QuasiFlow: a Nextflow pipeline for analysis of NGS-based HIV-1 drug resistance data

Abstract

Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) enables reliable detection of resistance mutations in minority variants of Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1). There is paucity of evidence for the association of minority resistance to treatment failure and this requires evaluation. However, the tools for analyzing HIV-1 drug resistance testing data are mostly web-based which requires uploading data to webservers. This is a challenge for laboratories with internet connectivity issues and instances with restricted data transfer across networks. We present QuasiFlow, a pipeline for reproducible analysis of NGS-based HIVDR testing data across different computing environments. Since QuasiFlow entirely depends on command line tools and a local copy of the reference database, it eliminates challenges associated with uploading HIV-1 NGS data onto webservers. The pipeline takes raw sequence reads in FASTQ format as input and generates a user-friendly report in PDF/HTML format. The drug resistance scores obtained using QuasiFlow were 100% and 99.12% identical to those obtained using web based HIVdb program and HyDRA web respectively at a mutation detection threshold of 20%. Availability and implementation QuasiFlow and corresponding documentation are publicly available at https://github.com/AlfredUg/QuasiFlow. The pipeline is implemented in Nextflow and requires regular updating of the Stanford HIV drug resistance interpretation algorithm. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics Advances online.