PacBio Alignment File Format (cmp.h5) Specification¶

Revision History¶

Version	Date	Authors	Comments
0.1	07/24/2009	Jason Chin	First draft
0.2	11/04/2009	Jason Chin	2nd draft, incorporated changes from prototype
0.3	11/17/2009	Susan Tang	Added consensus record
0.4	03/11/2009	Jason Chin, James Bullard	Added SF related spec and indexing proposal
0.5	07/06/2010	Dale Webster	Added PB Internal Format Spec
1.2rc	10/25/2010	Jason Chin, James Bullard, Dale Webster, Dimitris Iliopoulos, Ali Bashir	Major Revision before v. 1.2. Remove all reference to earlier Astro type cmp.h5. Meta-data group hierarchy changed. New attributes added. Define a few file operation behaviors. We call this document version 1.2rc to match the software release version for FCR. Preliminary support for strobe read timing information.
1.2	12/22/2010	Jason Chin	Finalize 1.2 spec , updated examples, revise the FileLog info group, remove TODO, remove “rc” in the version string.
1.3.1	03/6/2012	David Alexander, Mark Chaisson	QV record types changed. lastRow datasets removed. Converted to reStructuredText. Some material moved to Appendices
2.0.0	02/12/2013	David Alexander, James Bullard	Addition of chemistry tag information per-movie. Removal of master dataset constructs. Sortedness of a file now indicated by presence of OffsetTable.
2.1.0	08/01/2013	James Bullard	Addition of Barcode data
2.3.0	5/21/2014	David Alexander	Document revised chemistry encoding

File Format Versioning¶

The cmp.h5 file format version is stored in the root group attribute Version. The version may take one of the following values:

“1.2.0”
“1.2.0.SF”
“1.2.0.PB”
“1.3.1.SF”
“1.3.1.PB”
“2.0.0”
“2.1.0”
“2.3.0”

File formats with versions ending in “.SF” (for Springfield) represent the production file formats that are produced by instruments at customer sites. File formats with versions ending in “.PB” (for PacBio) may contain additional information. Version “X.PB” files are always usable wherever an “X.SF” file is usable; i.e. PacBio internal files contain a superset of the features required in a Springfield file, and the same formatting conventions are observed.

Hierarchy Layout¶

In this section, we specify the general layout. At the top-level, or root group of the cmp.h5 HDF5 file, there exist six HDF5 groups which must exist: AlnInfo, RefInfo, MovieInfo, AlnGroup, RefGroup, FileLog.

There are basically three different categories of data groups:

The Info groups contain information about particular aspects of the data contained in the file to some external references, e.g., reference sequences used for alignments, movies information for the reads, and ZMW hole numbers, etc. These groups will be referred to as info groups. (The only exception of such convention is the FileLog group. It should be considered as an Info group even though the group does have a “Info” suffix. )
The Group HDF5 groups contain information about how the data is stored in the file and function as key-value-pair mappings from integer IDs to character paths. Each “Group” HDF5 group will contain at least two datasets one of which will be called ID and the other will be called Path. The ID is the key used to refer to the HDF5 path stored in parallel in the Path dataset. To avoid ambiguity these groups will be referred to as mapping groups.
Additionally, at the top-level of the file, zero or more alignment data groups will exist—these groups contain the actual alignment data for each reference sequence and alignment group. These groups will be called data groups.

All datasets stored under the same HDF5 group irrespective of type shall always have the same number of rows or, in the case of dimensionless vectors, length.

Here we specify the minimal set of datasets in each of aforementioned groups:

An info group named AlnInfo containing information about each alignment stored in the file. The AlnInfo group should contain the following datasets:
1. AlnIndex: Dataset whose rows represent unique alignments and whose columns store relevant information about each alignment. The AlnIndex dataset has a string list attribute, ColumnNames, containing the names of the columns of this dataset.
2. (CCS only): A vector dataset NumPasses, of the same length as AlnIndex, indicating the number of CCS subreads that were used to generate the consensus read in the corresponding row of AlnIndex.
1. (Optional) Vector datasets, of the same length as AlnIndex, the same storing information about each alignment (e.g., ZScore, SNR, and Edna).
An info group named RefInfo containing information about the reference sequences used during alignment. The RefInfo group should contain the following datasets:
1. ID: Identifier of the record.
2. FullName: Name of the sequence as given by the FASTA file used during alignment.
3. MD5: md5 hashes of the DNA sequence used during alignment.
Note

