Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 27, 2025
09:40
Phage Phenomics: Physiological Approaches to Characterize Novel Viral Proteins
Published on: June 11, 2015
12.3K
From Trees to Clouds: PhageClouds for Fast Comparison of ∼640,000 Phage Genomic Sequences and Host-Centric
Guillermo Rangel-Pineros1,2, Andrew Millard3, Slawomir Michniewski4
1Section for Evolutionary Genomics, The GLOBE Institute, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
PHAGE (New Rochelle, N.Y.)
|September 23, 2022
Summary
PhageClouds is a new tool that uses a graph database to quickly find related phage genomes. This approach efficiently explores vast phage sequence data, aiding genomic analysis.
Area of Science:
- Microbiology
- Bioinformatics
- Genomics
Background:
- Exploring genomic relationships in large phage datasets requires efficient computational strategies.
- The diversity of phage sequences necessitates advanced methods for analysis and characterization.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce PhageClouds, a novel graph database approach for exploring phage genomic relationships.
- To provide a computationally efficient method for analyzing extensive phage sequence data.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a graph database (Neo4j®) to store intergenomic distances of 640,000 phage genomic sequences.
- Employed dashing, an alignment-free method, for calculating intergenomic distances on massive datasets.
- Integrated data from diverse databases and public virome assemblies.
Main Results:
- PhageClouds enabled rapid searching of related phages within GenBank's complete genomes in 10 seconds.
- The tool identified a greater number of closely related phage sequences compared to GenBank-exclusive searches.
- Successfully expanded detection for both finished and draft phage genomes.
Conclusions:
- PhageClouds offers a significant advancement in analyzing phage genomic sequences.
- This novel resource facilitates the characterization of assembled phage genomes.
- The approach enhances the exploration of the phage sequence space.
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