4.0.7

This is a bugfix release. It fixes the following problem(s):

• The multithreading capabilities in pVACtools are not available for Mac OSX. Attempting to use the -t parameter would result in the forked processes crashing but the run would still complete successfully leading to results with incomplete data. This release will result in an error when multithreading is used under Mac OSX.
• We’ve observed issues with IEDB’s API sometimes returning incorrect or incomplete data. This results in downstream errors. This release updates the prediction calling to log such occurrences and to retry the API when they are observed.
• MHCflurry sometimes returns no binding affinity percentile data. This resulted in errors when parsing such prediction data. This release fixes our parsing logic to handle this case.
• TSL parsing of the input VCF in pVACseq used to be limited to human data only. This release adds support for TSL parsing in mouse data.
• When running with the –noncanonical flag, the exons.csv file will contain exon postions for all possible transcript combinations. However, the transcripts weren’t being taken into account when parsing this file to determine the fusion positions. This release fixes this issue by looking up the positions for the specific transcripts of the record currently being parsed.
• When using BLASTp for the reference proteome match step, we applied the word-size parameter in order to only return perfect matches. However, for short sequences, word-size must be less than half the query length, or reliable hits can be missed. This release updates how the word-size parameter is calculated in order to meet this criteria.
• This release addresses in error in pVACview that would occur in the Transcripts in Set window when there are no peptides passing the aggregate inclusion binding threshold.

4.0.6

This is a bugfix release. It fixes the following problem(s):

• A bug in the aggregate report creation incorrectly evaluated the Transcript Support Level and resulted in picking the wrong Best Transcript in some cases.

4.0.5

This is a bugfix release. It fixes the following problem(s):

• In recent releases, users have noticed that at some point during pipeline runs, predictions to MHCflurry would hang or get killed. We were able to determine that the cause was related to PR 988. This PR originally updated calls to MHCflurry to happen by instantiating their predictor within Python instead of calling it on the command line. However, we suspect that this causes a substantial increase in memory usage resulting in the observed behavior. This release reverts the change from PR 988.

4.0.4

This is a bugfix release. It fixes the following problem(s):

• This release makes various fixes to allow pVACtools to run with non-human data.

4.0.3

This is a bugfix release. It fixes the following problem(s):

• The fixes in issue in the reference proteome similarity step in pVACseq where running with non-human data would cause an error.

4.0.2

This is a bugfix release. It fixes the following problem(s):

• Arriba annotated fusion sequences may contain characters that aren’t supported. This update skips such sequences.
• The --aggregate-report-evaluation parameter in the standalone pvacseq generate_protein_fasta command was previously set up with nargs in order to allow specifying multiple values. However, this conflicts with required positional parameters. The parameter definiton was updated so that multiple values are now specified as a comma-separated list.
• pVACfuse would previously fail in an odd way when none of the fusions in the input were processable. This update now exits pVACfuse more gracefully in this case.
• The reference proteome similarity step would previously fail when an epitope’s full peptide sequence wasn’t found in the input fasta. It now skips such epitopes and marks the Reference Match column as Not Run.
• There was a mismatch in how proximal variants were incorporated into the n-mer fasta files vs the “master” fasta file which had the potential of epitopes not being present in the “master” fasta file. This update brings both file creation steps in sync.

4.0.1

This is a bugfix release. It fixes the following problem(s):

• It fixes errors for a few edge cases when determining the mutation position(s).
• Update the HCC1395 demo date for pVACview to include elution data.
• Correctly set NA columns in pVACview export dataframe.
• Handle Arriba files with empty peptide_sequence fields.

4.0.0

This version adds the following features, outlined below. Please note that pVACtools 4.0 is not backwards-compatible and certain changes will break old workflows.

Breaking Changes

• pVACseq|pVACfuse|pVACbind report files have been reformatted to add some additional information and, in the case of pVACfuse and pVACbind, remove columns where all values were NA. Existing output files will no longer work with the standalone commands as well as pVACview.
• The format of the Mutation Position column has been updated to no longer use 0 and n+1 to denote mutations starting before or ending after the epitope. This column now only shows the actually mutated positions.

New Features

• We now support MHCflurry and NetMHCpanEL elution algorithms.
• Users are now able to select specific amino acids that would be problematic for vaccine manufacturing and have the pipelines mark epitopes with such amino acids.
• When running the reference proteome similarity step, users are now able to specify a peptide fasta to search against instead of using BLAST. Any exact matches against the entries in the peptide fasta are counted as a hit.
• The aggregate report now takes into account many command line thresholds when tiering candidates. We also refined the way we determine the Best Peptide to take into account the biotype and TSL of the transcripts coding for the peptide, and whether or not the candidate has any problematic positions or fails the anchor criteria. Please see the output file section of the documentation for more details.
• pVACview has been updated with a host of new features
  • Users may adjust a wider variety of thresholds for retiering.
  • Users are now able to reset the tiering thresholds to the ones originally used when running pVACview.
  • Transcripts resulting in the same set of epitope candidates are now grouped together to make it easier to identify unique candidates.
  • Elution data is displayed in the epitope details section of pVACview.
  • Reference match details are displayed in the transcript set details section of pVACview.
• pVACfuse now supports output files from Arriba for fusion peptide predictions.
• Users may provide an optional STAR-fusion output file to their pVACfuse run in order to extract expression and read support data for their candidates. These will be used for filtering, as well as for tiering in the aggregate report. Please see the output file section of the documention for more details.
• When running the pvacseq generate_protein_fasta command, users are now able to specify an aggregated report as the --input-tsv. When using such a TSV, they can also use the --aggregate-report-evaluation to specify Evaluation statuses to include in the protein fasta. This is useful when creating a peptide fasta for vaccine ordering after using pVACview to select vaccine candidates and exporting the results to a new TSV.

Minor Changes

• The reference proteome step is now run on the aggregated report instead of the filtered report.
• A new parameter --aggregate-inclusion-binding-threshold controls which epitope candidates are included in the aggregate report.

3.1.3

This is a bugfix release. It fixes the following problem(s):

• It fixes an issue with the reference proteome match step where stop lost mutations would throw a fatal error.

3.1.2

This is a bugfix release. It fixes the following problem(s):

• It fixes an issue with parsing class II IEDB output files when running pVACfuse or pVACbind, which resulted in the wrong binding prediction scores being associated with certain epitopes.
• It adds missing import statements to pVACvector.