snakemake-crispr-guides

---

A Snakemake workflow for the design of small guide RNAs (sgRNAs) for CRISPR applications.

• snakemake-crispr-guides
  • Usage
  • Workflow overview
  • Installation
    • Snakemake
  • Running the workflow
    • Input data
    • Starting the workflow
    • Parameters
    • Target type
    • Off-target scores
    • On-target scores
    • Strand specificity
  • Output
  • Authors
  • License
  • Contributions
  • References

Usage

The usage of this workflow is described in the Snakemake Workflow Catalog.

If you use this workflow in a paper, don't forget to give credits to the author(s) by citing the URL of this (original) repository and its DOI (see above).

Workflow overview

---

This workflow is a best-practice workflow for the automated generation of guide RNAs for CRISPR applications. It's main purpose is to provide a simple, efficient and easy-to-use framework to design thousands of guides simultaneously for CRISPR libraries from as little input as an organism's name/genome ID. For the manual design of single guides, users are instead referred to even simpler web resources such as Chop-Chop, CRISPick, or Cas-OFFinder/Cas-Designer.

This workflow relies to a large degree on the underlying Bioconductor package ecosystem crisprVerse, published in 2022 by:

Hoberecht, L., Perampalam, P., Lun, A. et al. A comprehensive Bioconductor ecosystem for the design of CRISPR guide RNAs across nucleases and technologies. Nat Commun 13, 6568 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34320-7.

The workflow is built using snakemake and consists of the following steps:

1. Obtain genome database in fasta and gff format (python, NCBI Datasets)
   1. Using automatic download from NCBI with a RefSeq ID
   2. Using user-supplied files
2. Find all possible guide RNAs for the given sequence, with many options for customization (R, crisprVerse)
3. Collect on-target and off-target scores (R, crisprVerse, Bowtie)
4. Filter and rank guide RNAs based on scores and return final list (R, crisprVerse)
5. Generate report with overview figures and statistics (R markdown)
6. Return report as HTML and PDF files (weasyprint)
7. Export module logs and versions

If you want to contribute, report issues, or suggest features, please get in touch on github.

Installation

Snakemake

Step 1: Install snakemake with conda, mamba, micromamba (or any another conda flavor). This step generates a new conda environment called snakemake-crispr-guides, which will be used to install all other dependencies.

conda create -c conda-forge -c bioconda -n snakemake-crispr-guides snakemake

Step 2: Activate conda environment with snakemake

source /path/to/conda/bin/activate
conda activate snakemake-crispr-guides

Alternatively, install snakemake using pip:

pip install snakemake

Or install snakemake globally from linux archives:

sudo apt install snakemake

Note:

All other dependencies for the workflow are automatically pulled as conda environments by snakemake, when running the workflow with the --use-conda parameter (recommended).

Running the workflow

Input data

The workflow requires the following input:

1. An NCBI Refseq ID, e.g. GCF_000006945.2. Find your genome assembly and corresponding ID on NCBI genomes
2. OR use a custom pair of *.fasta file and *.gff file that describe the genome of choice

Important requirements when using custom *.fasta and *.gff files:

• *.gff genome annotation must have the same chromosome/region name as the *.fasta file (example: NC_003197.2)
• *.gff genome annotation must have gene and CDS type annotation that is automatically parsed to extract transcripts
• *.gff genome annotation must have additional qualifiers Name=..., ID=..., and Parent=... for CDSs
• all chromosomes/regions in the *.gff genome annotation must be present in the *.fasta sequence
• but not all sequences in the *.fasta file need to have annotated genes in the *.gff file

Starting the workflow

To run the workflow from command line, change the working directory.

cd /path/to/snakemake-crispr-guides

Adjust options in the default config file config/config.yml. Before running the entire workflow, you can perform a dry run using:

snakemake --dry-run

To run the complete workflow with test files using conda, execute the following command. The definition of the number of compute cores is mandatory.

snakemake --cores 10 --sdm conda --directory .test

To run the workflow with singularity / apptainer, use:

snakemake --cores 10 --sdm conda apptainer --directory .test

To supply a custom config file and/or use options that override the defaults, use:

snakemake --cores 10 --sdm conda \
  --configfile 'config/my_config.yml' \
  --config option='input'

Parameters

This table lists all parameters that can be used to run the workflow.

