Bio4j: A pioneer graph based database for the integration of biological Big Data
Bio4j
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Transcript of Bio4j
Bio4j: A pioneer graph based
database for the integration of
biological Big Data
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Who am I?
I am Currently working as a Bioinformatics consultant/developer/researcher at Oh no sequences!
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Oh no what !?
We are the R&D group at Era7 Bioinformatics. we like bioinformatics, cloud computing, NGS, category theory, bacterial genomics… well, lots of things.
What about Era7 Bioinformatics?
Era7 Bioinformatics is a Bioinformatics company specialized in sequence analysis, knowledge management and sequencing data interpretation. Our area of expertise revolves around biological sequence analysis, particularly Next Generation Sequencing data management and analysis.
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
In Bioinformatics we have highly interconnected overlapping knowledge spread throughout different DBs
A bit of background…
However all this data is in most cases modeled in relational databases. Sometimes even just as plain CSV files
As the amount and diversity of data grows, domain models become crazily complicated!
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
With a relational paradigm, the double implication Entity Table does not go both ways.
You get ‘auxiliary’ tables that have no relationship with the small piece of reality you are modeling.
You need ‘artificial’ IDs only for connecting entities, (and these are mixed with IDs that somehow live in reality)
Entity-relationship models are cool but in the end you always have to deal with ‘raw’ tables plus SQL.
Integrating/incorporating new knowledge into already existing databases is hard and sometimes even not possible without changing the domain model
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
but one thing’s sure, they are not a set of tables!
Life in general and biology in particular are probably not 100% like a graph…
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
What’s Bio4j?
Bio4j is a bioinformatics graph based DB including most data available in :
Uniprot KB (SwissProt + Trembl)
Gene Ontology (GO)
UniRef (50,90,100)
NCBI Taxonomy
RefSeq
Enzyme DB
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
It provides a completely new and powerful framework
for protein related information querying and
management.
Since it relies on a high-performance graph engine, data
is stored in a way that semantically represents its own
structure
What’s Bio4j?
Bio4j uses Neo4j technology, a "high-performance graph
engine with all the features of a mature and robust
database".
Thanks to both being based on Neo4j DB and the API
provided, Bio4j is also very scalable, allowing anyone
to easily incorporate his own data making the best
out of it.
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
What’s Bio4j?
Everything in Bio4j is open source !
released under AGPLv3
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
What’s Bio4j?
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Relationships: 717.484.649 Nodes: 92.667.745 Relationship types: 144 Node types: 42
Bio4j in numbers
The current version (0.8) includes:
We’re approaching the 1 billion relationships! :)
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Let’s dig a bit about Bio4j structure…
Data sources and their relationships:
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Bio4j domain model
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Bio4j modules
Bio4j includes different data sources but you may not always be interested in having all of them.
That’s why the importing process is modular and customizable, allowing you to import just the data you are interested in.
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Bio4j modules
You must however keep in mind that you must be coherent when choosing the data sources you want to have included in your database; that’s to say, you cannot import for example protein interactions without having first included the proteins! ;)
Here’s a schema showing the dependencies for the importing process:
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
The Graph DB model: representation
Core abstractions:
Properties on both
Relationships between nodes
Nodes
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
How are things modeled?
Couldn’t be simpler!
Entities
Nodes
Associations / Relationships
Edges
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Some examples of nodes would be:
Protein
GO term
Genome Element
and relationships:
Protein
GO term
PROTEIN_GO_ANNOTATION
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
We have developed a tool aimed to be used both as a reference manual and initial contact for Bio4j domain model: Bio4jExplorer
Bio4jExplorer allows you to:
• Navigate through all nodes and relationships • Access the javadocs of any node or relationship • Graphically explore the neighborhood of a node/relationship • Look up for the indexes that may serve as an entry point for a node • Check incoming/outgoing relationships of a specific node • Check start/end nodes of a specific relationship
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Entry points and indexing
There are two kinds of entry points for the graph:
Auxiliary relationships going from the reference node, e.g.
Node indexing
- MAIN_DATASET: leads to both main datasets: Swiss-Prot and Trembl
There are two types of node indexes:
- CELLULAR_COMPONENT: leads to the root of GO cellular component sub-ontology
- Exact: Only exact values are considered hits
- Fulltext: Regular expressions can be used
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
//--creating manager and node retriever----
Bio4jManager manager = new Bio4jManager(“/mybio4jdb”);
NodeRetriever nR= new NodeRetriever(manager);
ProteinNode protein = nR.getProteinNodeByAccession(“P12345”);
Getting more related info...
