Sunbeam: a robust, extensible metagenomic sequencing pipeline

Sunbeam is a pipeline written in snakemake that simplifies and automates many of the steps in metagenomic sequencing analysis. It uses conda to manage dependencies, so it doesn't have pre-existing dependencies or admin privileges, and can be deployed on most Linux workstations and clusters. To read more, check out our paper in Microbiome.

Sunbeam currently automates the following tasks:

• Quality control, including adaptor trimming, host read removal, and quality filtering;
• Taxonomic assignment of reads to databases using Kraken;
• Assembly of reads into contigs using Megahit;
• Contig annotation using BLAST[n/p/x];
• Mapping of reads to target genomes; and
• ORF prediction using Prodigal.

Sunbeam was designed to be modular and extensible. Some extensions have been built for:

• IGV for viewing read alignments
• KrakenHLL, an alternate read classifier
• Kaiju, a read classifier that uses BWA rather than kmers
• Anvi'o, a downstream analysis pipeline that does lots of stuff!

More extensions can be found at the extension page: https://www.sunbeam-labs.org/.

To get started, see our documentation!

If you use the Sunbeam pipeline in your research, please cite:

EL Clarke, LJ Taylor, C Zhao, A Connell, J Lee, FD Bushman, K Bittinger. Sunbeam: an extensible pipeline for analyzing metagenomic sequencing experiments. Microbiome 7:46 (2019)

See how people are using Sunbeam:

• Shi, Z et al. Segmented Filamentous Bacteria Prevent and Cure Rotavirus Infection. Cell 179, 644-658.e13 (2019).
• Abbas, AA et al. Redondoviridae, a Family of Small, Circular DNA Viruses of the Human Oro-Respiratory Tract Associated with Periodontitis and Critical Illness. Cell Host Microbe 25, 719–729 (2019).
• Leiby, JS et al. Lack of detection of a human placenta microbiome in samples from preterm and term deliveries. Microbiome 6, 1–11 (2018).

Changelog:

v3.0.0 (June 27, 2022)

• Support use of .smk file extensions in Sunbeam extensions (in addition to .rules)
• Making use of snakemake's builtin features for environment management to separate dependencies and shrink environments
• Support mamba as an alternate package dependency solver at install time, for faster installs
• New command sunbeam extend to automatically install Sunbeam extensions! Use like sunbeam extend https://github.com/sunbeam-labs/sbx_report
• sunbeam init and sunbeam config update now add options for extensions you've installed to your default config file! (#247)
• Updated the path to the Illumina adapter sequences from hardcoded to templated (fixes #150 and #152)
• Use the updated kraken2 classifier instead of kraken
• Update other dependencies (trimmomatic -> 0.3.9; grabseqs -> 0.6.1; snakemake -> <5.7.0)
• Use diamond instead of blastx/p for a significant speed increase

v2.1.0 (November 26, 2019)

• Added a build manifest, which is run every time on integration testing and can be fed into conda by users to install the most recent successful dependencies
• Updates to documentation (#169, #230, #231)
• Fix missing samtools (#224)
• Integration test updates to schedule weekly builds (#222)
• Fix issues with old paired-end illumina adapters (#221)
• Script updates to use conda commands instead of source commands (#220)
• Add h5py package explicitly to avoid dependency metadata problem (#219)
• Add multiQC to build QC report (#203)
• Use multithreading for cutadapt in QC (#202)
• Correct conda channel priority during install (#201)
• Update documentation to spell out requirements (#199)
• New megahit failure handling (#194)
• Enforce sample wildcard constraints in Snakemake rules (#190)
• Run megahit multithreaded (#189)

v2.0.2 (August 28, 2019)

• Add implicit dependencies (samtools and bcftools) to environment file to make them explicit

v2.0.1 (July 24, 2019)

• Increment Snakemake version requirement for compatibility with recent conda
• Specify earlier megahit version to ensure compatbility with existing assembly behavior
• Integration test improvements

v2.0.0 (January 22, 2019)

• Start a project using resources directly from the SRA using sunbeam init --data_acc [SRA ###]. For more information, see the docs
• New extension website: https://www.sunbeam-labs.org/
• Improved documentation
• Numerous bugfixes and optimizations

v1.2.1 (May 24, 2018)

• Minor bugfixes

v1.2.0 (May 2, 2018)

• Low-complexity reads are now removed by default rather than masked
• Bug fixes related to single-end sequencing experiments
• Documentation updates

v1.1.0 (April 8, 2018)

• Reports include number of filtered reads per host, rather than in aggregate
• Static binary dependency for komplexity for easier deployment
• Remove max length filter for contigs

v1.0.0 (March 22, 2018)

• First stable release!
• Support for single-end sequencing experiments
• Low-complexity read masking via komplexity
• Support for extensions
• Documentation on ReadTheDocs.io
• Better assembler (megahit)
• Better ORF finder (prodigal)
• Can remove reads from any number of host/contaminant genomes
• Semantic versioning checks
• Integration tests and continuous deployment

Contributors

• Erik Clarke (@eclarke)
• Chunyu Zhao (@zhaoc1)
• Jesse Connell (@ressy)
• Louis Taylor (@louiejtaylor)
• Kyle Bittinger (@kylebittinger)