clustalw_help for version 1.4 (September 1994). This is the on-line help file for CLUSTAL W. It should be named or defined as: clustalw_help except with MSDOS in which case it should be named CLUSTALW.HLP For full details of usage and algorithms, please see the files: cluustalv.doc The documentation for Clustal V (most of the program usage and the basic algorithms are the same). clustalw.ms A manuscript describing the main algorithmic changes over Clustal V. readme.txt A brief summary of the main changes over Clustal V. Toby Gibson Des Higgins (now at the EBI, Hinxton, Great Britain) Julie Thompson EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany. The paper describing Clustal W is: Thompson, J.D., Higgins, D.G. and Gibson, T.J. (1994) CLUSTAL W: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice. Nucleic Acids Research, submitted, June 1994. >>HELP 1 << General help for CLUSTAL W Clustal W is a general purpose multiple alignment program for DNA or proteins. SEQUENCE INPUT: all sequences must be in 1 file, one after another. 6 formats are automatically recognised: NBRF/PIR, EMBL/SWISSPROT, Pearson (Fasta), Clustal (*.aln), GCG/MSF (Pileup) and GDE. All non-alphabetic characters (spaces, digits, punctuation marks) are ignored except "-" which is used to indicate a GAP ("." in GCG/MSF). To do a MULTIPLE ALIGNMENT on a set of sequences, use item 1 from this menu to INPUT them; go to menu item 2 to do the multiple alignment. PROFILE ALIGNMENTS (menu item 3) are used to align 2 alignments or to add a set of new sequences to an old alignment. Use this to add new sequences to an old alignment. GAPS in the old alignments are indicated using the "-" character. PROFILES can be input in ANY of the allowed formats; just use "-" (or "." for MSF) for each gap position. PHYLOGENETIC TREES (menu item 4) can be calculated from old alignments (read in with "-" characters to indicate gaps) OR after a multiple alignment while the alignment is still in memory. The program tries to automatically recognise the different file formats used and to guess whether the sequences are amino acid or nucleotide. This is not always foolproof. FASTA and NBRF/PIR formats are recognised by having a ">" as the first character in the file. EMBL/Swiss Prot formats are recognised by the letters ID at the start of the file (the token for the entry name field). CLUSTAL format is recognised by the word CLUSTAL at the beginning of the file. GCG/MSF format is recognised by the word PileUp at the start of the file. If your msf files do not contain this word first, edit it in at the start of the first line. If 85% or more of the characters in the sequence are from A,C,G,T,U or N, the sequence will be assumed to be nucleotide. This works in 97.3% of cases but watch out! The paper describing Clustal W is: Thompson, J.D., Higgins, D.G. and Gibson, T.J. (1994) CLUSTAL W: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice. Nucleic Acids Research, submitted, June 1994. >>HELP 2 << Help for multiple alignments If you have already loaded sequences, use menu item 1 to do the complete multiple alignment. You will be prompted for 2 output files: 1 for the alignment itself; another to store a dendrogram that describes the similarity of the sequences to each other. Multiple alignments are carried out in 3 stages (automatically done from menu item 1 ...Do complete multiple alignments now): 1) all sequences are compared to each other (pairwise alignments); 2) a dendrogram (like a phylogenetic tree) is constructed, describing the approximate groupings of the sequences by similarity (stored in a file). 3) the final multiple alignment is carried out, using the dendrogram as a guide. PAIRWISE ALIGNMENT parameters control the speed/sensitivity of the initial alignments. MULTIPLE ALIGNMENT parameters control the gaps in the final multiple alignments. RESET GAPS (menu item 7) will remove any new gaps introduced into the sequences during multiple alignment if you wish to change the parameters and try again. This only takes effect just before you do a second multiple alignment. You can make phylogenetic trees after alignment whether or not this is ON. If you turn this OFF, the new gaps are kept even if you do a second multiple alignment. This allows you to iterate the alignment gradually. Sometimes, the alignment is improved by a second or third pass. SCREEN DISPLAY can be used to send the output alignments to the screen as well as to the output file. You can skip the first stages (pairwise alignments; dendrogram) by using