Embracing firefly flash pattern variability with data-driven species classification.

Many nocturnally active fireflies use precisely timed bioluminescent patterns to identify mates, making them especially vulnerable to light pollution. As urbanization continues to brighten the night sky, firefly populations are under constant stress, and close to half of the species are now threatened. Ensuring the survival of firefly biodiversity depends on a large-scale conservation effort to monitor and protect thousands of populations. While species can be identified by their flash patterns, current methods require expert measurement and manual classification and are infeasible given the number and geographic distribution of fireflies. Here we present the application of a recurrent neural network (RNN) for accurate automated firefly flash pattern classification. Using recordings from commodity cameras, we can extract flash trajectories of individuals within a swarm and classify their species with an accuracy of approximately seventy percent. In addition to its potential in population monitoring, automated classification provides the means to study firefly behavior at the population level. We employ the classifier to measure and characterize the variability within and between swarms, unlocking a new dimension of their behavior. Our method is open source, and deployment in community science applications could revolutionize our ability to monitor and understand firefly populations.

Searching thousands of genomes to classify somatic and novel structural variants using STIX.

Structural variants are associated with cancers and developmental disorders, but challenges with estimating population frequency remain a barrier to prioritizing mutations over inherited variants. In particular, variability in variant calling heuristics and filtering limits the use of current structural variant catalogs. We present STIX, a method that, instead of relying on variant calls, indexes and searches the raw alignments from thousands of samples to enable more comprehensive allele frequency estimation.

Samplot: a platform for structural variant visual validation and automated filtering.

Visual validation is an important step to minimize false-positive predictions from structural variant (SV) detection. We present Samplot, a tool for creating images that display the read depth and sequence alignments necessary to adjudicate purported SVs across samples and sequencing technologies. These images can be rapidly reviewed to curate large SV call sets. Samplot is applicable to many biological problems such as SV prioritization in disease studies, analysis of inherited variation, or de novo SV review. Samplot includes a machine learning package that dramatically decreases the number of false positives without human review. Samplot is available at https://github.com/ryanlayer/samplot .

Combining signal and sequence to detect RNA polymerase initiation in ATAC-seq data.

The assay for transposase-accessible chromatin followed by sequencing (ATAC-seq) is an inexpensive protocol for measuring open chromatin regions. ATAC-seq is also relatively simple and requires fewer cells than many other high-throughput sequencing protocols. Therefore, it is tractable in numerous settings where other high throughput assays are challenging to impossible. Hence it is important to understand the limits of what can be inferred from ATAC-seq data. In this work, we leverage ATAC-seq to predict the presence of nascent transcription. Nascent transcription assays are the current gold standard for identifying regions of active transcription, including markers for functional transcription factor (TF) binding. We combine mapped short reads from ATAC-seq with the underlying peak sequence, to determine regions of active transcription genome-wide. We show that a hybrid signal/sequence representation classified using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) can identify these regions across different cell types.