Accelerating RepeatClassifier Based on Spark and Greedy Algorithm with Dynamic Upper Boundary

1Transposable elements (TEs) represent quantitatively important components of genome sequences (e.g. 90% of the wheat genome), and play important roles in genome organization and evolution. The promotion of unsupervised annotation of transposable elements is of great significance. Classification is an important step in TE annotation, which summarize the information about the type or mechanism for the raw repetitive sequences. RepeatClassifier is a basic homology-based classification tool which compares the TE families to both the Repeat Protein Database (DB) and libraries of RepeatMasker. Unfortunately, RepeatClassifier is inefficient and takes a few days to classify the repetitive sequences of large genomes. Hence, we proposed Spark-based RepeatClassifier (SRC) which uses Greedy Algorithm with Dynamic Upper Boundary (GDUB) for data division and load balancing, and Spark to improve the parallelism of RepeatClassifier. Experimental results show that SRC can not only ensure the same level of accuracy as that of RepeatClassifier, but also achieve 42-88 times of acceleration compared to RepeatClassifier. At the same time, SRC shows excellent parallel performance when dealing with input datasets with unbalanced length distribution. SRC is publicly available at https://github.com/BioinformaticsCSU/SRC.