DOKK / manpages / debian 13 / sideretro / sider.1.en
SIDER(1) sideRETRO SIDER(1)

sider - sideRETRO Documentation

sideRETRO has a very straightforward syntax. Basically, there are three main commands, each one with a plethora of available options:

  • process-sample
  • merge-call
  • make-vcf

So, in order to test the installation process and run a first example, user can call it without any argument from the command line, like this:

$ sider
Usage: sider [-hv]


       sider <command> [options]
A pipeline for detecting
Somatic Insertion of DE novo RETROcopies
Options:


   -h, --help            Show help options


   -v, --version         Show current version


   -c, --cite            Show citation in BibTeX
Commands:


   ps,  process-sample   Extract alignments related


                         an event of retrocopy


   mc,  merge-call       Discover and annotate


                         retrocopies


   vcf, make-vcf         Generate VCF file with all


                         annotate retrocopies


In the above situation, if sideRETRO was correctly installed, it will give that default usage help.

Another classical example is to print sideRETRO's installed version using the -v option:

$ sider --version
sideRETRO 1.0.0


And, if the user need further help, he can find it both at the sideRETRO's readthedocs page or in the already installed software documentation, from command line:

$ sider --help


Please, see A Practical Workflow and Running with Docker sections for more examples and tips for using with Docker.

Now, to get more familiar with sideRETRO main commands and results, let's try some basic examples for each command.

The first one is process-sample or ps for short, and was intended to act as the "evidence's grounding faith" for sideRETRO. Here, we're saying "first" because of an order in which the user must run the commands. The file resultant from this command will become the input to the next one, merge-call.

As explained in the Introduction section, the command process-sample creates a database of abnormal reads from a SAM/BAM file set. To do this, there are some mandatory options the user must supply to do a correct search. Calling the command process-sample without any argument will give a specific help where user can know all the mandatory options for this command:

$ sider process-sample


One or more alignment file in SAM/BAM format
Gene annotation on the reference genome in GTF/GFF3 format. sider will look for 'exon' with the attribute 'transcript_type=protein_coding'. The attributes 'gene_name', 'gene_id' and 'exon_id' are also required
File containing a newline separated list of alignment files in SAM/BAM/CRAM format. This option is not mandatory if one or more SAM/BAM/CRAM files are passed as argument. If 'input-file' and arguments are set concomitantly, then the union of all alignment files is used

Show help options
Decrease verbosity to error messages only or suppress terminal outputs at all if 'log-file' is passed
Same as '--quiet'
Increase verbosity to debug level
Print log messages to a file
Output directory. Create the directory if it does not exist [default:"."]
Prefix output files [default:"out"]

Set SQLite3 cache size in KiB [default:"200000"]

Minimum mapping quality of the reads required [default:"8"]
Maximum base frequency fraction allowed [default:"0.75"]
Remove duplicated reads. Reads are considered duplicates when they share the 5 prime positions of both reads and read-pairs

Assume all reads are grouped by queryname, even if there is no SAM/BAM/CRAM header tag 'SO:queryname'
Number of threads [default:"1"]
Maximum distance allowed between paired-end reads [default:"10000"]
Minimum overlap required as a fraction of exon [default:"1e-09"; 1 base]
Minimum overlap required as a fraction of alignment [default:"1e-09"; 1 base]
The minimum fraction must be satisfied for at least exon OR alignment. Without '-e', both fractions would have to be satisfied
The fraction overlap must be reciprocal for exon and alignment. If '-f' is 0.5, then '-F' will be set to 0.5 as well


So, supposing that the user has three files: f1.bam, f2.bam, f3.sam, he can type:

$ sider process-sample f2.bam f2.bam f3.sam \


    -a annotation_file.gtf


Note the mandatory -a option specifying the annotation file. And, in this unique exception, we suppressed the -i mandatory option cause all the files were explicitly called.

Let's see another example that shows the convenient use of the -i option to call a list of input files (e.g. my_files_list.txt) instead of them directly:

$ sider process-sample \


    -i my_files_list.txt \


    -a annotation_file.gtf


Both commands above will produce only one output database file out.db containing all relevant reads for non-fixed retrocopies search, whose prefix out can be easily changed with the -p option. The abnormal reads from all input files will be merged in just one table. To produce one database for each input file separately, user must run one distinct instance of sideRETRO per file.

