RSYD-BASIC: a bioinformatic pipeline for routine sequence analysis and data processing of bacterial isolates for clinical microbiology.

Abstract

Background. Whole-genome sequencing of bacterial isolates is increasingly becoming routine in clinical microbiology; however, subsequent analysis often needs to be started by a bioinformatician even for comprehensive pipelines. To increase the robustness of our workflow and free up bioinformatician work hours for development and advanced analysis, we aimed to produce a robust, customizable bioinformatic pipeline for bacterial genome assembly and routine analysis results that could be initiated by non-bioinformaticians. Results. We introduce the RSYD-BASIC pipeline for bacterial isolate sequence analysis and provide a demonstration of its functionality with two datasets composed of publicly available sequences, in which comparable results are obtained in most cases. In some instances, the pipeline provided additional information, corresponding to in vitro results where these could be obtained. In routine use at our department, the pipeline has already yielded clinically relevant results, allowing us to type a variety of bacterial pathogens isolated in our clinical laboratory. We also demonstrate how RSYD-BASIC results aided in disproving a potential outbreak. Conclusion. With the RSYD-BASIC pipeline, we present a configurable reads-to-results analysis pipeline operated by non-expert users that greatly eases the investigation of potential outbreaks by expert end users. Results obtained with publicly available sequences show comparable performance to the original methods, while underlining the importance of standardized methods.