The CFSAN SNP Pipeline is a Python-based system for the production of SNP matrices from sequence data used in the phylogenetic analysis of pathogenic organisms sequenced from samples of interest to food safety.

The SNP Pipeline was developed by the United States Food and Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

• Free software: See license below.
• Documentation: http://snp-pipeline.readthedocs.io/en/latest/readme.html
• Source Code: https://github.com/CFSAN-Biostatistics/snp-pipeline
• PyPI Distribution: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/snp-pipeline

The CFSAN SNP Pipeline uses reference-based alignments to create a matrix of SNPs for a given set of samples. The process generally starts off by finding a reference that is appropriate for the samples of interest, and collecting the sample sequence data into an appropriate directory structure. The SNP pipeline can then be used to perform the alignment of the samples to the reference. Once the sample sequences are aligned, a list of SNP positions is generated. The list of SNP positions is then used in combination with alignments of the samples to the reference sequence to call SNPs. The SNP calls are organized into a matrix containing (only) the SNP calls for all of the sequences.

This software was developed with the objective of creating high quality SNP matrices for sequences from closely-related pathogens, e.g., different samples of Salmonella enteriditis from an outbreak investigation. The focus on closely related sequences means that this code is not suited for the analysis of relatively distantly related organisms, where there is not a single reference sequence appropriate for all the organisms for which an analysis is desired.

The CFSAN SNP Pipeline is written in Python with some embedded bash snippets. The code is designed to be straightforward to install and run from the command line. A configuration file supports customizing the behavior of the pipeline. In situations where additional customization is desired, the code is not highly complex and should be easy to modify as necessary.

Examples of using the code are provided. These examples serve as both unit tests, and as examples that can be modified to work on other data sets of interest.

Please cite the publication below:

Davis S, Pettengill JB, Luo Y, Payne J, Shpuntoff A, Rand H, Strain E. (2015) CFSAN SNP Pipeline: an automated method for constructing SNP matrices from next-generation sequence data. PeerJ Computer Science 1:e20 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.20

See the LICENSE.txt file included in the SNP Pipeline distribution.