Failed to export the viruses subtrees in STAMP format

Dear Daniel,

I generated a .megan file for accession-taxonomy mapping using MEGAN 6.17.0. I uncollapse the tree and select all nodes, and export .spf in STAMP format. The file contains lines corresponding to k__Bacteria, k__Archaea and k__Eukaryota, but no viruses.
lnrep1.megan (17.1 KB) lnrep1-Taxonomy-viruses_export.spf (514 Bytes) lnrep1-Taxonomy-allnodes_export.spf (404.0 KB)
I select viruses node and export in the same way. Then I get the lines like the following:

Level_1 Level_2 Level_3 Level_4 Level_5 Level_6 Level_7 Observation Ids lnrep1-all_5_fraction_spectra
k__(null) p__(null) c__(null) o__(null) f__(null) g__(null) s__(null) ID1 182.0
k__(null) p__(null) c__(null) o__(null) f__(null) g__(null) s__(null) ID131567 59920.0
k__(null) p__(null) c__(null) o__(null) f__(null) g__(null) s__(null) ID10239 0.0
k__(null) p__(null) c__(null) o__(null) f__(null) g__(null) s__(null) ID2559587 0.0
k__(null) p__(null) c__(null) o__(null) f__(null) g__(null) s__(null) ID-2 3.0

I have tried many time and varied the settings each time but still failed. I search the posts and find a similar post “export .spf file”(Export .spf file), which described the same error. However, there is no answer to this question.

I also try all other formats. However, the STAMP format is exactly what I need.

Should you please take a look of this issue. Thank you very much!

Feng

Dear Feng,

MEGAN doesn’t output viruses correctly because it tries to find
the Phylum Class Order Family Genus lineage for each node that is exported. However, viruses don’t follow this this classification and so MEGAN fails to report this correctly.

There are two possible solutions:

  1. you export and analyze viruses separately. To do so, uncollapse the viruses and select all their nodes. Then export in STAMP format, selecting “No” when asked whether to export all higher level nodes as well. This will export all viruses in a flat list.

  2. I could look into “filing in” or “faking” taxonomic ranks for viruses and outputting that, but I am not sure that would be a good idea.
    In particular, I doubt that “Class” means the same for cellular organisms, and viruses, say. What do you think?