GBIF metagenomics and metacrap

Yes, this is a clickbait headline, and yes, it may seem like shooting fish in a barrel to complain about crappy data in GBIF, but my point here is raise concerns about the impact of metagenomic data on GBIF, and how difficult it may be to track down the causes of errors.

I stumbled across this example while looking for specimen records for the genus Rafflesia, which are parasitic plants famous for the spectacular size of their flowers (up to 1m across).

The GBIF map for Rafflesia shows a few outliers. Unfortunately GBIF doesn't make it easy to drill down (why oh why can't we just click on the map and see the corresponding occurrences?) so I opened the map in iSpecies and clicked on each outlier in turn. The one in Vanuatu (438164267 from the Paris museum P00577336) is identified to genus level only and has the note:

Parasite terrestre, grande fleur orange au ras du sol. Incomplète suite à prédation. Très forte odeur désagréable. Récolté par Sylvain Hugel (photo) (alcool seul)

which Google translates as:

Terrestrial parasite, large orange flower at ground level. Incomplete due to predation. Very strong unpleasant odor. Collected by Sylvain Hugel (photo) (alcohol only)

Sounds a bit like Rafflesia but there's no photo or other information available online. Likewise there's no additional data for the record from Brazil (1090499968). There is a record from Madagascar that is accompanied by a photo, but it that looks nothing like Rafflesia (1261055923):

That leaves two records, 2018528337 (Rafflesia cantleyi) from off the coast of Peru, and 2014813273 (Rafflesia) off the coast of Australia. Both of these records are metagenomic. For example, occurrence 2018528337 is part of a dataset Amplicon sequencing of Tara Oceans DNA samples corresponding to size fractions for protists that, on the face of it, would be an unlikely source of occurrences of forest dwelling plants.

What we get in the GBIF occurrence record is a link to the pipeline used to generate the data (Pipeline version 4.1 - 17-Jan-2018), the sample (ERS491947), and an analysis (MGYA00167469) that summarises all the taxonomic data from the ocean water sample.

What we don't get in GBIF is an obvious way to try and figure out why GBIF thinks that large flowers live in the ocean. I followed the links from MGYA00167469 and downloaded a bunch of files, some in familiar formats (FASTA), others in formats I'd not seen before (e.g., HDF5). From the mapseq file we have the following line:

ERR562574.2494029-BISMUTH-0000:2:112:3465:9749-2/89-1 GFBU01000011.4303.6106 76 0.9634146094322205 79 3 0 6 88 1722 1804 +  sk__Eukaryota;k__Viridiplantae;p__Streptophyta;c__;o__Malpighiales;f__Rafflesiaceae;g__Rafflesia;s__Rafflesia_cantleyi 

This tells us that sequence ERR562574.2494029-BISMUTH-0000:2:112:3465:9749-2/89-1 matches GenBank sequence GFBU01000011, which is "Rafflesia cantleyi RC_11 transcribed RNA sequence" from a paper on flower development in Rafflesia cantleyi doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0167958. So, now we see why we think we have giant flowers off the coast of Peru.

The rest of the line has information on the match: the oceanic sequence has a 0.96 identity with the plant sequence, has 79 matches, 3 mismatches, and no gaps, which suggests that this is a short sequence. Going digging in the FASTA file I found the raw sequence, and it is indeed very short:

>ERR562574.2494029-BISMUTH-0000:2:112:3465:9749-2/89-1
GTCTAAGTGTCGTGAGAAGTTCGTTGAACCTGATCATTTAGAGGAAGTAGAAGTCGTAAC
AAGGTTTCCGTAGGTGAACCTGCGGAAGG

This short string is the evidence for Rafflesia in the ocean. Out of curiosity I ran this sequence through BLAST:

Query  1     GTCTAAGTGTCGTGAGAAGTTCGTTGAACCTGATCATTTAGAGGAAGTAGAAGTCGTAAC  60
             |||||||||||||| |||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||
Sbjct  1683  GTCTAAGTGTCGTGGGAAGTTCGTTGAACCTTATCATTTAGAGGAAGGAGAAGTCGTAAC  1742

Query  61    AAGGTTTCCGTAGGTGAACCTGCGGAAGG  89
             |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sbjct  1743  AAGGTTTCCGTAGGTGAACCTGCGGAAGG  1771

The top hit is Bathycoccus prasinos, a picoplanktonic alga with a world-wide distribution. This seems like a more plausible identification for this sequence (all the top 100 hits are very similar to each other, many are labelled as Bathycoccus).

So, there's something clearly amiss with the analysis of this dataset. Someone who knows more about metagenomics than I do will be better placed to explain why this pipeline got it so wrong, and how common this issue is.

