# Panalyze: automated virus pangenome variation graph construction, analysis and annotation

**Authors:** Chandana Tennakoon, Thibaut Freville, Tim Downing

PMC · DOI: 10.1093/bioadv/vbag071 · Bioinformatics Advances · 2026-03-10

## TL;DR

Panalyze is a scalable tool for building and analyzing virus pangenome variation graphs, enabling efficient genomic diversity studies.

## Contribution

Panalyze introduces a scalable, automated pipeline for virus pangenome variation graph construction and analysis.

## Key findings

- Panalyze efficiently constructs and analyzes virus pangenome variation graphs across diverse computing environments.
- The tool supports both large-scale and single-laptop operations, making it accessible for various research settings.
- Panalyze generates valuable outputs for studying viral genomic diversity and optimizing pangenome analysis.

## Abstract

Constructing and studying pangenome variation graphs (PVGs) supports new insights into viral genomic diversity. This is because such pangenomes are less prone to reference bias, which affects mutation detection. Interpreting the information arising from this is challenging, so automating these processes to allow exploratory investigations for PVG optimisation is essential. Moreover, existing methods do not scale well to the smaller virus genome sizes and to facilitate analysis in laptop environments. To address this, we developed an easily deployable pipeline to facilitate the rapid creation of virus PVGs that applies a broad range of analyses to these PVGs.

We present Panalyze, a computationally scalable virus PVG construction, analysis and annotation tool implemented in NextFlow and containerised in Docker. Panalyze uses NextFlow to efficiently complete tasks across multiple compute nodes and in diverse computing environments. Panalyze can also operate on a single thread on a standard laptop, and analyse sequence lengths of any size. We illustrate how Panalyze works and the valuable outputs it can generate using a range of common viral pathogens.

Panalyze is released under a MIT open-source license, available on GitHub with documentation accessible at https://github.com/downingtim/Panalyze/.

## Full-text entities

- **Genes:** DGCR (DiGeorge syndrome chromosome region) [NCBI Gene 1714] {aka CATCH22, DGS, VCF}, BBS2 (Bardet-Biedl syndrome 2) [NCBI Gene 583] {aka BBS, RP74}
- **Diseases:** PVGs (OMIM:610141)
- **Chemicals:** C (MESH:D002244), PVG (-), Nucleotide (MESH:D009711)
- **Species:** Porcine respiratory coronavirus (no rank) [taxon 11146], Sheeppox virus (no rank) [taxon 10266], Rift Valley fever virus (no rank) [taxon 11588], Foot-and-mouth disease virus (no rank) [taxon 12110], Lumpy skin disease virus (no rank) [taxon 59509]

## Full text

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## Figures

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## References

53 references — full list in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC13005692/full.md

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC13005692