an old dendrogram file (menu item 3); or you can just produce the dendrogram with no final multiple alignment (menu item 2). OUTPUT FORMAT: Menu item 9 (format options) allows you to choose from 5 different alignment formats (CLUSTAL, GCG, NBRF/PIR, PHYLIP and GDE). You can toggle between FAST/APPROXIMATE or SLOW/ACCURATE alignments for the initial alignments used to make the guide tree. The fast ones are extremely fast but are less reliable than the slow ones. >>HELP 3 << Help for pairwise alignment parameters A distance is calculated between every pair of sequences and these are used to construct the dendrogram which guides the final multiple alignment. The scores are calculated from separate pairwise alignments. These can be calculated using 2 methods: dynamic programming (slow but accurate) or by the method of Wilbur and Lipman (extremely fast but approximate). You can choose between the 2 alignment methods using menu option 8. The slow/accurate method is fine for short sequences but will be VERY SLOW for many (e.g. >20) long (e.g. >1000 residue) sequences. SLOW/ACCURATE alignment parameters: These parameters do not have any affect on the speed of the alignments. They are used to give initial alignments which are then rescored to give percent identity scores. These % scores are the ones which are displayed on the screen. The scores are converted to distances for the trees. 1) Gap Open Penalty: the penalty for opening a gap in the alignment. 2) Gap extension penalty: the penalty for extending a gap by 1 residue. 3) Protein weight matrix: the scoring table which describes the similarity of each amino acid to each other. For DNA, an identity matrix is used. FAST/APPROXIMATE alignment parameters: These similarity scores are calculated from fast, approximate, global align- ments, which are controlled by 4 parameters. 2 techniques are used to make these alignments very fast: 1) only exactly matching fragments (k-tuples) are considered; 2) only the 'best' diagonals (the ones with most k-tuple matches) are used. K-TUPLE SIZE: This is the size of exactly matching fragment that is used. INCREASE for speed (max= 2 for proteins; 4 for DNA), DECREASE for sensitivity. For longer sequences (e.g. >1000 residues) you may need to increase the default. GAP PENALTY: This is a penalty for each gap in the fast alignments. It has little affect on the speed or sensitivity except for extreme values. TOP DIAGONALS: The number of k-tuple matches on each diagonal (in an imaginary dot-matrix plot) is calculated. Only the best ones (with most matches) are used in the alignment. This parameter specifies how many. Decrease for speed; increase for sensitivity. WINDOW SIZE: This is the number of diagonals around each of the 'best' diagonals that will be used. Decrease for speed; increase for sensitivity. >>HELP 4 << Help for multiple alignment parameters These parameters control the final multiple alignment. This is the core of the program and the details are complicated. To fully understand the use of the parameters and the scoring system, you will have to refer to the documentation. Each step in the final multiple alignment consists of aligning two alignments or sequences. This is done progressively, following the branching order in the GUIDE TREE. The basic parameters to control this are two gap penalties and the scores for various identical/non-indentical residues. 1) and 2) The GAP PENALTIES are set by menu items 1 and 2. These control the cost of opening up every new gap and the cost of every item in a gap. Increasing the gap opening penalty will make gaps less frequent. Increasing the gap extension penalty will make gaps shorter. Terminal gaps are not penalised. 3) The DELAY DIVERGENT SEQUENCES switch delays the alignment of the most distantly related sequences until after the most closely related sequences have been aligned. The setting shows the percent identity level required to delay the addition of a sequence; sequences that are less identical than this level to any other sequences will be aligned later. 4) For DNA, the scoring system assigns a score of 3 for two identical bases and zero otherwise. The TOGGLE TRANSITIONS switch (menu item 3) gives transitions (A <--> G or C <--> T i.e. purine-purine or pyrimidine-pyrimidine substitutions) a score of 1; otherwise, these are scored as mismatches and get a score of zero. For distantly related DNA sequences, this switch might be better turned off; for closely related sequences it can be useful. 