Building large updatable colored de Bruijn graphs via merging

MOTIVATION: There exist several large genomic and metagenomic data collection efforts, including GenomeTrakr and MetaSub, which are routinely updated with new data. To analyze such datasets, memory-efficient methods to construct and store the colored de Bruijn graph were developed. Yet, a problem that has not been considered is constructing the colored de Bruijn graph in a scalable manner that allows new data to be added without reconstruction. This problem is important for large public datasets as scalability is needed but also the ability to update the construction is also needed. RESULTS: We create a method for constructing the colored de Bruijn graph for large datasets that is based on partitioning the data into smaller datasets, building the colored de Bruijn graph using a FM-index based representation, and succinctly merging these representations to build a single graph. The last step, merging succinctly, is the algorithmic challenge which we solve in this article. We refer to the resulting method as [Formula: see text]. This construction method also allows the graph to be updated with new data. We validate our approach and show it produces a three-fold reduction in working space when constructing a colored de Bruijn graph for 8000 strains. Lastly, we compare [Formula: see text] to other competing methods—including [Formula: see text] , Rainbowfish, Mantis, Bloom Filter Trie, the method of Almodaresi et al. and Multi-BRWT—and illustrate that [Formula: see text] is the only method that is capable of building the colored de Bruijn graph for 16 000 strains in a manner that allows it to be updated. Competing methods either did not scale to this large of a dataset or do not allow for additions without reconstruction. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: VariMerge is available at https://github.com/cosmo-team/cosmo/tree/VARI-merge under GPLv3 license. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.