Panorama: A robust pangenome-based method for predicting and comparing biological systems across species

by Jérôme Arnoux, Jean Mainguy, Laura Bry, Quentin Fernandez de Grado, Yazid Hoblos, David Vallenet, Alexandra Calteau

Over the last decade, the expansion in the number of available genomes has profoundly transformed the study of genetic diversity, evolution, and ecological adaptation in prokaryotes. However, traditional bioinformatic approaches based on the analysis of individual genomes are showing their limitations when faced with the sheer scale of the data. To overcome these constraints, the concept of pangenome has emerged, offering a comprehensive framework to capture the full genetic repertoire of a species. In this study, we present PANORAMA, an innovative pangenomic tool designed to exploit pangenome graphs, enabling their annotation and comparison to explore the genomic diversity of several species. Based on the PPanGGOLiN pangenome graphs, PANORAMA integrates advanced methods for rule-based prediction of macromolecular systems and comparative analysis of conserved features between different pangenomes, such as spots of insertion. We illustrate the use of PANORAMA on a dataset of 941 Pseudomonas aeruginosa genomes, evaluating its performance against reference defense system prediction tools such as PADLOC and DefenseFinder. The analysis was then extended to a larger set, including four species of Enterobacteriaceae (>6,000 genomes), demonstrating PANORAMA’s ability to annotate, compare, and explore the diversity and distribution of biological systems across multiple species. This work provides new methods for the large-scale comparative study of microbial genomes and highlights the relevance of pangenome approaches in deciphering their evolutionary dynamics. PANORAMA is freely available and accessible at: https://github.com/labgem/PANORAMA