Back

PLAGUE: Improved confidence plasmid reconstruction from short read assemblies

Kozubal, K.; Dube, F.; Mujkic, A.; Joffre, E.; Guy, L.; Wang, H.; Hugerth, L. W.

2026-07-10 microbiology
10.64898/2026.07.10.737741 bioRxiv
Show abstract

As the vast majority of archival data is short-read based, reliable strategies for detecting and classifying plasmids out of these data are still needed. A widely adopted solution for binning plasmids with rich contextual data is MOB-Suite. However, a large portion of the available data has low coverage and results in fragmented assemblies. Under these circumstances, MOB-Suite delivers a high number of false positives, leading to wasteful follow-up experiments. To improve the reliability of MOB-Suite, while retaining and enriching its biological contextual output, we have developed PLAGUE. PLAGUE is a fast and low-memory consumption post-processing tool for MOB-Suite outputs, relying on checks of circularity, reads spanning the gap between the 3 and 5 ends and total coverage of the plasmid candidate. PLAGUE can reduce the number of false positives in MOB-Suite outputs by over 30%, while retaining almost full sensitivity. It is fully containerized and easy to use in clusters as well as locally.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

1
Genome Biology
637 papers in training set
Top 0.6%
13.0%
2
GigaScience
212 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
12.0%
3
Bioinformatics
1204 papers in training set
Top 2%
12.0%
4
Nature Communications
5641 papers in training set
Top 15%
12.0%
5
Nucleic Acids Research
1281 papers in training set
Top 3%
6.8%
50% of probability mass above
6
Scientific Reports
3612 papers in training set
Top 26%
4.1%
7
Genome Research
468 papers in training set
Top 2%
3.3%
8
PLOS ONE
5266 papers in training set
Top 37%
3.3%
9
PLOS Computational Biology
1863 papers in training set
Top 13%
2.1%
10
Molecular Biology and Evolution
542 papers in training set
Top 3%
2.1%
11
Trends in Biotechnology
12 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
1.7%
12
Peer Community Journal
281 papers in training set
Top 3%
1.7%
13
Microbial Genomics
225 papers in training set
Top 2%
1.3%
14
Nature Computational Science
55 papers in training set
Top 0.9%
1.3%
15
BMC Genomics
406 papers in training set
Top 6%
1.1%
16
PeerJ
308 papers in training set
Top 8%
1.1%
17
iScience
1154 papers in training set
Top 25%
1.1%
18
NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics
242 papers in training set
Top 3%
1.1%
19
Communications Biology
993 papers in training set
Top 25%
1.0%
20
Cell Reports Methods
165 papers in training set
Top 4%
0.8%
21
BMC Bioinformatics
457 papers in training set
Top 6%
0.8%
22
Methods
34 papers in training set
Top 0.7%
0.8%
23
Briefings in Bioinformatics
354 papers in training set
Top 7%
0.8%
24
Nature Biotechnology
172 papers in training set
Top 4%
0.8%
25
Nature Methods
385 papers in training set
Top 7%
0.6%