Some options' values can affect drastically the output. Let's play a little bit with some of them while using the short version of the command ps:

$ sider ps \


    -i my_files_list.txt \


    -a annotation_file.gtf \


    -o output_dir \


    -p my_reads_database \


    -l my_log_file.log \


    -c 2000000 \


    -Q 20 \


    -F 0.9 \


    -t 3


Wow! The number of options can be overwhelming.

Here used -o option to specify the directory output_dir to write our database as my_reads_database.db (-p option). Also, we chose to save the log messages in my_log_file.log file (-l option), a cache size of 2Gb (-c option), a minimum phred score cutoff of 20 for alignments (-Q option), a minimum overlap ratio of 0.9 for read alignments over exonic regions (-F option) and 3 threads to process those files in parallel (-t option).

To see another example of the process-sample command chained in a real workflow, please refer to the A Practical Workflow section.

The second step in the sideRETRO's "journey for the truth of retrocopies" is the command merge-call or mc for short. The aim of this command is to take the database created by process-sample step as input and populate more tables in it, with information risen from a clustering process over the abnormal reads regions.

Like process-sample, merge-call has some mandatory options, which can be known by calling it without any argument:

$ sider merge-call


One or more SQLite3 databases generated in the process-sample step
File containing a newline separated list of SQLite3 databases to be processed. This option is not mandatory if one or more SQLite3 databases are passed as argument. If 'input-file' and arguments are set concomitantly, then the union of all files is used

Show help options
Decrease verbosity to error messages only or suppress terminal outputs at all if 'log-file' is passed
Same as '--quiet'
Increase verbosity to debug level
Print log messages to a file
Output directory. Create the directory if it does not exist [default:"."]
Prefix output files [default:"out"]
Merge all databases with the first one of the list, instead of creating a new file

Set SQLite3 cache size in KiB [default:"200000"]

DBSCAN: Maximum distance between two alignments inside a cluster [default:"300"]
DBSCAN: Minimum number of points required to form a dense region [default:"10"]

Avoid clustering from and to this chromosome. This option can be passed multiple times [default:"chrM"]
GTF/GFF3/BED blacklisted regions. If the file is in GTF/GFF3 format, the user may indicate the 'feature' (third column), the 'attribute' (ninth column) and its values
Increase the blacklisted regions ranges (left and right) by N bases [default:"0"]
The value of 'feature' (third column) for GTF/GFF3 file [default:"gene"]
The 'attribute' (ninth column) for GTF/GFF3 file. It may be passed in the format key=value (e.g. gene_type=pseudogene). Each value will match as regex, so 'pseudogene' can capture IG_C_pseudogene, IG_V_pseudogene etc. This option can be passed multiple times and must be true in all of them
Works as 'gff-hard-attribute'. The difference is if this option is passed multiple times, it needs to be true only once [default:"gene_type=processed_pseudogene tag=retrogene"]
Minimum distance allowed between a cluster and its putative parental gene [default:"1000000"]
Minimum number of reads coming from a given source (SAM/BAM/CRAM) within a cluster [default:"3"]
Minimum ranked distance between genes in order to consider them close [default:"3"]

Number of threads [default:"1"]
Minimum mapping quality used to define reference allele reads [default:"8"]


And likewise, user can call a set of database files directly, or using a list of files:

$ sider merge-call database1.db database2.db -I


or

$ sider merge-call -i my_databases_list.txt -I


NOTE:

Again, note the -I option that is not mandatory but would lead the creation of duplicated output databases if absent. This option do the clustering "in place" over the input files, overwriting them (so be careful). If user do not use the -p or -I options, the output files will be named out.db.


In a more sophisticated example, we will use the short version of the command mc, with many other options:

$ sider mc \


    -i my_databases_list.txt \


    -o output_dir \


    -p my_database \


    -l my_log_file.log \


    -I \


    -c 2000000 \


    -B my_black_list.bed \


    -x 1000000 \


    -g 5 \


    -Q 20 \


    -C 15 \


    -t 3


Here, options -i, -o, -p, -l, -I, -c, -Q and -t keeps the same meaning as they have in the process-sample command. The others need some explanation. All we've done here was to ask for a minimum number of 5 reads of contribution from each input SAM/BAM file to consider a clustering region as a retrocopy candidate (with -g option); a minimum distance of 1000000 bp from the parental gene to resolve some doubtful overlaps (-x option), a minimum number of 15 crossing reads over the putative insertion point to consider heterozygosis evidence (-C) and, importantly, a BED file with a list of regions to be ignored at the clustering process called my_black_list.txt (-B option). This last option's file can describe entire chromosomes (like chrM) and many chromosomal regions with poor insertion evidences taken literature, like centromers. All specified regions won't be targets for clustering.