parameter	type	details	default
GET_GENOME
database	string	one of ncbi, manual	ncbi
assembly	string	RefSeq ID	GCF_000006945.2
fasta	path	optional input	Null
gff	path	optional input	Null
gff_source_type	list	allowed source types in GFF file	'RefSeq': 'gene', ...
DESIGN_GUIDES
target_region	numeric	use subset of regions for testing	["NC_003277.2"]
target_type	string	specify targets for guide design (see below)	["target", "intergenic", "ntc"]
tss_window	numeric	upstream/downstream window around TSS	[0, 500]
tiling_window	numeric	window size for intergenic regions	1000
tiling_min_dist	numeric	min distance between TSS and intergenic region	0
circular	logical	is the genome circular?	False
canonical	logical	only canonical PAM sites are included	True
strands	string	target coding, template or both	both
spacer_length	numeric	desired length of guides	20
guide_aligner	string	one of biostrings, bowtie	biostrings
crispr_enzyme	string	CRISPR enzyme ID	SpCas9
score_methods	string	see crisprScore package	default scores are listed below
score_weights	numeric	opt. weights when calculating mean score	[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]
restriction_sites	string	sequences to omit in entire guide	Null
bad_seeds	string	sequences to omit in seed region	["ACCCA", "ATACT", "TGGAA"]
no_target_controls	numeric	number of non targeting guides (neg. controls)	100
FILTER_GUIDES
filter_best_per_gene	numeric	max number of guides to return per gene	10
filter_best_per_tile	numeric	max number of guides to return per ig/tile	10
filter_score_threshold	numeric	mean score to use as lower limit	Null
filter_multi_targets	logical	remove guides that perfectly match >1 target	True
filter_rna	logical	remove guides that target e.g. rRNA or tRNA	True
gc_content_range	numeric	range of allowed GC content	[30, 70]
fiveprime_linker	string	optionally add 5' linker to each guide	Null
threeprime_linker	string	optionally add 3' linker to each guide	Null
export_as_gff	logical	export result table to .gff file	True
export_as_fasta	logical	export result table to .fasta file	True
REPORT
show_examples	numeric	number of genes to show guide position	10
show_genomic_range	numeric	genome start and end pos to show tiling guides	[0, 50000]

Target type

One of the most important options is to specify the type of target with the target_type parameter. The pipeline can generate up to three different types of guide RNAs:

1. guides for targets - these are typically genes, promoters or other annotated genetic elements determined from the supplied GFF file. The pipeline will try to find the best guides by position and score targeting the defined window around the start of the gene/feature (parameter tss_window). The number of guides is specified with filter_best_per_gene.
2. guides for intergenic regions - for non-annotated regions (or in the absence of any targets), the pipeline attempts to design guide RNAs using a 'tiling' approach. This means that the supplied genome is subdivided into 'tiles' (bins) of width tiling_window, and the best guide RNAs per window are selected. The number of guides is specified with filter_best_per_tile.
3. guides not targeting anything - this type of guide RNAs is most useful as negative control, in order to gauge the effect of the genetic background on mutant selection without targeting a gene. These guides are random nucleotide sequences with the same length as the target guide RNAs. The no-target control guides are named NTC_<number> and exported in a separate table (results/filter_guides/guideRNAs_ntc.csv). Some very reduced checks are done for these guides, such as off-target binding. mMst on-target checks are omitted for these guides as they have no defined binding site, strand, or other typical guide properties.

The following figure gives a nice overview about the designed guide RNAs for the different types. The organism that was used is Salmonella typhimurium, the example data. Red: guides targeting the TSS window of genes. Yellow: guides targeting intergenic regions. Grey: annotated genes.

Off-target scores

The pipeline maps each guide RNA to the target genome and -by default- counts the number of alternative alignments with 1, 2, 3, or 4 mismatches. All guide RNAs that map to any other position including up to 4 allowed mismatches are removed. An exception to this rule is made for guides that perfectly match multiple targets when the filter_multi_targets is set to False (default: True). The reasoning behind this rule is that genomes often contain duplicated genes/targets, and the default but sometimes undesired behavior is to remove all guides targeting the two or more duplicates. If set to False, these guides will not be removed and duplicated genes will be targeted even if they are located at different sites.

