nextstrain.org/avian-flu

This is the Nextstrain build for avian influenza subtypes A/H5N1, A/H5NX, A/H7N9, and A/H9N2 as well as analysis of the 2024 A/H5N1 cattle-flu outbreak. The most up-to-date builds of avian influenza can be found on nextstrain.org. Please see nextstrain.org/docs for details about augur and pathogen builds.

The Snakemake pipeline is parameterised by two config files, one for the A/H5N1, A/H5NX, A/H7N9, and A/H9N2 builds and one for the 2024 A/H5N1 cattle-flu outbreak.

Segment-level GISAID builds

The config/gisaid.yaml config builds 32 Auspice datasets (8 segments x 4 subtypes (A/H5N1, A/H5NX, A/H7N9, A/H9N2)) using GISAID data and can be run via

snakemake --cores 1 -pf --configfile config/gisaid.yaml

This pipeline starts by downloading data from a private S3 bucket and the appropriate credentials are required; see below for how to use locally ingested files. For rapid AWS rebuild run as:

nextstrain build --aws-batch --aws-batch-cpus 16 --aws-batch-memory 28800 . --jobs 16 --configfile config/gisaid.yaml

Please see nextstrain.org/docs for details about augur and pathogen builds.

Deploying builds

The pipeline can automatically deploy resulting builds within the auspice folder to nextstrain.org by running:

nextstrain build . --configfile config/gisaid.yaml -f deploy_all

H5N1 Cattle Outbreak (2024)

We produce per-segment and whole-genome (concatenated segments) builds for the ongoing H5N1 cattle-flu outbreak. These use NCBI data including consensus genomes and SRA data assembled via the Andersen lab's avian-influenza repo.

Running this build will overwrite GISAID files in ./data and thus you can't maintain or run GISAID & NCBI builds in parallel. In most cases this isn't an issue and we are working on improving this. You may want to proactively remove the ./data directory yourself to make sure everything works as expected.

snakemake --cores 1 -pf --configfile config/h5n1-cattle-outbreak.yaml

This pipeline starts by downloading data from a public S3 bucket.

Genome builds

The build is restricted to a set of strains where we think there's no reassortment, with outgroups excluded (config/dropped_strains_h5n1-cattle-outbreak.txt). Output files will be placed in results/h5n1-cattle-outbreak/genome. See Snakefile.genome for more details.

Segment-level builds

Strains for each segment are chosen by first constructing a general tree for the segment with all strains from 2024 onwards and then taking the clade which contains all strains in the genome build. This should allow any reassortments to be highlighted and will also include outbreak strains which are missing from the genome build (because they don't have all 8 segments sequenced).

Note that generating any segment-level build here will necessarily build the genome tree, as it's needed to identify the clade of interest in each segment.

Creating a custom build

The easiest way to generate your own, custom avian-flu build is to use the quickstart-build as a starting template. Simply clone the quickstart-build, run with the example data, and edit the Snakefile to customize. This build includes example data and a simplified, heavily annotated Snakefile that goes over the structure of Snakefiles and annotates rules and inputs/outputs that can be modified. This build, with it's own readme, is available here.

Features unique to avian flu builds

cleavage site annotations

Influenza virus HA is translated as a single peptide (HA0) that is cleaved to form the mature, functional form (HA1 and HA2). In all human strains and many avian strains, the cleavage site is composed of a single, basic amino acid residue. However, some avian influenza subtypes, particularly H5s, have acquired additional basic residues immediately preceding the HA cleavage site. In some cases, this results in addition of a furin cleavage motif, allowing HA to be cleaved by furin, which is ubiquitously expressed, and allows for viral replication across a range of tissues. The addition of this "polybasic cleavage site" is one of the prime determinants of avian influenza virulence. In these builds, we have annotated whether strains contain a furin cleavage motif, defined here as the sequence R-X-K/R-R immediately preceding the start of HA2, where X can be any amino acid. We have also added a color by for the cleavage site sequence, which we define here as the 4 bases preceding HA2.

clade labeling

H5 viruses are classified into clades, which are currently viewable as a color by on nextstrain.org. Because clade annotations are not available in all public databases, we annotate sequences with their most likely clade using a tool developed by Samuel S. Shepard at CDC called LABEL. The assigned clade for each H5N1 or H5Nx sequence are available as public tsvs here.

To update the clades.tsv file with clade annotations for new sequences, run:

snakemake -s Snakefile.clades -p --cores 1

To run the builds on without updating the clades file, run:

snakemake -p --cores 1

To string these together and update the clades.tsv file for new sequences and then run the builds:

snakemake -s Snakefile.clades -p --cores 1 && snakemake -p --cores 1

Using the same strains for all segments

By default we subsample data for each segment independently. Alternatively, you can ask the pipeline to use the same strains for each segment. This modifies the pipeline in a few ways:

1. An additional metadata processing step is added which counts the number of segments a strain has sequence data for
2. Subsampling is performed as normal for the HA segment, with the additional condition that each sample has sequence data for all segments
3. All other segments are subsampled to contain the same strains as used for HA in step 2

To enable this set the config parameter same_strains_per_segment to a truthy value. If you are calling snakemake directly you can add

--config 'same_strains_per_segment=True'

If you are using nextstrain build then add that to the end of the command (i.e. as a parameter which will be passed through to Snakemake).

Note that you may need to remove any existing data in results/ in order for snakemake to correctly regenerate the intermediate files.

Using locally ingested data (instead of downloading from S3)

Run the pipeline with --config 'local_ingest=True' to use the locally available files produced by the ingest pipeline (see ./ingest/README.md for details on how to run). Specifically, the files needed are ingest/results/metadata.tsv and ingest/results/sequences_{SEGMENT}.fasta.

To modify this build to work with your own data

Although the simplest way to generate a custom build is via the quickstart build, you are welcome to clone this repo and use it as a starting point for running your own, local builds if you'd like. The Nextstrain docs are a fantastic resource for getting started with the Nextstrain pipeline, and include some great tutorials to get you started. This build is slightly more complicated than other builds, and has a few custom functions in it to accommodate all the features on nextstrain.org, and makes use of wildcards for both subtypes and gene segments. If you'd like to adapt this full, non-simplified pipeline here to your own data (which you may want to do if you also want to annotate clades), you would need to make a few changes and additions:

1. Data is stored on a private S3 bucket

The phylogenetics pipeline starts by downloading data from a private S3 bucket. If you don't have credentials for this bucket you can run the build using the example data provided in this repository. Before running the build, copy the example sequences and metadata into the data/ directory like so:

mkdir -p data/
cp -r -v example_data/* data/

Then run the build with the test target, a H5N1 HA "all time" tree:

snakemake test_target

If you'd like to consistently run your own data, then you can place your fasta file in data. Alternatively, you can alter the Snakefile to remove references to S3 and add paths to your own files (see rules download_sequences and download_metadata).

2. clade labeling

If you'd like to run clade labeling, you will need to install LABEL yourself. This pipeline assumes that LABEL is located in avian-flu/flu-amd/, and should work if you install it into the avian-flu directory. If you do not need to label clades, then you can delete rule add_h5_clade, the function metadata_by_wildcards. You will need to make sure that all references to metadata in the pipeline are referencing metadata_subtype_segment, not metadata-with-clade_subtype_segment, which is generated by rule add_h5_clade and adds a new column to the metadata file with clade information.