Welcome to the Sei framework repository! Sei is a framework for systematically predicting sequence regulatory activities and applying sequence information to human genetics data. Sei provides a global map from any sequence to regulatory activities, as represented by 40 sequence classes, and each sequence class integrates predictions for 21,907 chromatin profiles (transcription factor, histone marks, and chromatin accessibility profiles across a wide range of cell types).

Sei is now published, you can read the manuscript here.

This repository can be used to run the Sei model and get the Sei chromatin profile and sequence class predictions for input sequences or variants.

We also provide information and instructions for how to train the Sei deep learning sequence model.

Requirements

Please create a new Anaconda environment specifically for running Sei via Selene. Sei requires Python 3.6+ and Python packages PyTorch (>=1.0), Selene (>=0.5.0), and docopt. You can follow PyTorch installation steps here and Selene installation steps here. Install docopt with pip or conda (e.g. conda install docopt)

Setup

Please download and extract the trained Sei model and resources (containing hg19 and hg38 FASTA files) .tar.gz files before proceeding:

sh ./download_data.sh

• Sei model
• Sei framework resources directory

Chromatin profile prediction

1. The following scripts can be used to obtain Sei deep learning predictions for 21,907 chromatin profiles (please run on a GPU node): (1) 1_sequence_prediction.py (and corresponding bash script, 1_sequence_prediction.sh): Accepts either a BED (.bed) or FASTA (.fa, .fasta) file as input and makes sequence predictions.

Example usage:

sh 1_sequence_prediction.sh <input-file> <genome> <output-dir> --cuda

Arguments:

• <input-file>: BED or FASTA input file
• <genome>: If you use a BED file as input, this must be either hg19 or hg38 as these are the FASTA reference genome files we provide by default. If you are using a FASTA file, you can specify whichever genome version you are using for logging purposes.
• <output-dir>: Path to output directory (will be created if does not exist)
• --cuda: Optional, use this flag if running on a CUDA-enabled GPU.

You can run python 1_sequence_prediction.py -h for the full documentation of inputs.

2. 1_variant_effect_prediction.py (and corresponding bash script, 1_variant_effect_prediction.sh): Accepts a VCF file as input and makes variant effect predictions.

Example usage:

sh 1_variant_effect_prediction.sh <vcf> <hg> <output-dir> [--cuda]

Arguments:

• <vcf>: VCF file
• <hg>: Either hg19 or hg38
• <output-dir>: Path to output directory (will be created if does not exist)
• --cuda: Optional, use this flag if running on a CUDA-enabled GPU.

You can run python 1_variant_effect_prediction.py -h for the full documentation of inputs.

These scripts will output the chromatin profile predictions as HDF5 files to a subdirectory chromatin-profiles-hdf5 in your specified output directory.

See example_slurm_scripts/1_example_seqpred.slurm_gpu.sh and example_slurm_scripts/1_example_vep.slurm_gpu.sh for sample scripts for running chromatin profile prediction on SLURM.

Sequence class prediction

Sequence class scores can be obtained from Sei chromatin profile predictions. There are 2 types of scores that can be computed:

• Raw sequence class scores: For sequences only. Raw sequence class scores are projection scores of chromatin profile predictions projected on the unit-length vectors representing each sequence class. This is an intermediate score originally developed for variant score prediction and is made available for use for developing downstream analyses or applications, such as using them as a sequence representation. Note our manuscript uses the Louvain community clustering, whole-genome sequence class annotation of the human genome whenever we apply sequence classes to reference genome sequences, and we encourage the use of these annotations over the raw sequence class scores when possible. Sequence class annotations for hg38 and hg19 (lifted over from hg38) are available for download from this Zenodo record.
• Sequence class variant effect score (nucleosome-occupancy-adjusted): For variants only. Computed as alt - ref of the raw sequence class scores adjusted for nucleosome occupancy, i.e. histone normalized. To better represent predicted variant effects on histone marks, it is necessary to normalize for nucleosome occupancy (for example, a LoF mutation near the TSS can decrease H3K4me3 modification level while increasing nucleosome occupancy, resulting in an overall increase in observed H3K4me3 quantity). Therefore, for variant effect computation, we used the sum of all histone profile predictions as an approximation to nucleosome occupancy and adjusted all histone mark predictions to remove the impact of nucleosome occupancy change (nonhistone mark predictions are unchanged). See manuscript methods for more detail.

