the Bioconductor package `r BiocStyle::Biocpkg("syntenet")`. # Installation ```{r installation, eval=FALSE} if(!requireNamespace('BiocManager', quietly = TRUE)) install.packages('BiocManager') BiocManager::install("cogeqc") ``` ```{r load_package, message=FALSE} # Load package after installation library(cogeqc) set.seed(123) # for reproducibility ``` # Data description Here, we will use a subset of the synteny network inferred in @zhao2019network that contains the synteny network for *Brassica oleraceae*, *B. napus*, and *B. rapa*. ```{r data_description} # Load synteny network for data(synnet) head(synnet) ``` # Network-based assessment of synteny identification To assess synteny detection, we calculate a synteny network score as follows: $$ \begin{aligned} S &= C N, \text{ where:} \\ \\ C &= \text{Clustering coefficient} \\ N &= \text{Number of nodes} \end{aligned} $$ The network with the highest score is considered the most accurate. To score a network, you will use the function `assess_synnet()`. ```{r assess_synnet} assess_synnet(synnet) ``` Ideally, you should be able to run a synteny detection program (e.g., MCScanX [@wang2012mcscanx] or i-ADHoRE [@proost2012adhore]) with multiple combinations of parameters, infer a synteny network for each run, and assess each network to pick the best. To demonstrate it, let's simulate different networks through resampling and calculate scores for each of them with the wrapper function `assess_synnet_list()`. ```{r assess_list} net1 <- synnet net2 <- synnet[-sample(1:10000, 500), ] net3 <- synnet[-sample(1:10000, 1000), ] synnet_list <- list( net1 = net1, net2 = net2, net3 = net3 ) synnet_assesment <- assess_synnet_list(synnet_list) synnet_assesment # Determine the best network synnet_assesment$Network[which.max(synnet_assesment$Score)] ``` As you can see, the first (original) network is the best one, as it has the highest score. # Session information {.unnumbered} This document was created under the following conditions: ```{r session_info} sessionInfo() ``` # References {.unnumbered}