On-target scores

The list of available on-target scores in the R crisprScore package is larger than the different scores included by default. It is important to note that the computation of some scores does not necessarily make sense for the design of every CRISPR library. For example, several scores were obtained from analysis of Cas9 cutting efficiency in human cell lines. For such scores it is questionable if they are useful for the design of a different type of library, for example a dCas9 CRISPR inhibition library for bacteria.

Another good reason to exclude some scores are the computational resources they require. Particularly deep learning-derived scores are calculated by machine learning models that require both a lot of extra resources in terms of disk space (downloaded and installed via basilisk and conda environments) and processing power (orders of magnitude longer computation time).

Users can look up all available scores on the R crisprScore github page and decide which ones should be included. In addition, the default behavior of the pipeline is to compute an average score and select the top N guides based on it. The average score is the weighted mean of all single scores and the score_weights can be defined in the config/config.yml file. If a score should be excluded from the ranking, it's weight can simply be set to zero.

The default scores are:

• ruleset1, ruleset3, crisprater, and crisprscan from the crisprScore package
• tssdist as an additional score representing the relative distance to the promoter. Only relevant for CRISRPi repression
• genrich as an additional score representing the G enrichment in the -4 to -14 nt region of a spacer (Miao & Jahn et al., 2023). Only relevant for CRISPRi repression

Strand specificity

The strand specificity is important for some CRISPR applications. In contrast to the crisprDesign package, functions were added to allow the design of guide RNAs that target either both strands, or just the coding (non-template) strand, or the template strand. This can be defined with the strands parameter in the config file.

• For CRISPRi (inhibition) experiments, the literature recommends to target the coding strand for the CDS or both strands for the promoter (Larson et al., Nat Prot, 2013)
• this pipeline will automatically filter guides for the chosen strand
• for example, if only guides for the coding (non-template) strand are desired, genes on the "+" strand will be targeted with reverse-complement guides ("-"), and genes on the "-" strand with "+" guides.

Output

The workflow generates the following output from its modules:

get_genome

• genome.fasta: Supplied or downloaded fasta file
• genome.gff: Supplied or downloaded gff file
• log.txt: Log file for this module

design_guides

• guideRNAs_target.RData: GuideSet with all designed guide RNAs for genes
• guideRNAs_intergenic.RData: GuideSet with all designed guide RNAs for intergenic regions
• guideRNAs_ntc.RData: GuideSet with all designed non-targeting control guide RNAs
• log.txt: Log file for this module

filter_guides

• guideRNAs_target.csv (.gff) (.fasta): Table with all remaining guide RNAs targeting genes after filtering
• guideRNAs_intergenic.csv (.gff) (.fasta): Table with all remaining guide RNAs targeting intergenic regions after filtering
• guideRNAs_ntc.csv (.gff) (.fasta): GuideSet with all quality filtered non-targeting control guide RNAs
• guideRNAs_target_failed.csv: Table with genes/targets where no guide RNAs were designed. Typical reasons for failure are very short target sites, or overlapping annotation with other genes/targets such that candidate guide RNAs would target multiple annotated genes.
• <target>_log.txt: Log file for filtering the respective target type

report

• report.html: HTML report with summary statistics and other information about the designed library
• report.pdf: PDF version of the HTML report. Does not contain table previews
• <report>_log.txt: Log file for making the respective report

Authors

• The custom snakemake, R, R markdown, and python scripts were written by Michael Jahn, PhD
• Affiliation: Max-Planck-Unit for the Science of Pathogens (MPUSP), Berlin, Germany
• Visit the MPUSP github page at https://github.com/MPUSP for info on this workflow and other projects
• Visit the author's github page at https://github.com/m-jahn for info on other projects

License

The code in this repository is published with the MIT license, that means:

• You are free to use this software for scientific or commercial purposes
• You are free to copy, distribute, and modify the software
• On the condition that the license must be included in all instances of this software
• The software is provided "as is", without any warranty for its use
• All external software obtained by installation of this software is licensed by its own terms and is not covered by this license

Contributions

• Contributions to this package are welcome!
• Please get in touch on github by filing a new issue with your suggestion
• After initial discussion, you are welcome to submit your pull request

References

• Essential tools are linked in the top section of this document
• The core of this workflow is the Bioconductor package crisprVerse:

Hoberecht, L., Perampalam, P., Lun, A. et al. A comprehensive Bioconductor ecosystem for the design of CRISPR guide RNAs across nucleases and technologies. Nat Commun 13, 6568 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34320-7.