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AmrPlusPlus is an Easy to Use App that Identifies and Characterizes Resistance Genes within Sequence Data

Warning

This documentation is for AMR++ version 1.1. Click here for the latest docs.

AmrPlusPlus is a Galaxy-based metagenomics pipeline that is intuitive and easy to use. The pipeline takes advantage of current and new tools to help identify and characterize resistance genes within metagenomic sequence data.

The pipeline can be used under a local instance of Galaxy 1,2,3 and installed via Galaxy's Main Tool Shed. It is also available as a Galaxy-based Docker Image, using base images developed by Björn Grüning at the University of Freiburg.

We recommend checking out his Github repository. for other Galaxy tools and workflows.

What's Included in the Installation?

AmrPlusPlus consist of:

Together, these tools make up the entire AmrPlusPlus pipeline. Only three inputs are required to run the pipeline: a single or paired fastq dataset, a resistance database (fasta), and a host genome (fasta).

What is the goal of AmrPlusPlus?

The goal of many metagenomics studies is to characterize the content and relative abundance of sequences of interest from the DNA of a given sample or set of samples. You may want to know what is contained within your sample or how abundant a given sequence is relative to another.

Often, metagenomics is performed when the answer to these questions must be obtained for a large number of targets where techniques like multiplex PCR and other targeted methods would be too cumbersome to perform. AmrPlusPlus can process the raw data from the sequencer, identify the fragments of DNA, and count them. It also provides a count of the polymorphisms that occur in each DNA fragment with respect to the reference database.

Additionally, you may want to know if the depth of your sequencing (how many reads you obtain that are on target) is high enough to identify rare organisms (organisms with low abundance relative to others) in your population. This is referred to as rarefaction and is calculated by randomly subsampling your sequence data at intervals between 0% and 100% in order to determine how many targets are found at each depth. AmrPlusPlus can perform this analysis as well.

As a result of AmrPlusPlus, you will obtain count files for each sample that can be combined into a count matrix and analyzed using any statistical and mathematical techniques that can operate on a matrix of observations.

For an example of a study where we have performed this using metagenomic sequencing data, you can read the open access manuscript entitled “Resistome diversity in cattle and the environment decreases during beef production”.