PostBio documentation

Introduction

What PostBio is

PostBio is a set of bioinformatics extensions for PostgreSQL. It includes two data types, int_interval, an integer interval used to represent biological sequence features, and stree, a suffix tree type to search for maximum unique matches, and a set of utilitary routines.

PostBio is licensed under the MIT license (very similar to PostgreSQL's BSD license) and so can be freely used for academic and commercial purposes. Please refer to the Installation section for more details.

Integer intervals

A type for biological sequence features

An int_interval is not much different from a line segment lseg type in PostGIS, being an specialization of it: only integer coordinates are allowed and the line lies in the unidimensional space represented by a sequence, which gives the "interval" representation. As such, integer intervals admit topological operations and can be indexed by GiSTs.

Values of int_interval are specified with

int_interval '( low , high )'

where low and high are integers. Implicit casts from and to text are possible, and an integer i can be casted to (i, i).

The following table describes all int_interval operators, where we use ii1 as int_interval'(l1, h1)' and ii2 as int_interval'(l2, h2)' in the example column. The operators are actually syntatic sugar for the functions in the function column.

Operator	Description	Function	Example
`#`	Size (length)	`int_size`	`#ii1 = h1 - l1 + 1`
`#<`	Lower endpoint	`int_low`	`#<ii1 = l1`
`#>`	Upper endpoint	`int_high`	`#>ii1 = h1`
`\|-\|`	Distance	`int_distance`	`ii1 \|-\| ii2 = (\|l1 - l2\| + \|h1 - h2\| - #ii1 - #ii2) / 2`
`<->`	Buffer	`int_buffer`	`ii1 <-> b = int_interval(max(0, l1 - b), h1 + b)`
`<<`	Strictly left?	`int_left`	`ii1 << ii2` is `true` iff `h1 < l2`
`&<`	Left?	`int_overleft`	`ii1 &< ii2` is `true` iff `h1 <= h2`
`&&`	Overlaps?	`int_overlaps`	`ii1 && ii2` is `true` iff `l1 <= h2 and h1 >= l2`
`&>`	Right?	`int_overright`	`ii1 &> ii2` is `true` iff `l1 >= l2`
`>>`	Strictly right?	`int_right`	`ii1 >> ii2` is `true` iff `l1 > h2`
`~=`	Same?	`int_same`	`ii1 ~= ii2` is `true` iff `l1 = l2 and h1 = h2`
`~`	Contains?	`int_contains`	`ii1 ~ ii2` is `true` iff `l1 <= l2 and h1 >= h2`
`@`	Contained?	`int_contained`	`ii1 @ ii2` is `true` iff `ii2 ~ ii1`
`+`	Join	`int_join`	`ii1 + ii2 = int_interval(min(l1, l2), max(h1, h2))` if `ii1` and `ii2` overlap and `NULL` otherwise
*``**	Overlap	`int_overlap`	`ii1 * ii2 = int_interval(max(l1, l2), min(h1, h2))` if `ii1` and `ii2` overlap and `NULL` otherwise
`^`	Span	`int_span`	`ii1 ^ ii2 = int_interval(min(l1, l2), max(h1, h2))`

Operators join and overlap are pairwise union and intersection respectively. Union and intersection are defined as aggregate functions int_union and int_intersection returning an int_interval. The aggregator version of int_span is int_cover.

A function intpair_to_int that takes integers l and h as arguments and returns int_interval'(l, h)' is provided for convenience. There is also a version of int_buffer that allows the specification of left and right offsets: int_buffer(ii, b1, b2), where ii = (l, h), returns (max(0, l - b1), h + b2); if b1 = b2 we have the version in the table.

Examples

A sequence feature corresponds to a triplet (id, orient, ii) where id is a sequence identifier (possibly the primary key for a sequence table), orient is a boolean indicating if the feature is in the same or contrary orientation of the sequence, and ii is the int_interval representing the feature as a subsequence.

