An object-oriented framework for evolutionary pangenome analysis

Abstract

Pangenome analysis is fundamental to explore molecular evolution occurring in bacterial populations. Here, we introduce Pagoo, an R framework that enables straightforward handling of pangenome data. The encapsulated nature of Pagoo allows the storage of complex molecular and phenotypic information using an object-oriented approach. This facilitates to go back and forward to the data using a single programming environment and saving any stage of analysis (including the raw data) in a single file, making it sharable and reproducible. Pagoo provides tools to query, subset, compare, visualize, and perform statistical analyses, in concert with other microbial genomics packages available in the R ecosystem. As working examples, we used 1,000 <i>Escherichia coli</i> genomes to show that Pagoo is scalable, and a global dataset of <i>Campylobacter fetus</i> genomes to identify evolutionary patterns and genomic markers of host-adaptation in this pathogen.