remove.lineage

The remove.lineage command reads a taxonomy file and a taxon and generates a new file that contains only the sequences not containing that taxon. You may also include either a fasta, name, group, list, count or align.report file to this command and mothur will generate new files for each of those that contains only the sequences not containing that taxon. To complete this tutorial, you are encouraged to obtain the abrecovery dataset.

Special note

When running remove.lineage in command_line_mode, you must wrap your taxon in quotes so mothur knows to ignore the ; characters.

Example: ./mothur "#remove.lineage(taxonomy=abrecovery.silva.taxonomy, taxon='Bacteria;Firmicutes;');"

Default Settings

To run remove.lineage, you must provide the taxonomy or constaxonomy file and taxon. The command will generate a *.pick.* file.

Running with a taxonomy file

To generate an taxonomy file, let’s first run classify.seqs:

mothur > classify.seqs(fasta=abrecovery.fasta, template=silva.nogap.fasta, taxonomy=silva.bacteria.silva.tax)
mothur > remove.lineage(taxonomy=abrecovery.silva.taxonomy, taxon=Bacteria;Firmicutes;)

This generates abrecovery.silva.pick.taxonomy a file containing the 136 sequences NOT from Bacteria;Firmicutes;

You can remove sequences from multiple taxons by separating them with dashes. Example:

 mothur > remove.lineage(taxonomy=abrecovery.silva.taxonomy, taxon=Bacteria;Firmicutes;-Bacteria;Bacteroidetes;)

This generates abrecovery.silva.pick.taxonomy a file containing the 55 sequences NOT from Bacteria;Firmicutes; or Bacteria;Bacteroidetes;

You may enter your taxons with confidence scores, doing so will get only those sequences that belong to the taxonomy and whose confidence scores is above the scores you give.

mothur > classify.seqs(fasta=abrecovery.fasta, template=silva.nogap.fasta, taxonomy=silva.bacteria.silva.tax)
mothur > get.lineage(taxonomy=abrecovery.silva.taxonomy, taxon=Bacteria(100);Firmicutes(90);)

This generates abrecovery.silva.pick.taxonomy a file containing the 240 sequences, removing sequences from Bacteria;Firmicutes whose confidence scores are below 100 for Bacteria and below 90 for Firmicutes.

Running with a constaxonomy file

First we need to find the consensus taxonomies for each OTU with the classify.otu command:

mothur > classify.otu(list=final.an.list, name=final.names, taxonomy=final.taxonomy)
mothur > remove.lineage(constaxonomy=final.an.0.03.cons.taxonomy, list=final.an.list, taxon='Bacteria(100);Firmicutes(100);', label=0.03)

This generates final.an.0.03.pick.list containing the 207 OTUs NOT classified to Bacteria;Firmicutes;.

name option

To use the name option, follow this example:

mothur > remove.lineage(taxonomy=abrecovery.silva.taxonomy, taxon=Bacteria;Firmicutes;, name=abrecovery.names)

This generates the file abrecovery.pick.names, which contains only the names of sequences NOT from Bacteria;Firmicutes;

count option

The count file is similar to the name file in that it is used to represent the number of duplicate sequences for a given representative sequence. It can also contain group information.

mothur > remove.lineage(taxonomy=abrecovery.silva.taxonomy, taxon=Bacteria;Firmicutes;, count=abrecovery.count_table)

dups

The dups parameter is only be used in tandem with a namefile. By default dups is true, so if any sequence in a specific line in the name file is in your taxon, then all sequences in that line will be removed. This is especially useful when used with the groupfile, since for most commands your files can contain only the unique sequences, but the groupfile need to contain all the sequences in your namefile.

group option

To use the group option, follow this example:

mothur > remove.lineage(taxonomy=abrecovery.silva.taxonomy, taxon=Bacteria;Firmicutes;, group=abrecovery.groups)

This generates the file abrecovery.pick.groups, which contains only sequences NOT from Bacteria;Firmicutes;

fasta option

To use the fasta option, follow this example:

mothur > remove.lineage(taxonomy=abrecovery.silva.taxonomy, taxon=Bacteria;Firmicutes;, fasta=abrecovery.fasta)

This generates the file abrecovery.pick.fasta, which contains only sequences NOT from Bacteria;Firmicutes;

alignreport option

To use the alignreport option, follow this example:

mothur > remove.lineage(taxonomy=abrecovery.silva.taxonomy, taxon=Bacteria;Firmicutes;, alignreport=abrecovery.align.report)

This generates the file abrecovery.pick.align.report, which contains only sequences NOT from Bacteria;Firmicutes;

list option

To use the list option, follow this example:

mothur > remove.lineage(taxonomy=abrecovery.silva.taxonomy, taxon=Bacteria;Firmicutes;, list=abrecovery.fn.list)

This generates the file abrecovery.fn.pick.list, which contains only sequences NOT from Bacteria;Firmicutes;

constaxonomy && shared && list

If you provide a constaxonomy file, mothur will remove the otus from a shared or list file that are assigned to the requested taxon. The constaxonomy parameter may only be used with list or shared.

mothur > remove.lineage(constaxonomy=final.an.0.03.cons.taxonomy, shared=final.an.shared, taxon='Bacteria(100);Firmicutes(100);', label=0.03)

or

mothur > remove.lineage(constaxonomy=final.an.0.03.cons.taxonomy, list=final.an.list, taxon='Bacteria(100);Firmicutes(100);', label=0.03)

Revisions