To see another example of the merge-call command chained in a real workflow, please refer to the A Practical Workflow section.

The third and last step to the sideRETRO's "crusade to retrocopies" is the make-vcf command or vcf for short. This command takes the already clustered tables in the database files populated at the merge-call step and creates one VCF file with all statistically significant retrocopy insertions annotated in a convenient format.

This command has no mandatory options, but it is worth try to discover the others:

$ sider make-vcf


SQLite3 database generated at process-sample and merge-call steps
Show help options
Decrease verbosity to error messages only or suppress terminal outputs at all if 'log-file' is passed
Same as '--quiet'
Increase verbosity to debug level
Print log messages to a file
Output directory. Create the directory if it does not exist [default:"."]
Prefix output files [default:"out"]

Minimum distance between genes in order to consider them close [default:"10000"]
Maximum error allowed for orientation rho [default:"0.05"]
FASTA file for the reference genome


So, in order to produce a VCF file from a database input file like my_database.db, just type:

$ sider make-vcf my_database.db


This will produce a out.vcf output file.

Let's add more options to customize it to our needs (with the short version of the command only for symmetry):

$ sider vcf my_database.db \


    -o output_dir \


    -p my_retrocopies \


    -l my_log_file.log \


    -r my_reference_genome.fa \


    -n 50000


Command make-vcf is very simple and don't allow the user to use threads. The only new options are -r, which must specify the reference genome in FASTA format (like gencode's Hg38.fa) and -n, where user can establish a distance threshold for genes surrounding insertion points for additional information in the output VCF file.

Working with CRAM files may be a little tricky, mainly if you have downloaded the data from a public repository. Let's take a look at two possible cases:

  • Local alignment
  • External alignment

In order to generate an alignment file in the CRAM format, first we need to index the reference genome:

# Inde for BWA: .fa.amb, .fa.ann, .fa.bwt, .fa.pac, .fa.sa files
bwa index hg38.fa
# Index reference genome for CRAM: .fa.fai file
samtools faidx hg38.fa


Then, we can align with bwa:

# Align with BWA and generate a CRAM
bwa mem hg38.fa file_R1.fastq file_R2.fastq | \


   samtools view -T hg38.fa -C -o file.cram -


The alignment file.cram can be processed with sider, as long as we don't change the reference genome and its index (.fa.fai) path. If so, we need to set the environment variables REF_PATH and REF_CACHE, see External alignment.

When we download public data already aligned in the CRAM format, we may be concerned about the reference genome index. Probably, we won't have the required genome index to read the .cram, and the htslib library - used by sider and samtools - is able to download the index from the CRAM Reference Registry.

However, in order to htslib be able to accomplish this task, we need to compile the library with the required flags and also we need to have the reqeuired dependencies (as libcurl). Therefore to be able to read these files, without depending on these details, we need to generate a new local index and set the environment variables - REF_PATH and REF_CACHE - to the correct path:

# Create cache dir
mkdir -p /my/cache
# Construct the index
perl seq_cache_populate.pl -root /my/cache hg38.fa
# Now before running samtools or sider, we need to
# set the environment variables REF_PATH and REF_CACHE
export REF_PATH=/my/cache/%2s/%2s/%s:http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/cram
export REF_CACHE=/my/cache/%2s/%2s/%s
# So ...
sider ps -a annot.gff3.gz -o result file.cram


The script seq_cache_populate.pl can be found in the samtools, or at seq_cache_populate.pl.

For more information, see Samtools Worflow.

Now, let's do an interesting exercise, with real experimental data from the 1000 Genomes Project. (Warning: This example requires 16GB of RAM)

In order to run siderRETRO searching for retrocopies, we will download 2 whole-genome sequenced CRAM files, both aligned on the gencode's hg38 genome: NA12878 and NA12778.

