CrisprVi: a software for visualizing and analyzing CRISPR sequences of prokaryotes

Abstract

Background: Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and their spacers are important components of prokaryotic CRISPR-Cas systems. In order to analyze the CRISPR loci of multiple genomes more intuitively and comparatively, here we propose a visualization analysis tool named CrisprVi. Results: CrisprVi is a Python package consisting of a graphic user interface (GUI) for visualization, a module for commands parsing and data transmission, local SQLite and BLAST databases for data storage and a functions layer for data processing. CrisprVi can not only visually present information of CRISPR direct repeats (DRs) and spacers, such as their orders on the genome, IDs, start and end coordinates, but also provide interactive operation for users to display, label and align the CRISPR sequences, which help researchers investigate the locations, orders and components of the CRISPR sequences in a global view. In comparison to other CRISPR visualization tools such as CRISPRviz and CRISPRStudio, CrisprVi not only improves the interactivity and effects of the visualization, but also provides basic statistics of the CRISPR sequences, and the consensus sequences of DRs/spacers across the input strains can be inspected from a clustering heatmap based on the BLAST results of the CRISPR sequences hitting against the genomes. Conclusions: CrisprVi is a convenient tool for visualizing and analyzing the CRISPR sequences and it would be helpful for users to inspect novel CRISPR-Cas systems of prokaryotes.