5) PROTEIN WEIGHT MATRIX leads to a new menu where you are offered a choice of weight matrices. The default is the BLOSUM series of matrices by Jorja and Steven Henikoff. Note, a series is used! The actual matrix that is used depends on how similar the sequences to be aligned at this alignment step are. Different matrices work differently at each evolutionary distance. Further help is offered in the weight matrix menu. >>HELP A << Help for protein gap parameters. 1) RESIDUE SPECIFIC PENALTIES are amino acid specific gap penalties that reduce or increase the gap opening penalties at each position in the alignment or sequence. See the documentation for details. As an example, positions that are rich in glycine are more likely to have an adjacent gap than positions that are rich in valine. 2) 3) HYDROPHILIC GAP PENALTIES are used to increase the chances of a gap within a run (5 or more residues) of hydrophilic amino acids; these are likely to be loop or random coil regions where gaps are more common. The residues that are "considered" to be hydrophilic are set by menu item 3. 4) GAP SEPARATION DISTANCE tries to decrease the chances of gaps being too close to each other. Gaps that are less than this distance apart are penalised more than other gaps. This does not prevent close gaps; it makes them less frequent, promoting a block-like appearance of the alignment. 5) END GAP SEPARATION treats end gaps just like internal gaps for the purposes of avoiding gaps that are too close (set by GAP SEPARATION DISTANCE above). If this is off (default), end gaps will be ignored for this purpose. This is useful when you wish to align fragments where the end gaps are not biologically meaningful. >>HELP 5 << Help for output format options. Five output formats are offered. You can choose more than one (or all 5 if you wish). CLUSTAL format output is a self explanatory alignment format. It shows the sequences aligned in blocks. It can be read in again at a later date to (for example) calculate a phylogenetic tree or add a new sequence with a profile alignment. GCG output can be used by any of the GCG programs that can work on multiple alignments (e.g. PRETTY, PROFILEMAKE, PLOTALIGN). It is the same as the GCG .msf format files (multiple sequence file); new in version 7 of GCG. PHYLIP format output can be used for input to the PHYLIP package of Joe Felsenstein. This is an extremely widely used package for doing every imaginable form of phylogenetic analysis (MUCH more than the the modest intro- duction offered by this program). NBRF/PIR: this is the same as the standard PIR format with ONE ADDITION. Gap characters "-" are used to indicate the positions of gaps in the multiple alignment. These files can be re-used as input in any part of clustal that allows sequences (or alignments or profiles) to be read in. GDE: this format is used by the GDE package of Steven Smith. OUTPUT ORDER is used to control the order of the sequences in the output alignments. By default, it is the same as the input order. This switch can be used to make the order correspond to the order in which the sequences were aligned (from the guide tree/dendrogram), thus automatically grouping closely related sequences. >>HELP 6 << Help for profile alignments By PROFILE ALIGNMENT, we mean alignment to an existing alignment. Either of the alignments can be a single sequence. A profile is simply an alignment of one or more sequences (e.g. an alignment output file from Clustal W) or a set of unaligned sequences. The profiles can be in any of the allowed input formats with "-" characters used to specify gaps (except for GCG/MSF where "." is used). You have to specify the 2 profiles by choosing menu items 1 and 2 and giving 2 file names. Then Menu item 3 will align the 2 profiles to each other. Menu item 4 will take the sequences in the second profile and align them to the first profile, 1 at a time. This is useful to add some new sequences to an existing alignment. In this case, the second profile need not be pre- aligned. The alignment parameters can be set using menu items 6 and 7 ("Alignment parameters"). These are EXACTLY the same parameters as used by the general, automatic multiple alignment procedure. The general multiple alignment proc- edure is simply a series of profile alignments. Carrying out a series of profile alignments on larger and larger groups of sequences, allows you to manually build up a complete alignment. Profile alignments allow you to store alignments of your favourite sequences and add new sequences to them in small bunches at a time. >>HELP 7 << Help for phylogenetic trees 1) Before calculating a tree, you must have an ALIGNMENT in memory. This can be input in any format or you should have just carried out a full multiple alignment and the alignment is still in memory. Remember YOU MUST ALIGN THE SEQUENCES FIRST!!!! The method used is the NJ (Neighbour Joining) method of Saitou and Nei. First you calculate distances (percent divergence) between all pairs of sequence from a multiple alignment; second you apply the NJ method to the distance matrix. 