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Updated: Apr 7, 2026

Heuristic Mining of Hierarchical Genotypes and Accessory Genome Loci in Bacterial Populations
Published on: December 7, 2021
Phylogenetically typing bacterial strains from partial SNP genotypes observed from direct sequencing of clinical
Jason W Sahl1, James M Schupp2, David A Rasko3
1Department of Pathogen Genomics, Translational Genomics Research Institute, Flagstaff, AZ USA ; Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 86011 USA.
Abstract:
We describe an approach for genotyping bacterial strains from low coverage genome datasets, including metagenomic data from complex samples. Sequence reads from unknown samples are aligned to a reference genome where the allele states of known SNPs are determined. The Whole Genome Focused Array SNP Typing (WG-FAST) pipeline can identify unknown strains with much less read data than is needed for genome assembly. To test WG-FAST, we resampled SNPs from real samples to understand the relationship between low coverage metagenomic data and accurate phylogenetic placement. WG-FAST can be downloaded from https://github.com/jasonsahl/wgfast.
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