The MD5 convention used in cmp.h5 files differs from the standard convention in SAM files. SAM files store the “MD5 checksum of the sequence in the uppercase, with gaps and spaces removed.” cmp.h5 files contain the MD5 checksums of the reference contig sequences as present in the refernece FASTA file—case preserved, spaces and gaps intact (but newlines removed).
1. Length: The length of the DNA sequence used during alignment.
An info group named MovieInfo containing information about the movies which produced the alignments. This MovieInfo group should contain the following datasets:
1. ID: Identifier of the record.
2. Name: Movie name.
3. FrameRate: The camera speed in frames per second used
  
  to record the movie.
4. Datasets encoding information about the sequencing chemistry that was used. This is encoded in one of two manners:
Datasets SequencingKit, BindingKit, and SoftwareVersion represent the partnumbers read by the instrument barcode reader for each movie run, as well as the basecaller version. Decoding of this identifying “triple” for each movie is deferred to the tools that actually need to know the chemistry details—specifically, the Quiver variant/consensus calling tool and the base-modification identification tools.

(Versions 2.2.0 and earlier, and manual override in 2.3.0 and after) Dataset SequencingChemistry, representing a canonical string representation (for example, “P4-C2”) of the chemistry. Note that this places the burden for decoding of the barcode information on the software that constructs the cmp.h5 rather than client software.

Software that parses the cmp.h5 format shall rely on the datasets in (1) as the canonical chemistry information, only falling back to the information in (2) if the datasets in (1) are absent.
An info group named FileLog containing information about the history of the file itself.
1. ID: Identifier of the record
2. Program: The name of the program that touches the file
3. Version: The version of the program that touches the file
4. Timestamp: A W3C compatible timestamp string of the date-time when the file is touched.
5. CommandLine: Detail command line string that details how the program is used
6. Log: The field to store any extra details
A mapping group named RefGroup that records the reference sequence information used in the alignments: The RefGroup group should contain the following datasets:
1. ID
2. Path
3. RefInfoID: RefInfoID refers to elements of the /RefInfo/ID dataset.
A mapping group named AlnGroup that records the different partitions of alignments. This data group should contains:
1. ID
2. Path
Zero or more data groups containing the actual alignments. The names of the groups are defined by the dataset /RefGroup/Path. Each reference group contains one or more alignment groups (representing alignments from some predefined grouping, such as: SMRTcell, acquisition, or movie, etc). The full HDF5 paths to the alignment groups including the group names are defined in the dataset /AlnGroup/Path. An alignment group should contain:
1. A single alignment array dataset named AlnArray
2. (Optional) Datasets for quality values and pulse features that can be aligned to the read bases. Detailed information about necessary datasets is defined in sections 10 and 11.
(Optional) User-defined datasets conforming to the conventions of simple HDF5 types and having the same length as each sibling in its containing group.

It may be helpful to inspect the output of h5ls applied to a 1.3.1.SF cmp.h5 file:

mp-f052:~ $ h5ls -r  ~/Data/new_cmph5/alignments.cmp.h5
/                        Group
/AlnGroup                Group
/AlnGroup/ID             Dataset {1/Inf}
/AlnGroup/Path           Dataset {1/Inf}
/AlnInfo                 Group
/AlnInfo/AlnIndex        Dataset {16866/Inf, 22/Inf}
/FileLog                 Group
/FileLog/CommandLine     Dataset {3/Inf}
/FileLog/ID              Dataset {3/Inf}
/FileLog/Log             Dataset {3/Inf}
/FileLog/Program         Dataset {3/Inf}
/FileLog/Timestamp       Dataset {3/Inf}
/FileLog/Version         Dataset {3/Inf}
/MovieInfo               Group
/MovieInfo/FrameRate     Dataset {1/Inf}
/MovieInfo/SequencingChemistry     Dataset {1/Inf}
/MovieInfo/ID            Dataset {1/Inf}
/MovieInfo/Name          Dataset {1/Inf}
/RefGroup                Group
/RefGroup/ID             Dataset {1/Inf}
/RefGroup/OffsetTable    Dataset {1/Inf, 3/Inf}
/RefGroup/Path           Dataset {1/Inf}
/RefGroup/RefInfoID      Dataset {1/Inf}
/RefInfo                 Group
/RefInfo/FullName        Dataset {1/Inf}
/RefInfo/ID              Dataset {1/Inf}
/RefInfo/Length          Dataset {1/Inf}
/RefInfo/MD5             Dataset {1/Inf}
/ref000001               Group
/ref000001/m120225_045819_richard_c100304312550000001523012308061200_s1_p0 Group
/ref000001/m120225_045819_richard_c100304312550000001523012308061200_s1_p0/AlnArray Dataset {39434696/Inf}
/ref000001/m120225_045819_richard_c100304312550000001523012308061200_s1_p0/DeletionQV Dataset {39434696/Inf}
/ref000001/m120225_045819_richard_c100304312550000001523012308061200_s1_p0/DeletionTag Dataset {39434696/Inf}
/ref000001/m120225_045819_richard_c100304312550000001523012308061200_s1_p0/IPD Dataset {39434696/Inf}
/ref000001/m120225_045819_richard_c100304312550000001523012308061200_s1_p0/InsertionQV Dataset {39434696/Inf}
/ref000001/m120225_045819_richard_c100304312550000001523012308061200_s1_p0/MergeQV Dataset {39434696/Inf}
/ref000001/m120225_045819_richard_c100304312550000001523012308061200_s1_p0/PulseWidth Dataset {39434696/Inf}
/ref000001/m120225_045819_richard_c100304312550000001523012308061200_s1_p0/QualityValue Dataset {39434696/Inf}
/ref000001/m120225_045819_richard_c100304312550000001523012308061200_s1_p0/SubstitutionQV Dataset {39434696/Inf}
/ref000001/m120225_045819_richard_c100304312550000001523012308061200_s1_p0/SubstitutionTag Dataset {39434696/Inf}