Now, as a genomic application, suppose we have two tables of sequence features: genes and probesets, both with sequence identifiers relative to the chromosome sequence table for some species:

CREATE TABLE genes (
  id integer PRIMARY KEY,
  seq_id integer REFERENCES sequences(id),
  orient boolean,
  cds int_interval -- coding region
);
CREATE INDEX genes_id_idx ON genes(seq_id, orient);
CREATE INDEX genes_cds_idx ON genes USING gist(cds);

CREATE TABLE probesets (
  id integer PRIMARY KEY,
  seq_id integer REFERENCES sequences(id),
  orient boolean,
  region int_interval
);
CREATE INDEX probesets_id_idx ON probesets(seq_id, orient);
CREATE INDEX probesets_region_idx ON probesets USING gist(region);

Our first task is to select which probesets are contained within each gene:

SELECT p.seq_id, p.orient, p.region, g.cds FROM probesets p JOIN genes g ON
  g.seq_id=p.seq_id AND g.orient=p.orient -- same sequence and orientation
  AND p.region @ g.cds; -- probeset contained in CDS

As a more substantial application, let's now select probesets that are closest to a gene, within a specific maximum from the coding region (CDS) but not overlapping the CDS. We start with an auxiliary view:

\set offset 500
CREATE VIEW pset_buffer AS
  SELECT g.id AS gid, p.id AS pid, @(p.region |-| g.cds) AS dist
    FROM probesets p JOIN genes g ON
    g.seq_id=p.seq_id AND g.orient=p.orient -- same sequence and orientation
    -- overlapping buffer but not CDS:
    AND p.region && (g.cds <-> :offset) AND NOT p.region && g.cds;

Finally, we use pset_buffer to select probesets that attain minimum distance and report more details:

SELECT g.seq_id, g.orient, p.region, g.cds FROM genes g JOIN
  (SELECT b.gid, b.pid FROM pset_buffer b
    JOIN (SELECT gid, MIN(dist) AS dist FROM pset_buffer GROUP BY gid) AS q ON
      b.gid=q.gid AND b.dist=q.dist) AS j ON g.id=j.gid
    JOIN probesets p ON p.id=j.pid;

Suffix trees

Efficient nucleotide sequence search

A suffix tree for a reference sequence S is a data structure representing suffixes of S in a way to allow fast searching of maximal matches from query sequences. You can get more general information on suffix trees at Wikipedia.

The suffix tree data type, stree, is a serialized version of the suffix tree struct found in MUMmer version 3.20, more specifically in its core suffix tree library libstree implemented by Stefan Kurtz. For convenience, libstree is provided in PostBio but you are strongly advised to refer to the links for more details and references.

Values of stree are specified from a lower-case extended nucleotide sequence, that is,

stree '[a | c | g | t | s | w | r | y | m | k | b | d | h | v | n]+'

Suffix trees can also be casted from and to text. If you decide to store your reference sequences as strees and plan on retrieving many subsequences then stree_subtext(stree, start, len) is more memory efficient than casting to text and running substr(reftext, start, len).

Maximal matches between a stree and a query sequence can be found with maxmatch, which uses a composite type, streematch, to store each result. If only the number of matches are wanted maxmatchcount can be used.

CREATE TYPE streematch AS
  (matchlen integer, refstart integer, querystart integer);

maxmatch(stree, query, uniqueinref, minmatchlen)

SRF that returns a maximal match (of type streematch) per row between the reference sequence in stree and the query sequence. uniqueinref is a boolean for whether the matches in the reference are unique; true is equivalent to specifying "-mumcand" in MUMmer (the default behavior) while false is equivalent to "-maxmatch". minmatchlen is the minimum length of the match, being equivalent to the "-l" input in MUMmer; if minmatchlen = 0 then the query sequence length is taken as the actual minimum length.

maxmatchcount(stree, query, uniqueinref, minmatchlen, anymatch)

Returns the number of maximal matches in stree from query with length at least minmatchlen. The first four arguments have the same interpretation as in maxmatch. anymatch is a boolean for whether maxmatchcount should only check if there is any match returning 0 or 1, or if the actual number of matches should be returned.

Examples

A simple example would be:

# select maxmatch('acgtacgt', 'cgta', false, 2);
 maxmatch 
----------
 (4,2,1)
 (3,6,1)
(2 rows)

If uniqueinref were true the result would be only the first row. In the next example we have two tables, one with sequences and other with motifs, and we wish to count the number of occurrences of each motif in each sequence:

SELECT s.id, motif, maxmatchcount(seq::stree, motif, false, 0) AS nmatches
  FROM sequences s, motifs;

Utils

Utilitary routines

For now PostBio offers only one utilitary routine:

revcomp(seq [, complement])

Returns the reverse complement of sequence seq if complement is true (the default value) and the simple reverse otherwise. seq should contain only extended nucleotides, that is, only the same letters from the alphabet defining stree.

Installation

How to obtain and install PostBio

PostBio is distributed as a source package and can be obtained at PgFoundry. After downloading and unpacking, our first task is to compile libstree:

$ cd stree && make && make clean

The source package is then installed like any regular PostgreSQL module, that is, just run:

$ make && sudo make install
$ psql -f postbio.sql <database>

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.