2) EXCLUDE POSITIONS WITH GAPS? With this option, any alignment positions where ANY of the sequences have a gap will be ignored. This means that 'like' will be compared to 'like' in all distances. It also, automatically throws away the most ambiguous parts of the alignment, which are concentrated around gaps (usually). The disadvantage is that you may throw away much of the data if there are many gaps. 3) CORRECT FOR MULTIPLE SUBSTITUTIONS? For small divergence (say <10%) this option makes no difference. For greater divergence, this option corrects for the fact that observed distances underestimate actual evolutionary dist- ances. This is because, as sequences diverge, more than one substitution will happen at many sites. However, you only see one difference when you look at the present day sequences. Therefore, this option has the effect of stretching branch lengths in trees (especially long branches). The corrections used here (for DNA or proteins) are both due to Motoo Kimura. See the documentation for details. README.TXT describes a new modification for proteins distances. For VERY divergent sequences, the distances cannot be reliably corrected. You will be warned if this happens. Even if none of the distances in a data set exceed the reliable threshold, if you bootstrap the data, some of the bootstrap distances may randomly exceed the safe limit. 4) To calculate a tree, use option 4 (DRAW TREE NOW). This gives an UNROOTED tree and all branch lengths. The root of the tree can only be inferred by using an outgroup (a sequence that you are certain branches at the outside of the tree .... certain on biological grounds) OR if you assume a degree of constancy in the 'molecular clock', you can place the root in the 'middle' of the tree (roughly equidistant from all tips). 5) BOOTSTRAPPING is a method for deriving confidence values for the groupings in a tree (first adapted for trees by Joe Felsenstein). It involves making N random samples of sites from the alignment (N should be LARGE, e.g. 500 - 1000); drawing N trees (1 from each sample) and counting how many times each grouping from the original tree occurs in the sample trees. You must supply a seed number for the random number generator. Different runs with the same seed will give the same answer. See the documentation for details. 6) OUTPUT FORMATS: three different formats are allowed. None of these displays the tree visually. You must make the tree yourself (on paper) using the results OR get the PHYLIP package and use the tree drawing facilities there. (Get the PHYLIP package anyway if you are interested in trees). >>HELP 8 << Help for choosing protein weight matrix For protein alignments, you use a weight matrix to determine the similarity of non-identical amino acids. For example, Tyr aligned with Phe is usually judged to be 'better' than Tyr aligned with Pro. These are not used with DNA. There are two 'in-built' series of weight matrices offered. Each consists of several matrices which work differently at different evolutionary distances. To see the exact details, read the documentation. Crudely, we store several matrices in memory, spanning the full range of amino acid distance (from almost identical sequences to highly divergent ones). For very similar sequences, it is best to use a strict weight matrix which only gives a high score to identities and the most favoured conservative substitutions. For more divergent sequences, it is appropriate to use "softer" matrices which give a high score to many other frequent substitutions. 1) BLOSUM (Henikoff). These matrices appear to be the best available for carrying out data base similarity (homology searches). The matrices used are: Blosum80, 62, 40 and 30. 