Root Group Attributes¶

The following mandatory string attributes should be set in the root group:

Name	Allowed Values	Comment
Version	“1.2.0” “1.2.0.SF” “1.2.0.PB” “1.3.1.SF” “1.3.1.PB” “2.0.0”	The suffix is used to indicate whether the file includes (“.SF”) or does not include (“.PB”) several datasets useful for in-house analyses.
ReadType	“RCCS”, “CCS”, “strobe”, “standard”, or “cDNA”	Set to “standard” by default. If the cmp.h5 is used for “RCCS” and “CCS”, there will be no pulse features. Each read type will allows different sets of optional tables.
CommandLine	The command line used for generating this file.	This attribute is reserved for the initial generation. All post-initial alignment information should be stored in FileLog

Mapping Groups: `ID`, and `Path` datasets¶

Each mapping group contains at least an ID and Path dataset. The ID dataset contains unique positive integer values. The Path dataset contains proper HDF5 paths to HDF5 groups within the file. Elements of the path dataset should conform to the following regular expression (leading forward slash not included):

“[a-zA-Z-+_0-9]+” (all lower and upper case ASCII characters, numbers, “-”, and “+”).

The ID, Path datasets function as key-value pair mappings. The individual IDs are used in datasets to reference the relevant information stored in this particular mapping group.

The following HDF5 DDL defines the hdf5 data types for these data sets:

DATASET "ID" {
   DATATYPE  H5T_STD_U32LE
   DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
}
DATASET "Path" {
   DATATYPE  H5T_STRING {
         STRSIZE H5T_VARIABLE;
         STRPAD H5T_STR_NULLTERM;
         CSET H5T_CSET_ASCII;
         CTYPE H5T_C_S1;
      }
   DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
}

Two datasets are used to avoid compound types in an HDF5 file. This avoids the complication in reader/writer code implementations. If there is a mature compound type code base within the PBI development environment, compound type datasets are recommended for storing such key-value pairs.

`RefGroup` data group and `/RefGroup/*` datasets¶

The RefGroup mapping group provides a mapping between reference sequence identifiers (ID) to HDF5 paths in the file (Path). An example HDF5 schema can be seen above. A RefInfoID data set is used for pointing to the ID dataset in the RefInfo group and can be viewed as a foreign key.

The following DDL code block defines the data types for the datasets and attributes associated with /RefGroup:

GROUP "RefGroup" {
   DATASET "ID" {
      DATATYPE  H5T_STD_U32LE
      DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
   }
   DATASET "Path" {
      DATATYPE  H5T_STRING {
            STRSIZE H5T_VARIABLE;
            STRPAD H5T_STR_NULLTERM;
            CSET H5T_CSET_ASCII;
            CTYPE H5T_C_S1;
         }
      DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
   }
   DATASET "RefInfoID" {
      DATATYPE  H5T_STD_U32LE
      DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
   }
}

`AlnGroup` data group: `/AlnGroup/*` datasets¶

The AlnGroup mapping group provides a mapping between alignment group identifiers (ID) to alignment group paths.

