Extremely fast construction and querying of compacted and colored de Bruijn graphs with GGCAT

Abstract

Compacted de Bruijn graphs are one of the most fundamental data structures in computational genomics. Colored compacted de Bruijn graphs are a variant built on acollectionof sequences and associate to eachk-mer the sequences in which it appears. We present GGCAT, a tool for constructing both types of graphs, based on a new approach merging thek-mer counting step with the unitig construction step, as well as on numerous practical optimizations. For compacted de Bruijn graph construction, GGCAT achieves speed-ups of 3× to 21× compared with the state-of-the-art tool Cuttlefish 2. When constructing the colored variant, GGCAT achieves speed-ups of 5× to 39× compared with the state-of-the-art tool BiFrost. Additionally, GGCAT is up to 480× faster than BiFrost for batch sequence queries on colored graphs.