Assemblies

Summary

Assemblies can be downloaded from OSF, AWS, or the ENA.

Batched assemblies are on OSF. If you want all assemblies or large numbers then get them from OSF.
Individual FASTA files for each sample are on AWS. If you want assemblies for specific samples then AWS will be easiest.
Individual FASTA files are also available from the ENA. However, around 10,000 assemblies are not available from the ENA, since the submission system rejected them due to various errors.

Downloading assemblies from AWS

Individual assembly files

A gzipped FASTA assembly file for each sample is available, with the S3 URI of the form:

s3://allthebacteria-assemblies/<SAMPLE_ID>.fa.gz

For example:

s3://allthebacteria-assemblies/SAMD00000344.fa.gz

To download to the current working directory using the aws cli:

aws s3 cp --no-sign-request s3://allthebacteria-assemblies/SAMD00000344.fa.gz .

The object URL is of the form:

https://allthebacteria-assemblies.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/<SAMPLE_ID>.fa.gz

For example:

https://allthebacteria-assemblies.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/SAMD00000344.fa.gz

Download with wget:

wget https://allthebacteria-assemblies.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/SAMD00000344.fa.gz

List of all available assemblies

If you want to know which assemblies are on AWS, we do not recommend running ls to find out! It will be slow. Every Monday, a list of current assembly files is generated. Get the latest file with:

aws s3 ls --no-sign-request s3://allthebacteria-metadata/allthebacteria-assemblies/assemblies-list/data/  | sort | tail -n1

At the time of writing, the output was:

2025-03-23 17:38:59   79359181 b21b76f7-b5f1-4862-ba55-4b515bc6d05f.csv.gz

That file can be downloaded to a file called latest.tsv.gz with:

aws s3 cp --no-sign-request s3://allthebacteria-metadata/allthebacteria-assemblies/assemblies-list/data/b21b76f7-b5f1-4862-ba55-4b515bc6d05f.csv.gz latest.tsv.gz

or:

wget -O latest.tsv.gz https://allthebacteria-metadata.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/allthebacteria-assemblies/assemblies-list/data/b21b76f7-b5f1-4862-ba55-4b515bc6d05f.csv.gz

That file lists all assemblies that are in the bucket allthebacteria-metadata, plus the size, md5sum, and time of upload.

Downloading assemblies from the ENA

Nearly all of the assemblies have been accessioned in the ENA as “analysis” objects. The accessions are in the file atb.metadata.202505.sqlite.assembly.tsv.xz. It is a TSV format file of the table assembly from the SQLite metadata database. The TSV file can be downloaded with:

wget -O atb.metadata.202505.sqlite.assembly.tsv.xz https://osf.io/download/4kjh7/

The relevant columns here are sample_accession and assembly_accession. For example, sample SAMN23010837 has the assembly accession ERZ26049045. Get the URL by querying the ENA:

$ wget -qO- 'https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/portal/api/filereport?accession=ERZ26049045&result=analysis'
analysis_accession  submitted_bytes submitted_md5   submitted_ftp
ERZ26049045 1785435 1e59b0bf2e684f6491d9617dee9fde2b    ftp.sra.ebi.ac.uk/vol1/analysis/ERZ260/ERZ26049045/SAMN23010837.fa.gz

and then get the assembly with:

wget ftp.sra.ebi.ac.uk/vol1/analysis/ERZ260/ERZ26049045/SAMN23010837.fa.gz

Downloading assemblies from OSF

FASTA files of assemblies for AllTheBacteria are available from OSF. To reduce file size, the assemblies are provided in batches of xzipped tar archives (made by Miniphy). Each archive contains up to ~4000 FASTA files.

The downside of this is that if you want the assembly for a single sample, then you will need to download the tar.xz file and extract it from that. We apologise for the inconvenience, but bear in mind that miniphy compression makes a huge difference. For example, the size of the individual gzipped FASTA files for release 0.2 is around 3.1TB. This is too large to sensibly put on OSF. The total size of the same data but in compressed archive files is 89GB.

The latest list of all samples and their related file names are in the file file_list.all.latest.tsv.gz. This file should have all the information you need. Older files and files split by dataset are also available - see the folder “File Lists” in the top level of the Assembly component on OSF.

The columns in this file are:

sample = the INSDC sample accession
sylph_species = inferred species call from running sylph on the reads. This is using the “post-202505” method on all of the samples. Meaning that species calls in files from 202505 onwards are not the same as in files before 202505. See the species calls page for more details
filename_in_tar_xz = the FASTA filename for this sample inside the tar.xz file
tar_xz = the name of the tar.xz file where this sample’s FASTA lives
tar_xz_url = URL of tar_xz
tar_xz_md5 = MD5 sum of tar_xz
tar_xz_size_MB = size of the tar_xz file in MB

Older files (pre-202505) have these two columns:

species_sylph = inferred species call from running sylph on the reads, using the pre-202505 method.
species_miniphy = the name miniphy gave to the species

If you want to download the archives in bulk, then use the tar_xz_url column to get the urls, and tar_xz for what you should name the downloaded file. OSF does not have the filename in the download URL.

Here’s an example of how to get the wget commands to run:

$ gunzip -c file_list.all.latest.tsv.gz | awk -F"\t" 'NR>1 {print "wget -O "$4" "$5}' | uniq | head -n3
wget -O atb.assembly.r0.2.batch.127.tar.xz https://osf.io/download/6671719165e1de5eb5893c28/
wget -O atb.assembly.r0.2.batch.136.tar.xz https://osf.io/download/66717ce2d835c439e94cdf1e/
wget -O atb.assembly.r0.2.batch.625.tar.xz https://osf.io/download/6672f5a7d835c43c944ce4e8/

If you just want one sample, for example sample SAMD00000355, then this is the info in file_list.all.latest.tsv.gz:

sample              SAMD00000355
sylph_species       Streptococcus pyogenes
filename_in_tar_xz  atb.assembly.r0.2.batch.625/SAMD00000355.fa
tar_xz              atb.assembly.r0.2.batch.625.tar.xz
tar_xz_url          https://osf.io/download/6672f5a7d835c43c944ce4e8/
tar_xz_md5          444ff0fc9e860ab374bdc6fe9d9bd9f5
tar_xz_size_MB      21.5

The wget command to get the tar file would be:

wget -O atb.assembly.r0.2.batch.625.tar.xz https://osf.io/download/6672f5a7d835c43c944ce4e8/

Extract the FASTA with:

tar xf atb.assembly.r0.2.batch.625.tar.xz atb.assembly.r0.2.batch.625/SAMD00000355.fa

Species calls and assembly batches

The text below only applies to 2024-08 and earlier. It is only relevant if you are using old files. For 2025-05, there is only one species call in the assembly file, which is made from parsing sylph results as described here.

Why are species calls included in the assembly file? For convenience, to allow getting all assemblies for a particular species. Note that one batch of assemblies will often contain the same species.

Miniphy needs species calls to aid compression of the assembly FASTA files, so that similar genomes are batched together. We run Sylph on all reads, to get this species call for each sample. See the Sylph section of the species page for details. The calls input to Miniphy are in the column species_sylph. Miniphy changes these names (removing spaces, adding underscores) - we put the Miniphy name in species_miniphy column.

Miniphy keeps its species names in its output files. However, for AllTheBacteria we want to keep species calls separate from assembly files. For this reason, we rename the miniphy files before releasing them. (Side note: release 0.2 on the EBI FTP site did have species names in them, but were removed while migrating to OSF.)

SQLite metadata Species identification