The following DDL code block defines the data types for the datasets and attributes associated with /AlnGroup:

GROUP "AlnGroup" {
   DATASET "ID" {
      DATATYPE  H5T_STD_U32LE
      DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
   }
   DATASET "Path" {
      DATATYPE  H5T_STRING {
            STRSIZE H5T_VARIABLE;
            STRPAD H5T_STR_NULLTERM;
            CSET H5T_CSET_ASCII;
            CTYPE H5T_C_S1;
         }
      DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
   }
}

`RefInfo` info group and `/RefInfo/*` datasets¶

The RefInfo info group provides information about the reference sequences used during alignment. The RefInfo group contains at least 4 datasets including the ID dataset. The RefInfo/FullName provides the name of the sequence aligned to and is the full FASTA name. The RefInfo/MD5 is an MD5 hash of the reference sequence aligned to. The RefInfo/Length provides the length of the sequence aligned to.

Other sequence specific annotations can be stored as parallel datasets at this level.

The following DDL code block defines the data types for the datasets and attributes associated /RefInfo:

GROUP "RefInfo" {
   DATASET "FullName" {
      DATATYPE  H5T_STRING {
            STRSIZE H5T_VARIABLE;
            STRPAD H5T_STR_NULLTERM;
            CSET H5T_CSET_ASCII;
            CTYPE H5T_C_S1;
         }
      DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
   }
   DATASET "ID" {
      DATATYPE  H5T_STD_U32LE
      DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
   }
   DATASET "Length" {
      DATATYPE  H5T_STD_U32LE
      DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
   }
   DATASET "MD5" {
      DATATYPE  H5T_STRING {
            STRSIZE H5T_VARIABLE;
            STRPAD H5T_STR_NULLTERM;
            CSET H5T_CSET_ASCII;
            CTYPE H5T_C_S1;
         }
      DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
   }
}

`MovieInfo` data group: `MovieInfo/*` datasets¶

The paired arrays MovieInfo/ID and MovieInfo/Name in the MovieInfo group are defined to indicate the source of the movies for the reads in the AlnInfo/AlnIndex dataset. This pair of arrays functions as a key-value-pair map between IDs and movie names.

The following DDL code block defines the data types for the datasets and attributes associated /MovieInfo:

GROUP "MovieInfo" {
   DATASET "ID" {
      DATATYPE  H5T_STD_U32LE
      DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
   }
   DATASET "Name" {
      DATATYPE  H5T_STRING {
            STRSIZE H5T_VARIABLE;
            STRPAD H5T_STR_NULLTERM;
            CSET H5T_CSET_ASCII;
            CTYPE H5T_C_S1;
         }
      DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
   }
}

`AlnInfo` data group and the `AlnArray` data sets¶

`AlnInfo` data group¶

The first column of the AlnIndex can be treated as the equivalent “ID” dataset in the mapping or the info groups.

The data types of the dataset AlnIndex are defined as:

DATASET "AlnIndex" {
 DATATYPE  H5T_STD_U32LE
 DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( *, 22 ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED, 22 ) }
}

`AlnIndex` dataset¶

The purpose of the AlnIndex dataset is to:

Store the information necessary to retrieve alignments from the file. This includes: path, beginning offset, and ending offset within the dataset containing the alignment. (This kind of reference to alignment is similar to that proposed by HDF5 group in the bioHDF5 specification.)
Store the information, e.g., the orientation (i.e., strand) of the alignment, for processing the alignment properly for downstream bioinformatics analysis and visualization.
Store information that can be used to indentify the original reads.
Store the unique unsigned 32 bit integer ID as single unique key for each individual alignment.
Store summary information about the alignment. For example, one can store the number of matches, mismatches, insertions, deletions, mapping quality, read level quality values, etc.

`AlnIndex` Dataset Columns¶

The 22 columns in the AlnIndex dataset are described in the table below.