2) PAM (Dayhoff). These have been extremely widely used since the late '70s. We use the PAM 120, 160, 250 and 350 matrices. We also supply an identity matrix which gives a score of 10 to two identical amino acids and a score of zero otherwise. This matrix is not very useful. Alternatively, you can read in your own (just one matrix, not a series). A new matrix can be read from a file on disk, if the filename consists only of lower case characters. The values in the new weight matrix must be integers and the scores should be similarities. You can use negative as well as positive values if you wish, although the matrix will be automatically adjusted to all positive scores. INPUT FORMAT The format used for a new matrix is the same as the BLAST program. Any lines beginning with a # character are assumed to be comments. The first non-comment line should contain a list of amino acids in any order, using the 1 letter code, followed by a * character. This should be followed by a square matrix of integer scores, with one row and one column for each amino acid. The last row and column of the matrix (corresponding to the * character) contain the minimum score over the whole matrix. >>HELP 9 << Help for command line parameters DATA (sequences) /INFILE=file.ext :input sequences. /PROFILE1=file.ext and /PROFILE2=file.ext :profiles (old alignment). VERBS (do things) /OPTIONS :list the command line parameters /HELP or /CHECK :outline the command line params. /ALIGN :do full multiple alignment /TREE :calculate NJ tree. /BOOTSTRAP(=n) :bootstrap a NJ tree (n= number of bootstraps; def. = 1000). PARAMETERS (set things) ***General settings:**** /INTERACTIVE :read command line, then enter normal interactive menus /QUICKTREE :use FAST algorithm for the alignment guide tree /NEWTREE= :file for new guide tree /USETREE= :file for old guide tree /NEGATIVE :protein alignment with negative values in matrix /OUTFILE= :sequence alignment file name /OUTPUT= :GCG, GDE, PHYLIP or PIR /OUTORDER= :INPUT or ALIGNED /CASE :LOWER or UPPER (for GDE output only) ***Fast Pairwise Alignments:*** /KTUP=n :word size /TOPDIAGS=n :number of best diags. /WINDOW=n :window around best diags. /PAIRGAP=n :gap penalty /SCORE :PERCENT or ABSOLUTE ***Slow Pairwise Alignments:*** /PWMATRIX= :BLOSUM, PAM, ID or filename /PWGAPOPEN=f :gap opening penalty /PWGAPEXT=f :gap opening penalty ***Multiple Alignments:*** /MATRIX= :BLOSUM, PAM, ID or filename /GAPOPEN=f :gap opening penalty /GAPEXT=f :gap extension penalty /ENDGAPS :no end gap separation pen. /GAPDIST=n :gap separation pen. range /NORGAP :Residue specific gaps off /NOHGAP :hydrophilic gaps off /HGAPRESIDUES= :list hydrophilic res. /MAXDIV=n :% ident. for delay /TYPE= :PROTEIN or DNA /TRANSITIONS :transitions NOT weighted. ***Trees:*** /SEED=n :seed number for bootstraps. /KIMURA :use Kimura's correction. /TOSSGAPS :ignore positions with gaps. >>HELP 0 << Help for tree output format options Three output formats are offered: 1) Clustal, 2) Phylip/TreeTool, 3) Just the distances. None of these formats displays the results graphically. To see a graphic representation of a tree (not a bootstrapped tree), get the PHYLIP package and use format 2) below. It can be imported into the PHYLIP programs RETREE, DRAWTREE and DRAWGRAM and displayed graphically. TreeTool can also do this but is only available for SUN (by ftp from rdp.life.uiuc.edu). TreeTool, however has a neat facility for labels on internal nodes which we use to display bootstrap figures on the bootstrap trees. If you do not have TreeTool, please request the trees in Clustal format 1) below. 1) Clustal format output. This format is verbose and lists all of the distances between the sequences and the number of alignment positions used for each. The tree is described at the end of the file. It lists the sequences that are joined at each alignment step and the branch lengths. After two sequences are joined, it is referred to later as a NODE. The number of a NODE is the number of the lowest sequence in that NODE. 2) Phylip or TreeTool format output. This format is the New Hampshire format, used by many phylogenetic analysis packages. It consists of a series of nested parentheses, describing the branching order, with the sequence names and branch lengths. With a simple tree, it can be used by the RETREE, DRAWGRAM and DRAWTREE programs of the PHYLIP package to see the trees graphically. This is the same format used during multiple alignment for the guide trees. With a bootstrap tree, you need to use TreeTool or request format 1) above. 3) The distances only. This format just outputs a matrix of all the pairwise distances in a format that can be used by the Phylip package. It used to be useful when one could not produce distances from protein sequences in the Phylip package but is now redundant (Protdist of Phylip 3.5 now does this).