Journal Article

HAVoC, a bioinformatic pipeline for reference-based consensus assembly and lineage assignment for SARS-CoV-2 sequences

Vapalahti, Olli, Sironen, Tarja, Plyusnin, Ilya, Truong Nguyen, Phuoc Thien, Kant, Ravi, Smura, Teemu

2021

Overview

Background SARS-CoV-2 related research has increased in importance worldwide since December 2019. Several new variants of SARS-CoV-2 have emerged globally, of which the most notable and concerning currently are the UK variant B.1.1.7, the South African variant B1.351 and the Brazilian variant P.1. Detecting and monitoring novel variants is essential in SARS-CoV-2 surveillance. While there are several tools for assembling virus genomes and performing lineage analyses to investigate SARS-CoV-2, each is limited to performing singular or a few functions separately. Results Due to the lack of publicly available pipelines, which could perform fast reference-based assemblies on raw SARS-CoV-2 sequences in addition to identifying lineages to detect variants of concern, we have developed an open source bioinformatic pipeline called HAVoC (Helsinki university Analyzer for Variants of Concern). HAVoC can reference assemble raw sequence reads and assign the corresponding lineages to SARS-CoV-2 sequences. Conclusions HAVoC is a pipeline utilizing several bioinformatic tools to perform multiple necessary analyses for investigating genetic variance among SARS-CoV-2 samples. The pipeline is particularly useful for those who need a more accessible and fast tool to detect and monitor the spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern during local outbreaks. HAVoC is currently being used in Finland for monitoring the spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants. HAVoC user manual and source code are available at https://www.helsinki.fi/en/projects/havoc and https://bitbucket.org/auto_cov_pipeline/havoc , respectively.

• Publisher: BioMed Central,BioMed Central Ltd,Springer Nature B.V,BMC
• Subject: Algorithms / Assembling / Bioinformatics / Biomedical and Life Sciences / Computational biology / Computational Biology/Bioinformatics / Computer Appl. in Life Sciences / Coronavirus / Coronaviruses / COVID-19 / Genetic analysis / Genetic diversity / Genetic variance / Genomes / Life Sciences / Lineage identification / Methods / Microarrays / Monitoring / Mutation / Reference assembly / SARS-CoV2 / Sequence analysis / Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 / Software / Source code / Variant detection / Viral diseases / Virus research / Viruses