Column Name	Meaning	Comment
AlnID	Non-zero unique 32 bit integer key for the alignment record	Each alignment should have a unique AlnID. No other assumption about the order of the AlnID should be used for data processing.
AlnGroupID	A foreign key referring to AlnGroup/ID
MovieID	A foreign key referring to MovieInfo/ID
RefGroupID	A foreign key referring to RefGroup/ID.
tStart	The start position (0-based, inclusive) of the alignment target (the reference sequence)	tStart should always be less than tEnd, even when the hit is against the opposite strand.
tEnd	The end position (0-based, not-inclusive) of the alignment target (the reference sequence)	tEnd should always be greater than tStart, even when the hit is against the opposite strand.
RCRefStrand	The relative strand in the alignment. 1 for reversed reference strand; 0 for forward-forward alignment	The read base should never be reverse-complimented in the alignment array, so we only need to record if the reference bases are presented in reverse complemented strand in the file. “1” means “Yes/True” here.
HoleNumber	The HoleNumber from the bas.h5
SetNumber
StrobeNumber ExonNumber	Context dependent value. When the read type is Strobe, this field is the strobe number. When the read type is cDNA it will be the exon number.
MoleculeID	An integer which is unique to all subreads from the same ZMW.	If multiple subreads are from the same physical origin, they should have the same MoleculeID and different physical origins should have different MoleculeID.
rStart	The start position (0-based, inclusive) of the read in the alignment	Regardless weather the alignment is a subread or not, the position is always relative to the original raw full read sequence.
rEnd	The end position (0-based, not-inclusive) of the read in the alignment	rEnd should always be greater than rStart.
MapQV	TBD
nM	Number of matched base in the alignment
nMM	Number of mis-matched base in the alignment
nIns	Number of insertions in the read relative to the reference sequence
nDel	Number of deletions (missing bases) in the read relative to the reference sequence
Offset_begin	The beginning position (0-based, inclusive) of the alignment in the AlignmentArray
Offset_end	The ending position (0-based, exclusive) the alignment in the AlignmentArray	Not including the padded zero of the alignment array.
nBackRead	Used for faster access to blocks of sorted reads	See the sorting and indexing section
nReadOverlap	Used for faster access to blocks of sorted reads	See the sorting and indexing section

The column names should be stored as an attribute ColumnNames that contains all names listed in “Column Name” in the table above.

Sequence Alignments¶

Binary Encoding for Alignment Pair¶

The alignment array is a one dimensional 8 bit unsigned integer array where the individual array elements represent a “read base - reference base” pair packed into one byte. The higher four bits are set by the read base and the lower four bits are set by the reference base as the following:

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
T G C A T G C A

For example, “T” and “T” matched alignment will be presented as 0b10001000=136. “T” vs. “G” mismatch will be represented as 0b10000100=132. Insertion of “T” in read will be 0b10000000=128. “No-call” (“N”) bases are encoded as 0b1111=15 for both read and reference.

In the AlnArray dataset, the encoded read base should be always the same as what has been observed by the sequencing machine without any complementation. If a read is aligned to the reverse complement strand of the reference sequence, the lower four bits represent the complemented base (i.e., the reference has been complemented).

Alignment Array¶

The example below shows the conversion of an alignment pair to the binary array represented as an integer:

Alignment:

    Read Bases: ATCTT--ATC-GTTAATTA--A
    Ref. Bases: A-CTCAGA-CAGTCAATTAGCA

Encoded Alignment Pairs:

    AA -> 17
    T- -> 128
    CC -> 34
    TT -> 136
    TC -> 130
    -A -> 1
    -G -> 4
    ...
    -C -> 2
    AA -> 17

The final encoded array for this alignment is [17, 128, 34, 136, 130, 1, 4, 17, 128, 34, 1, 68, 136, 130, 17, 17, 136, 136, 17, 4, 2, 17, 0].

Note that zero is padded at the end of each alignment as a separator between different alignments. This will enable some analysis by simply streaming the alignment array without extra index look-ups to separate different alignments.

The alignment array is a concatenation of all encoded alignment arrays of each read and the AlignmentIndex dataset is used to indentify the origin of each alignment.

Below is an example of the HDF5 type definition for an AlnArray:

DATASET "AlnArray" {
    DATATYPE H5T_STD_U8LE
    DATASPACE SIMPLE { ( * ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
}

Pulse Metrics and QVs¶

In addition to the basic and required AlnArray dataset present in each alignment group, pulse metrics and quality values (QVs) may be optionally provided; however if one of these features is provided for one alignment group they must be provided for all alignment groups. These optional datasets are:

DeletionQV,

DeletionTag,

InsertionQV,

MergeQV,

SubstitutionQV,

SubstitutionTag,

QualityValue,

IPD,

PulseWidth,

StartFrame,

pkmid

Each such dataset is of the same shape as the AlnArray dataset in the same alignment group. Missing values (corresponding to read gaps in the alignment array) are encoded based on the type of the dataset:

Data type	Missing value encoding
float32	NaN
int8 (char)	‘-’ (ASCII 42)
uint8	255
uint16	65535

A missing value is present at a dataset offset if and only if that offset corresponds to a read gap in the AlnArray.

For the types of the pulse metric and QV datasets, see Summary of Attributes and Datasets. Any offset into a pulse metric or QV dataset corresponds to the same offset in the AlnArray.

Specification for the `cmp.h5` used for automatic data analysis from the instrument¶

This section defines the constraints that a cmp.h5 file should satisfy for automatic data analysis for an SpringField instrument. Such files are labeled with a root group attribute Version of “1.2.0.SF” or “1.3.1.SF”.