List<InterproNode> interpros = protein.getInterpro();
OrganismNode organism = protein.getOrganism();
List<GoTermNode> goAnnotations = protein.getGOAnnotations();
List<ArticleNode> articles = protein.getArticleCitations();
for (ArticleNode article : articles) {
System.out.println(article.getPubmedId());
}
//Don’t forget to close the manager
manager.shutDown();
Retrieving protein info (Bio4j Java API)
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Querying Bio4j with Cypher
START k=node:keyword_id_index(keyword_id_index = "KW-0181")
return k.name, k.id
Getting a keyword by its ID
START d=node:dataset_name_index(dataset_name_index = "Swiss-Prot")
MATCH d <-[r:PROTEIN_DATASET]- p,
circuit = (p) -[:PROTEIN_PROTEIN_INTERACTION]-> (p2) -
[:PROTEIN_PROTEIN_INTERACTION]-> (p3) -[:PROTEIN_PROTEIN_INTERACTION]->
(p)
return p.accession, p2.accession, p3.accession
Finding circuits/simple cycles of length 3 where at least one protein is from Swiss-Prot dataset:
Check this blog post for more info and our Bio4j Cypher cheetsheet
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Mining Bio4j data
Finding topological patterns in Protein-Protein Interaction networks
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
gremlin> g.idx('protein_accession_index')[['protein_accession_index':'P12345']].full_name ==> Aspartate aminotransferase, mitochondrial
Get protein by its accession number and return its full name
Get proteins (accessions) associated to an interpro motif (limited to 4 results)
gremlin> g.idx('interpro_id_index')[['interpro_id_index':'IPR023306']].inE('PROTEIN_INTERPRO').outV.accession[0..3] ==> E2GK26 ==> G3PMS4 ==> G3Q865 ==> G3PIL8
Check our Bio4j Gremlin cheetsheet
A graph traversal language
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
You can also query/navigate through Bio4j with the Neo4j REST API ! The default representation is json, both for responses and or data sent with POST/PUT requests
http://server_url:7474/db/data/index/node/protein_accession_index/
protein_accession_index/Q9UR66
REST Server
Get protein by its accession number: (Q9UR66)
http://server_url:7474/db/data/node/Q9UR66_node_id/relationships/o
ut
Get outgoing relationships for protein Q9UR66
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Visualizations (1) REST Server Data Browser
Navigate through Bio4j data in real time !
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Visualizations (2) Bio4j GO Tools
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Visualizations (3) Bio4j + Gephi
Get really cool graph visualizations using Bio4j and Gephi visualization and exploration platform
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Bio4j + Cloud
Interoperability and data distribution
We use AWS (Amazon Web Services) everywhere we can around Bio4j, giving us the following benefits:
Releases are available as public EBS Snapshots, giving AWS users the opportunity of creating and attaching to their instances Bio4j DB 100% ready volumes in just a few seconds.
CloudFormation templates: - Basic Bio4j DB Instance - Bio4j REST Server Instance
Backup and Storage using S3 (Simple Storage Service)
We use S3 both for backup (indirectly through the EBS snapshots) and storage (directly storing RefSeq sequences as independent S3 files)
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Why would I use Bio4j ?
Massive access to protein/genome/taxonomy… related information
Networks analysis
Integration of your own DBs/resources around common information
Development of services tailored to your needs built around Bio4j
Besides many others I cannot think of myself… If you have something in mind for which Bio4j might be useful, please let us know so we can all see how it could help you meet your needs! ;)
Visualizations
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
OK, but why starting all this? Were you so bored…?!
It all started somehow around our need for massive access to protein GO (Gene Ontology) annotations.
At that point I had to develop my own MySQL DB based on the official GO SQL database, and problems started from the beginning:
I got crazy ‘deciphering’ how to extract Uniprot protein annotations from GO official tables schema
Uniprot and GO official protein annotations were not always consistent
Populating my own DB took really long due to all the joins and subqueries needed in order to get and store the protein annotations.
Soon enough we also had the need of having massive access to basic protein information.
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
These processes had to be automated for our (specifically designed for NGS data)
bacterial genome annotation system BG7 (PLOS ONE 2012 in Press)
Uniprot web services available were too limited: - Slow - Number of queries limitation - Too little information available
So I downloaded the whole Uniprot DB in XML format (Swiss-Prot + Trembl) and started to have some fun with it !
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
We got used to having massive direct access to all this protein related information…
So why not adding other resources we needed quite often in most projects and which now were becoming a sort of bottleneck compared to all those already included in Bio4j ?
Then we incorporated:
- Isoform sequences
- Protein interactions and features
- Uniref 50, 90, and 100
- RefSeq
- NCBI Taxonomy
- Enzyme Expasy DB
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Some numbers:
• 157 639 502 nodes • 742 615 705 relationships • 632 832 045 properties • 148 relationship types • 44 node types
Bio4j + MG7 + 48 Blast XML files (~1GB each)
And it works just fine!
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
MG7 domain model
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
What’s MG7?
MG7 provides the possibility of choosing different parameters to fix the thresholds for filtering the BLAST hits: i. E-value ii. Identity and query coverage
It allows exporting the results of the analysis to different data formats like: • XML • CSV • Gexf (Graph exchange XML format) As well as provides to the user with Heat maps and graph visualizations whilst including an user-friendly interface that allows to access to the alignment responsible for each functional or taxonomical read assignation and that displays the frequencies in the taxonomical tree --> MG7Viewer
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Finding the lowest common ancestor of a set of NCBI taxonomy nodes with Bio4j
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Future directions
Gene flux tool (New tool for bacterial comparative genomics)
Pathways tool Data from Metacyc is going to be included in Bio4j. This data would allow to dissect the metabolic pathways in which a genome element, organism or community (metagenomic samples) is involved. .
Improvements in modules
Integration of even more massive data
Application to Cancer genomics
Data visualization, network analysis and much more…
www.ohnosequences.com www.bio4j.com
Community
Bio4j has a fast growing internet presence:
- Twitter: check @bio4j for updates
- Blog: go to http://blog.bio4j.com
- Mail-list: ask any question you may have in our list.
- LinkedIn: check the Bio4j group
- Github issues: don’t be shy! open a new issue if you think something’s going wrong.