At the beginning of a run, the files listed below must be at the same directory where the user is running sideRETRO or their correct paths must be supplied at the correspondent option. Files are:

1.
A GTF gene annotation file from gencode project (here gencode.v32.annotation.gtf).
2.
A FASTA file with the gencode's Human reference genome, version 38 (here GRCh38_full_analysis_set_plus_decoy_hla.fa).
3.
A custom perl script, seq_cache_populate.pl, to construct a new local index . The seq_cache_populate.pl script can be found in seq_cache_populate.pl.
4.
A custom perl script, analyser.pl, to do the final analysis over the VCF file and produce the TSV file in a tabular format. The analyser.pl script can be downloaded here.

Also, we will set the environment variables REF_PATH and REF_CACHE, as a requirement to work with CRAM files - more information at Dealing with CRAM format.

See the complete command sequence below for the whole analysis.

Tip: Copy and paste line by line in your terminal.

Tip 2: If you are running line by line in your terminal don't paste the "$" character. It is already in your terminal.

# Do things inside a clean directory.
# Average time: irrelevant
$ mkdir -p sider_test
$ cd sider_test
# Download annotation from gencode
wget ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/gencode/Gencode_human/release_32/gencode.v32.annotation.gtf.gz
# Download the reference genome from 1000 genomes
wget ftp://ftp.1000genomes.ebi.ac.uk/vol1/ftp/technical/reference/GRCh38_reference_genome/GRCh38_full_analysis_set_plus_decoy_hla.fa
# Make the CRAM index
# Create cache dir
mkdir -p cache
# create index
perl seq_cache_populate.pl -root cache GRCh38_full_analysis_set_plus_decoy_hla.fa
# Set environment variables
export REF_PATH=$PWD/cache/%2s/%2s/%s:http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/cram
export REF_CACHE=$PWD/cache/%2s/%2s/%s
# Create a download list (WGS.list) containing all files of interest.
# Average time: irrelevant
$ echo "ftp://ftp.sra.ebi.ac.uk/vol1/run/ERR323/ERR3239334/NA12878.final.cram" > WGS_download.list
$ echo "ftp://ftp.sra.ebi.ac.uk/vol1/run/ERR323/ERR3239484/NA12778.final.cram" >> WGS_download.list
# Download all files: NA12878 and NA12778.
# Average time: network dependent
$ wget -c -i WGS_download.list
# Create the list of BAM files.
# Average time: irrelevant
$ ls *.cram > WGS_genomes.list
# First sideRETRO step: process-sample
# Input file: WGS_genomes.list
# Output file: 1000_genomes.db
# Average time: 62m34.541
$ sider process-sample \


    -i WGS_genomes.list \


    -a gencode.v32.annotation.gtf.gz \


    -p 1000_genomes \


    -c 2000000 \


    -Q 20 \


    -F 0.9 \


    -t 2
# Second sideRETRO step: merge-call
# Input file: 1000_genomes.db
# Output file: 1000_genomes.db (same file)
# Average time: 62m34.541
$ sider merge-call 1000_genomes.db \


    -c 2000000 \


    -x 1000000 \


    -g 5 \


    -I \


    -t 2
# Second sideRETRO step: merge-call
# Input file: 1000_genomes.db
# Output file: 1000_genomes.vcf
# Average time: 62m34.541
$ sider make-vcf 1000_genomes.db \


    -p 1000_genomes \


    -r GRCh38_full_analysis_set_plus_decoy_hla.fa
# Some analysis over the final VCF file.
# Input file: 1000_genomes.vcf
# Output file: 1000_genomes.tsv
# Average time: 62m34.541
$ perl analyser.pl 1000_genomes.vcf > 1000_genomes.tsv


This was a simple but complete pipeline to obtain a final TSV file with all the relevant results in a tabular format ready to import in a R or Python script and plot some graphics.

Notwithstanding sideRETRO's native run, user can happily run it from a Docker image just prepending Docker's directives to any example shown. That is, supposing the user has Docker installed and has pulled the image galantelab/sider:latest from DockerHub, he can just prepend docker --rm -ti -v $(pwd):/home/sider -w /home/sider galantelab/sider to the ordinary sider command, like:

$ docker --rm -ti -v $(pwd):/home/sider -w /home/sider galantelab/sider \


  sider ps \


      -i my_files_list.txt \


      -a annotation_file.gtf \


      -o output_dir \


      -p my_reads_database \


      -l my_log_file.log \


      -c 2000000 \


      -Q 20 \


      -F 0.9 \


      -t 3


Thiago L. A. Miller

2020, The sideRETRO Team

March 17, 2025