The RefGroup/Path for 1.2.0.SF and 1.2.0.PB cmp.h5 files has the form of “ref%06d” (C string formatting convention). The original FASTA sequence header should be stored in the RefInfo/FullName dataset. Additionally, two other datasets are obligatory: RefInfo/Length and RefInfo/MD5.

The default of AlnGroup partition is to group alignments from the same movie that aligned to the same reference together and we use the movie filename without suffix as the default alignment group name.

Specification for the `cmp.h5` used for PacBio internal data analysis¶

In addition to all datasets specified for the standard cmp.h5 the following additional datasets are required in internal files (“1.2.1.PB”):

Within the info group named “MovieInfo” containing information about the movies which produced the alignments:

Exp: A uint32 dataset specifying the PacBio LIMS Experiment code associated with each movie in the corresponding /MovieInfo/Name dataset.

Run: A uint32 dataset specifying the PacBio LIMS Run code associated with each movie in the corresponding /MovieInfo/Name dataset.

Data type and data space definition:
DATASET "/MovieInfo/Exp" {
   DATATYPE  H5T_STD_U32LE
   DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( 1 ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
}
DATASET "/MovieInfo/Run" {
   DATATYPE  H5T_STD_U32LE
   DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( 1 ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
}

Within the info group named AlnInfo containing information about each alignment stored in the file:

ZScore: a float32 dataset containing the alignment significance score (“Z Score”) computed from the corresponding row of the /AlnInfo/Index table.

Data type and data space definition:
DATASET "/AlnInfo/ZScore" {
   DATATYPE  H5T_IEEE_F32LE
   DATASPACE  SIMPLE { ( 310 ) / ( H5S_UNLIMITED ) }
}

In addition to all attributes specified for the standard cmp.h5 the following additional root level attributes are required:

Attribute name	Type	Sample values	Comment
ReportsFolder	string	“Analysis_Reports”	Contains the directory name of the Primary Analysis Reports used for this alignment
PrimaryPipeline	string	“61453”	Contains the Perforce changelist number of the Primary Analysis Pipeline used for this alignment

Sorting, Flattening, Merging, Splitting and Filtering Behaviors¶

Sorting¶

In order to provide fast access to cmp.h5 files, we provide sorted cmp.h5 files. These files have some additional information to quickly retrieve contiguous regions according to an indexing scheme. The most typical use case is to obtain a set of reads overlapping a particular genomic region, where the region can be a single genomic coordinate or ranges of genomic coordinates. Note that by default, sorting only entails the sorting of the AlnIndex dataset, and not the sorting of the alignment data itself.

A sorted cmp.h5 file has the following additional items as compared to an unsorted cmp.h5:

A dataset OffsetTable stored within the RefGroup mapping group giving the offsets of the reads mapped to a reference sequences in the global alignment index. The dataset is a 3 by N unsigned 32 bit unsigned integer array, where N is the total number of reference sequences in the RegGroup/ID table. The three elements of each row in the array indicate the RefID, targetStartOffset, and targetEndOffset. The targetStartOffest and targetEndOffset give the range of the reads in the global /AlnInfo/AlnIndex that maps to the specific reference sequence in the first column of the dataset. /The presence or absence of the OffsetTable dataset should be used to determine whether the file is sorted or unsorted./
The alignment index will have two additional columns of unsigned 32-bit integers (these could be shorter) nBackRead and nReadOverlap which gives the maximum number of reads one needs to examine to determine overlap and the actual number of reads which overlap a position, respectively. A value of -1 indicates that the field has not been filled in, whereas a value of 0 means that no further reads possibly overlap the position of interest. Here, nBackRead > nReadOverlap is always true.
In addition to sorting the AlnIndex, sorting and indexing can perform a “flattening” operation whereby all AlnGroups under each RefGroup are merged into a single AlnGroup. The name of the single AlnGroup can be anything, however, convention is to use the name: “rg-0001” to indicate that the sub-datasets have been merged and re-ordered. Additionally, an attribute on this group: repacked will be set to 1 to indicate, irrespective of the name, that the datasets have been sorted. If the length of any of the child datasets of of a “repacked” alignment group would be greater than 2^32, then additional alignment groups are added serially, e.g., “rg-0002”, etc. An alignment will never span more than one alignment group.

Note

The time complexity of sorting a cmp.h5 file will be on the order of O(n log(n)). Additionally, the columns nBackRead and nReadOverlap need to be computed. This will be on the order of O(max(read length) * n). Access to a given start position in cmp.h5 will be O(log(n)), however, this will only produce reads having that start position. In order to obtain all reads overlapping a position, one needs to inspect the nBackRead to obtain the size of the slice that they should grab from the cmp.h5 file. Retrieval, therefore, is bound by O(nBackRead log(n)). The additional column, nReadOverlap, should allow one to obtain significantly better performance, as the search can stop once to obtained number of reads is equal to nReadOverlap.

