Lastz tuning procedure

Introduction

For the lastz/chain/net procedure at UCSC, we attempt to tune the lastz parameters when the target and query species are phylogenetic distant from either human or mouse since the normal lastz default parameters are already tuned for human and mouse alignments.

The procedure will be:

1. extract 'genscan' proteins from each pair of species to align (can use any gene table)
2. blat the proteins to each other, select the highest scoring alignments
3. for each highest scoring alignment, extract the full DNA sequence for each gene, coding and non-coding, plus 5,000 bases upstream of the transcript plus extra DNA sequence on each end for the shorter sequence to get them nearly the same size. Concatenate all the sequences together to produce one single sequence representing all of these gene sequences, one file for each species
4. Run the lastz_D tuning procedure for four different collections of these sequences:
   1. top 100 alignments
   2. top 200 alignments
   3. top 300 alignments
   4. top 400 alignments
5. Compare the resulting output from each of those four trials to verify they are consistent and produce similar parameters. Sometimes one of those results will be radically different. From the set of at least three results that are consistent, choose the one with the largest number of alignments. Usually this is the top-400, sometimes it is the top-300. If none of them are consistent, simply use lastz standard defaults. This isn't a perfect procedure, sometimes lastz standard defaults will produce more alignment in a full chain/net procedure.

Fetch Protein Fasta

To fetch protein fasta sequence, assuming you have the kent userApps and $HOME/.hg.conf set to:

db.host=genome-mysql.cse.ucsc.edu
db.user=genomep
db.password=password
central.db=hgcentral

For example on hg38:

hgsql -N -e 'select * from genscan;' hg38 | cut -f2- > hg38.genscan.tab
rsync -a -P rsync://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg38/bigZips/hg38.2bit ./
getRnaPred -peptides -genomeSeqs=hg38.2bit hg38 hg38.genscan.tab all hg38.genscan.pep

BLAT proteins

The blat command is:

blat -prot -oneOff=1 ${target}.genscan.pep ${query}.genscan.pep -out=maf ${target}.${query}.oneOff.maf

Scan the resulting maf file:

[[1]] mafScoreSizeScan.pl]] ${target}.${query}.oneOff.maf > mafScoreSizeScan.list