Genealogies Unbiased By recomBinations In Nucleotide Sequences
Gubbins (Genealogies Unbiased By recomBinations In Nucleotide Sequences) is an algorithm that iteratively identifies loci containing elevated densities of base substitutions, which are marked as recombinations, while concurrently constructing a phylogeny based on the putative point mutations outside of these regions. Simulations demonstrate the algorithm generates highly accurate reconstructions under realistic models of short-term bacterial evolution, and can be run in only a few hours on alignments of hundreds of bacterial genome sequences.
Before starting your analysis, please have a look at the Gubbins webpage, manual, tutorial, plotting advice and/or publication.
Phylogenetic software:
Python modules:
- Biopython (>1.59),
- DendroPy (>=4.0)
- Scipy
- Numpy
- Multiprocessing
- Numba
See environment.yml for details. These are in addition to standard build environment tools (e.g. python >=3.8, pip3, make, autoconf, libtool, gcc, check, etc...). There are a number of ways to install Gubbins and details are provided below. If you encounter an issue when installing Gubbins please contact your local system administrator.
Install conda and enable the bioconda channels. This can be done using the normal command line (Linux), with Terminal (OSX) or the Powershell (Windows versions >=10).
conda config --add channels r
conda config --add channels defaults
conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda config --add channels bioconda
conda install gubbins
Gubbins has been packaged by the Debian Med team and is trivial to install using apt.
sudo apt-get install gubbins
Install the dependencies and include them in your PATH. Clone or download the source code from GitHub and run the following commands to install Gubbins:
autoreconf -i
./configure [--prefix=$PREFIX]
make
[sudo] make install
cd python
[sudo] python3 -m pip install [--prefix=$PREFIX] .
Use sudo to install Gubbins system-wide. If you don't have the permissions, run configure with a prefix to install Gubbins in your home directory.
The easiest way to install the latest version of the code from this repository is to set up a conda environment with the packages needed for installation, then remove gubbins:
conda create -c bioconda -n gubbins_git gubbins python=3.9
conda activate gubbins_git
conda install -c conda-forge libtool autoconf-archive automake pkg-config check pytest
conda remove --force gubbins
Then download and install the repository in the same environment:
git clone https://github.com/nickjcroucher/gubbins
cd gubbins
autoreconf -i
chmod x configure
./configure --prefix=$CONDA_PREFIX
make
sudo make install
cd python
python3 -m pip install .
You may encounter an issue with clang versions not being able to link to library files during make check. If you have installed into a conda environment called gubbins_env, this can be solved with the command:
FILES=`ls -l1 $CONDA_PREFIX/lib/clang/*/lib/darwin/*`; for clang_dir in $(ls -d1 $CONDA_PREFIX/lib/clang/*); do if [[ ! -d "$clang_dir/lib/darwin" ]]; then mkdir -p $clang_dir/lib/darwin; for clang_file in $(echo $FILES); do ln -s $clang_file $clang_dir/lib/darwin/; done; fi; done
Gubbins can be run through the Powershell in Windows versions >=10. We have also created a virtual machine which has all of the software setup, along with the test datasets from the paper. It is based on Bio-Linux 8. You need to first install VirtualBox, then load the virtual machine, using the 'File -> Import Appliance' menu option. The root password is 'manager'.
- ftp://ftp.sanger.ac.uk/pub/pathogens/pathogens-vm/pathogens-vm.latest.ova
The test can be run from the top level directory:
make check
To run Gubbins with default settings:
run_gubbins.py [FASTA alignment]
Information on further options can be found in the manual.
Gubbins is free software, licensed under GPLv2.
There is no specific support for development or maintenance of Gubbins. However, we will try to help you out if you report any issues about usage of the software to the issues page.
Version 3 incorporates a number of features that were explicitly requested by users (e.g. plotting functions), improved the algorithm's accuracy (e.g. using joint ancestral reconstruction) and were commonly used in published analyses (e.g. using IQTREE2 for phylogeny construction).
Future development will prioritise:
- More efficient phylogenetic processing with modern python libraries
- Parallelisation of recombination searches
- Faster sequence reconstruction through hardware acceleration
- Extension of existing analyses using phylogenetic placement
If you believe there are other improvements that could be added, please describe them on the issues page and tag the suggestion as an "enhancement".
If you use this software please cite: Croucher N. J., Page A. J., Connor T. R., Delaney A. J., Keane J. A., Bentley S. D., Parkhill J., Harris S.R. "Rapid phylogenetic analysis of large samples of recombinant bacterial whole genome sequences using Gubbins". doi:10.1093/nar/gku1196, Nucleic Acids Research, 2014.
For more information on this software see the Gubbins webpage.
From version 1.3.5 (25/6/15) to version 1.4.6 (29/2/16) trees were not midpoint rerooted by default. This does not have any effect on the recombination detection, but the output trees may not look as expected. Users are advised to upgrade to the latest version.
From version 3.0.0 onwards, Gubbins will use joint ancestral reconstructions with a modified version of pyjar by default. Version 2 used marginal ancestral reconstruction with RAxML; this is still available in version 3, using the --mar flag (IQtree can also be used for reconstruction in version >3.0.0). This may useful in cases where memory use is limiting. Version 1 used joint ancestral reconstruction with fastML.