Given the scale and automation of metagenomics, there will always be errors - that is inevitable. What we need is ways to catch those errors, especially ones that are going to "pollute" existing distribution data with spurious records (flowers in the ocean). And in a sense, GBIF excels at this in that it exposes data to a wider audience. If you work on marine microbiology you might not notice that your sequences apparently include forest plants, but if you work on forest plants you will almost certainly notice sequences occurring in the ocean.

A key feature of GBIF that makes it so useful is that, unlike many data repositories, it does not treat data as a "black box". GBIF is not like a library catalogue which merely tells you that they have books and where to find them, instead it is like Google Books, which can tell you which books contain a given phrase you are looking for. By opening up each dataset and indexing the contents, GBIF enables us to do data analysis (in much the same way that GenBank isn't just a catalogue of sequences, it enables you to search the sequences themselves).

This is a feature we risk losing if we treat metagenomics data as a black box. The Tara Oceans data that GBIF receives is simply a list of taxa at a locality, it's a checklist. We have to take it on trust that the taxonomic assignments are accurate, and it is not a trivial task to diagnose errors. Compare this to having the photo that accompanied the record from Madagascar, which helps us determine that the identification is wrong. Going forward, it would be helpful if we had metagenomic sequences available as part of the data download from GBIF. It's also worth considering whether GBIF should start doing its own analysis of sequence data, or asking its contributors to check that their taxonomic assignments are correct (e.g., running BLAST on the data). Otherwise GBIF users may end up having to filter their data for a growing number of completely spurious records.

Update

Looks like (occurrence 1261055923) is Langsdorffia:

Related to the blog post https://t.co/do5P2u5Ooj, does anyone have ideas on the identity of this species (@GBIF record https://t.co/zSr8xemkh7 from Madagascar) which is labelled "Rafflesia" pic.twitter.com/qiRtYH0tUh

— Roderic Page (@rdmpage) December 20, 2019

The Semantic Web revisited: thoughts on SWAT4HCLS

This week I attended the SWAT4(HC)LS (Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Healthcare and Life Sciences) meeting in Edinburgh. Although a relatively small meeting, SWAT4(HC)LS attracts some big names in the field and featured keynotes by Denny Vrandečić (founder of Wikidata), Dov Greenbaum, Birgitta König-Ries, and Helen Parkinson.
For me this was a chance to get a sense of the state of the Semantic Web, and also to present a talk on biodiversity knowledge graphs. Given that this is a computer science meeting, you need to get a paper submitted and accepted in order to give a talk, so I hastily wrote up some notes on matching author names in taxonomic and bibliographic databases (there's a version of this on bioRxiv):

Page, R. D. M. (2019). Reconciling author names in taxonomic and publication databases. doi:10.1101/870170

Google the "Semantic Web" and pretty soon you discover that many people think it is dead (see Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?). But it is still here, maybe partly because there is some ambiguity about just what it is. The 2003 paper "Which semantic web?" By Catherine C. Marshall and Frank M. Shipman (doi:10.1145/900051.900063) sketches three different Semantic Webs:

1. a universal library, to be readily accessed and used by humans in a variety of information use contexts.
2. the backdrop for the work of computational agents completing sophisticated activities on behalf of their human counterparts
3. a method for federating particular knowledge bases and databases to perform

(1) is essentially what Google gives us, the ability to use a web browser to find stuff on the web, augmented by structured markup to help us do that (the "Library of Alexandria"). (2) is the idea of global ontologies, agents, and reasoning (the Knowledge Navigator), and (3) focusses on cross linking data in different databases (the "Federated Knowledge Base").

My own focus is very much in area (3), I want to link disconnected datasets together. Many of the presentations at SWAT4(HC)LS were more in area (2) and focussed on ontologies, especially medical. This is a world of big - not always open - ontologies, and lots of discussions about how to model data. In other words, what many people think of as the Semantic Web.

One of the nice things about the conference was the way people with posters got to give a lightning talk about their poster (I've seen this at VIZBI as well). I think this is a great idea and would love to see this at biodiversity conferences. The posters that I got the most out of were from the researchers at the DBCLS in Japan, such as TogoStanza (visualisations of SPARQL results), SPARQList (Markdown notebook for SPARQL), and Umaka Viewer (visualise classes in a SPARQL endpoint).

For fun I tried Umaka Viewer on my Ozymandias knowledge graph. You can see the results here.
It took about 30 minutes to generate the data for this visualisation, but it was fun to poke around at the internals of a knowledge graph that I had created. I discovered classes I'd forgotten I'd used!

As someone who spends a lot of time messing about with ways to collect, clean, and visualise data, it's no surprise that posters and presentations on tools for doing this are what I found most useful. The thing I find most appealing about the Semantic Web is the notion of having simple APIs that can query knowledge encoded in both web pages and databases (see also work by Franck Michel and colleagues on SPARQL Micro-Services, e.g. SPARQL Micro-Services Demo Page).