QuRe: Software for viral quasispecies reconstruction from next-generation sequencing data

Abstract

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is an ideal framework for the characterization of highly variable pathogens, with a deep resolution able to capture minority variants. However, the reconstruction of all variants of a viral population infecting a host is a challenging task for genome regions larger than the average NGS read length. QuRe is a program for viral quasispecies reconstruction, specifically developed to analyze long read (>100 bp) NGS data. The software performs alignments of sequence fragments against a reference genome, finds an optimal division of the genome into sliding windows based on coverage and diversity and attempts to reconstruct all the individual sequences of the viral quasispecies-along with their prevalence-using a heuristic algorithm, which matches multinomial distributions of distinct viral variants overlapping across the genome division. QuRe comes with a built-in Poisson error correction method and a post-reconstruction probabilistic clustering, both parameterized on given error rates in homopolymeric and non-homopolymeric regions. © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.