Sequence prediction

Example usage:

sh 2_raw_sc_score.sh <input-file> <output-dir>

Arguments:

• <input-file>: Path to the Sei _predictions.h5 file.
• <output-dir>: Path to output directory (will be created if does not exist)

You can run python 2_raw_sc_score.py -h for the full documentation of inputs.

Variant effect prediction

Example usage:

sh 2_varianteffect_sc_score.sh <ref-fp> <alt-fp> <output-dir> [--no-tsv]

Arguments:

• <ref-fp>: Path to the Sei .ref_predictions.h5 file.
• <alt-fp>: Path to the Sei .alt_predictions.h5 file.
• <output-dir>: Path to output directory (will be created if does not exist)
• --no-tsv: Optional flag if you'd like to suppress the outputted TSV files (see the next section 'Example variant effect prediction run' for more information).

You can run python 2_varianteffect_sc_score.py -h for the full documentation of inputs.

Example variant effect prediction run:

We provide test.vcf (hg19 coordinates) so you can try running this command once you have installed all the requirements. Additionally, example_slurm_scripts contains example scripts with the same expected input arguments if you need to submit your job to a compute cluster.

Example command run on GPU:

sh 1_variant_effect_prediction.sh test.vcf hg19 ./test_outputs --cuda

Example command run on CPU:

sh 2_varianteffect_sc_score.sh ./test_outputs/chromatin-profiles-hdf5/test.ref_predictions.h5 \
                               ./test_outputs/chromatin-profiles-hdf5/test.alt_predictions.h5 \
                               ./test_outputs

You can add --no-tsv to this command to suppress the TSV file outputs if you are comfortable working with HDF5 and NPY files. Note you will need to match the rows to the test_row_labels.txt file in ./test_outputs/chromatin-profiles.hdf5 and the columns to ./model/target.names (chromatin profile HDF5 files) and ./model/seqclass.names (sequence class NPY file).

Expected outputs:

• chromatin-profiles-hdf5: directory containing HDF5 Sei predictions files and the corresponding test_row_labels.txt file.
• sorted.test.chromatin_profile_diffs.tsv: chromatin profile prediction TSV file (Note: output file will be compressed if input has >10000 variants), sorted by max absolute sequence class score.
• sorted.test.sequence_class_scores.tsv: sequence class prediction TSV file, sorted by max absolute sequence class scores.
• test.sequence_class_scores.npy: sequence class scores NPY file, note this is NOT sorted and will be ordered in the same way as chromatin-profiles-hdf5/test_row_labels.txt file.

Sequence classes

Sequence classes are defined based on 30 million sequences tiling the genome and thus cover a wide range of sequence activities. To help interpretation, we grouped sequence classes into groups including P (Promoter), E (Enhancer), CTCF (CTCF-cohesin binding), TF (TF binding), PC (Polycomb-repressed), HET (Heterochromatin), TN (Transcription), and L (Low Signal) sequence classes. Please refer to our manuscript for a more detailed description of the sequence classes.

Training

The configuration file and script for running train is under the train directory. To run Sei deep learning sequence model training, you will need GPU computing capability (we run training on 4x Tesla V100 GPUs connected with NVLink).

The training data is available here should be downloaded and extracted into the train directory.

NOTE: because the Sei training data contains processed files from the Cistrome Project, please first agree to the Cistrome Project terms of usage before downloading the data:

cd ./train
sh ./download_data.sh  # in the train directory

The Sei training configuration YAML file is provided as the train/train.yml file. You can read more about the Selene command-line interface and configuration file formatting here.

You must use Selene version >0.5.0 to train this model (release notes).

We also provide an example SLURM script train.sh for submitting a training job to a cluster.

Help

Please post in the Github issues or e-mail Kathy Chen (chen.kathleenm@gmail.com) with any questions about the repository, requests for more data, etc.

License

If you are interested in obtaining the software for commercial use, please contact Office of Technology Licensing, Princeton University (Laurie Tzodikov 609-258-7256, tzodikov@princeton.edu).

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