CATO: The Clone Alignment Tool

PLoS One. 2016 Jul 26;11(7):e0159586. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0159586. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

High-throughput cloning efforts produce large numbers of sequences that need to be aligned, edited, compared with reference sequences, and organized as files and selected clones. Different pieces of software are typically required to perform each of these tasks. We have designed a single piece of software, CATO, the Clone Alignment Tool, that allows a user to align, evaluate, edit, and select clone sequences based on comparisons to reference sequences. The input and output are designed to be compatible with standard data formats, and thus suitable for integration into a clone processing pipeline. CATO provides both sequence alignment and visualizations to facilitate the analysis of cloning experiments. The alignment algorithm matches each of the relevant candidate sequences against each reference sequence. The visualization portion displays three levels of matching: 1) a top-level summary of the top candidate sequences aligned to each reference sequence, 2) a focused alignment view with the nucleotides of matched sequences displayed against one reference sequence, and 3) a pair-wise alignment of a single reference and candidate sequence pair. Users can select the minimum matching criteria for valid clones, edit or swap reference sequences, and export the results to a summary file as part of the high-throughput cloning workflow.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Cloning, Molecular
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Molecular Sequence Annotation
  • Sequence Alignment / methods
  • Sequence Analysis, DNA
  • Software*
  • User-Computer Interface

Grants and funding

The authors PL and PVH are employees of Pfizer. Inc. Pfizer provided support in the form of salaries for authors to PL and PVH, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.