Basic Info

Combining sequence similarity matching and machine learning classification models of genetic characteristics, predict active prophages from whole-genome sequences

More Details

Prophages are phages in lysogeny that are integrated into, and replicated as part of, the host bacterial genome. These mobile elements can have tremendous impact on their bacterial hosts’ genomes and phenotypes, which may lead to strain emergence and diversification, increased virulence or antibiotic resistance. 

What's New

PhiSpy was developed based on seven distinctive characteristics of prophages, i.e. protein length, transcription strand directionality, customized AT and GC skew, the abundance of unique phage words, phage insertion points and the similarity of phage proteins. The first five characteristics are capable of identifying prophages without any sequence similarity with known phage genes. PhiSpy locates prophages by ranking genomic regions enriched in distinctive phage traits.

Additional Information

Related links:

https://github.com/linsalrob/PhiSpy

Literature

Akhter S, Aziz RK, Edwards RA. PhiSpy: a novel algorithm for finding prophages in bacterial genomes that combines similarity- and composition-based strategies. Nucleic Acids Res. 2012;40(16):e126. doi:10.1093/nar/gks406