Merging¶

Merging is performed on a list of cmp.h5 files by selecting the first file to act as the seed and sequentially merging the rest onto the seed. If the first file in the list of files to be merged is empty then the next non-empty file is selected to act as the seed. An exact copy of the seed is made where all ID-type datasets have their entries serialized to consecutive 32 bit integers starting from 1. Merging results modifies a copy of the seed file in place. For each cmp.h5 file in the merging list, the following steps are performed:

If the file is empty, its root group Version does not match the seed’s Version or does not have the same type of loaded PulseMetrics as the seed, it is removed from the merging list and the next file is considered.
Root group attributes are not merged since they are set to the seed’s Root group attributes.
Datasets under the seed’s AlnInfo Data group are extended with their counterparts from the file to be merged. The AlnID column of the newly added rows in the AlnInfo/Index is updated by resetting the old values from the merged file. The new values are set equal to a list of integers starting from the maximum AlnID of the seed + 1, adding 1 for each new AlnID from the merged file.
Datasets under the seed’s RefInfo, MovieInfo, AlnGroup and RefGroup data groups are extended only with new entries from their counterparts in the file to be merged. If new RefInfo/ID, RefGroup/ID or MovieInfo/ID entries are created, they are mapped back to their respective columns in the AlnInfo/Index.

After going through the entire list of files to be merged, the FileLog attribute from the Root group attributes is modified (TBD).

Splitting¶

The current splitting behavior is implementation specific and associated with a single use case, i.e., processing of .cmp.h5 files involved in Edna analysis- type workflows. It is our aim to generalize the splitting behavior to accommodate more use cases when those become available.

A master cmp.h5 file is split into an N number of cmp.h5 files where N is equal to the number of RefInfo/ID entries in the master file. Consequently, each new cmp.h5 file contains all data associated with a single reference sequence. This is done by:

Creating N copies of the master cmp.h5 file and sequentially selecting a RefInfo/ID entry to become the only entry for each copied file, unique amongst the group.
Resizing all datasets belonging to AlnInfo, RefInfo, MovieInfo, AlnGroup and RefGroup by deleting all entries that are not associated with the chosen reference sequence. Splitting maintains the values of all ID-type fields and data fields in the AlnInfo/Index rows.
Maintaining the size and content of the AlnArray and PulseMetric-type datasets in the new files as the ones in the master.

Barcode Information¶

In addition to the afforementioned core alignment information, the cmp.h5 file can be used to store optional datasets containing barcode annotation on alignments. The pattern leveraged to store this annotation demonstrates a general mechanism to extend the information stored in the cmp.h5 file for downstream applications.

In the case of barcoding, we wish to label alignments according to their barcode so that other applications can leverage this information when computing statistics over sets of alignments, e.g., consensus calling within sample. To this end, a parallel dataset to /AlnInfo/AlnIndex is created. The Barcode dataset is 32-bit integer matrix with the same number of rows as the AlnIndex dataset and 5 columns storing scoring and labeling information.

The Barcode dataset contains the total number of barcodes scored for this molecule (count), the index of the top-scoring barcode (index1), the score of the top-scoring barcode (score1), the index of the 2nd-highest scoring barcode (index2) and its score (score2). These columns are named in the attribute ColumnNames of the Barcode dataset.

The index1 and index2 are foreign-keys into the BarcodeInfo/ID dataset. Analagous to the other *Info datasets, the BarcodeInfo/ID and BarcodeInfo/Name are used to retrieve the human-readable name of the barcode.

Summary of Attributes and Datasets¶

Versions prior to 2.0.0 are described in the Appendices.

File Version 2.0.0 contents:

Parent Group	HDF5 data	Resource Name	Data type	Shape
/	ATTR	CommandLine	VLEN_STR	None	required
/	ATTR	Index	VLEN_STR	(3,)	optional
/	ATTR	ReadType	VLEN_STR	None	required
/	ATTR	Version	VLEN_STR	None	required
/AlnGroup	DS	ID	uint32	1	required
/AlnGroup	DS	Path	VLEN_STR	1	required
/AlnInfo	DS	AlnIndex	uint32	22	required
/AlnInfo	ATTR	ColumnNames	VLEN_STR	22	required
/FileLog	DS	CommandLine	VLEN_STR	1	required
/FileLog	DS	ID	uint32	1	required
/FileLog	DS	Log	VLEN_STR	1	required
/FileLog	DS	Program	VLEN_STR	1	required
/FileLog	DS	Timestamp	VLEN_STR	1	required
/FileLog	DS	Version	VLEN_STR	1	required
/MovieInfo	DS	ID	uint32	1	required
/MovieInfo	DS	Name	VLEN_STR	1	required
/MovieInfo	DS	FrameRate	float32	1	required
/MovieInfo	DS	SequencingChemistry	VLEN_STR	1	required
/ref/	DS	AlnArray	uint8	1	required
/ref/	DS	QualityValue	uint8	1	optional
/ref/	DS	DeletionQV	uint8	1	optional
/ref/	DS	InsertionQV	uint8	1	optional
/ref/	DS	MergeQV	uint8	1	optional
/ref/	DS	SubstitutionQV	uint8	1	optional
/ref/	DS	SubstitutionTag	char	1	optional
/ref/	DS	DeletionTag	char	1	optional
/ref/	DS	IPD	uint16	1	optional
/ref/	DS	PulseWidth	uint16	1	optional
/ref/	DS	PulseIndex	uint32	1	optional
/RefGroup	DS	ID	uint32	1	required
/RefGroup	DS	OffsetTable	uint32	3	optional
/RefGroup	DS	Path	VLEN_STR	1	required
/RefGroup	DS	RefInfoID	uint32	1	required
/RefInfo	DS	FullName	VLEN_STR	1	required
/RefInfo	DS	ID	uint32	1	required
/RefInfo	DS	Length	uint32	1	required
/RefInfo	DS	MD5	VLEN_STR	1	required
/BarcodeInfo	DS	ID	uint32	1	optional
/BarcodeInfo	DS	ID	uint32	1	required
/BarcodeInfo	DS	Name	VLEN_STR	1	required

PacBio Alignment File Format (cmp.h5) Specification¶

Revision History¶

File Format Versioning¶

Hierarchy Layout¶

Root Group Attributes¶

Mapping Groups: `ID`, and `Path` datasets¶

`RefGroup` data group and `/RefGroup/*` datasets¶

`AlnGroup` data group: `/AlnGroup/*` datasets¶

`RefInfo` info group and `/RefInfo/*` datasets¶

`MovieInfo` data group: `MovieInfo/*` datasets¶

`AlnInfo` data group and the `AlnArray` data sets¶

`AlnInfo` data group¶

`AlnIndex` dataset¶

`AlnIndex` Dataset Columns¶

Sequence Alignments¶

Binary Encoding for Alignment Pair¶

Alignment Array¶

Pulse Metrics and QVs¶

Specification for the `cmp.h5` used for automatic data analysis from the instrument¶

Specification for the `cmp.h5` used for PacBio internal data analysis¶

Sorting, Flattening, Merging, Splitting and Filtering Behaviors¶

Sorting¶

Merging¶

Splitting¶

Barcode Information¶

Summary of Attributes and Datasets¶

Table of Contents

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PacBio Alignment File Format (cmp.h5) Specification¶

Revision History¶

File Format Versioning¶

Hierarchy Layout¶

Root Group Attributes¶

Mapping Groups: ID, and Path datasets¶

RefGroup data group and /RefGroup/* datasets¶

AlnGroup data group: /AlnGroup/* datasets¶

RefInfo info group and /RefInfo/* datasets¶

MovieInfo data group: MovieInfo/* datasets¶

AlnInfo data group and the AlnArray data sets¶

AlnInfo data group¶

AlnIndex dataset¶

AlnIndex Dataset Columns¶

Sequence Alignments¶

Binary Encoding for Alignment Pair¶

Alignment Array¶

Pulse Metrics and QVs¶

Specification for the cmp.h5 used for automatic data analysis from the instrument¶

Specification for the cmp.h5 used for PacBio internal data analysis¶

Sorting, Flattening, Merging, Splitting and Filtering Behaviors¶

Sorting¶

Merging¶

Splitting¶

Barcode Information¶

Summary of Attributes and Datasets¶

Mapping Groups: `ID`, and `Path` datasets¶

`RefGroup` data group and `/RefGroup/*` datasets¶

`AlnGroup` data group: `/AlnGroup/*` datasets¶

`RefInfo` info group and `/RefInfo/*` datasets¶

`MovieInfo` data group: `MovieInfo/*` datasets¶

`AlnInfo` data group and the `AlnArray` data sets¶

`AlnInfo` data group¶

`AlnIndex` dataset¶

`AlnIndex` Dataset Columns¶

Specification for the `cmp.h5` used for automatic data analysis from the instrument¶

Specification for the `cmp.h5` used for PacBio internal data analysis¶