Purpose: Assisted download of selected samples from GISAID or EPI_SET creation.

gisaid-download is a tool for acuiring metadata for selected samples from gisaid. It was produced primarily for use with the EpiCoV database but should work just as well for EpiFlu or EpiPox. Fully-automated download from gisaid's website is tricky, but manual download is a slow, error-prone process requiring renaming and moving around files as you go. With gisaid-download, you are guided through the process of downloading desired samples.

Downloading Samples:

• keeps track of which samples you (or your team-mates) have already downloaded so you only get the new ones
• can download batches of samples from multiple locations
• moves/renames files to a consolidated directory as they're downloaded
• can limit which metadata files you download to any combination of the following:
  • fasta: [Nucleotide sequences]
  • meta: [Dates and Location, Patient status metadata, Sequencing technology metadata]
  • ackno: [Acknowledgement pdfs] (can only do this for 500 samples at a time, so EPI_SETs are better)

Uploading samples for further analysis:

• can upload all that data to an hpc via sftp
• can add a command to run after upload to start your analysis pipeline (We might make ours available someday!)

Getting an EPI_SET:

• can walk you through getting an EPI_SET identifier for all of your samples
• this will be emailed to you by GISAID

Some of the above features use sftp or ssh via scripted commands with the help of the package hpc-interact. It has its own config for storing login credentials. If needed and not yet made, your credentials will be gathered over the command line. That file can be specified in gisaid_config.ini and only requires two lines:

username=myuser
password=mypass

pip install gisaid-download

The first time you use gisaid-download, you'll need to set up a config file: gisaid_config.ini . Download it to your pwd or chosen outdir via:

gisaid_download --example -o gisaid/directory

Edit the config file to serve your needs. There are details in there that explain most everything.

Now you're ready to do the download and/or get your EPI_SET. Let's say we only want samples that were collected before 2023. We'll set a date (required for creating unique filenames). To run, do this:

sample_date='2023-01-01'
gisaid_download ${sample_date}

The above command triggers up to four steps. Steps 1, 3, and 4 only happen if you're interacting with the hpc cluster. If using the --no_cluster (or -n) flag, they will be skipped.

If you're planning on transferring downloaded data to an hpc, the above command will first look for samples that already exist on the hpc at your cluster_epicov_dir (from config). This uses sftp via (via hpc-interact). If no data yet exists on the cluster or you're the only one downloading samples and transferring them to the hpc, you can skip this step by adding the --skip_local_update (or -s) flag like this:

gisaid_download ${sample_date} --skip_local_update

The flag -n can also be used to skip this step along with step 3 and 4.

This is an interactive download that by default requires pressing enter after each step. If you don't want to press enter as much (like if you get in the rhythm and can't be bothered to stop...), you can add the --quick (or -q) flag like this

gisaid_download ${sample_date} --quick

Using sftp (via hpc-interact), all the data downloaded in Step 2 will be uploaded to the hpc at your cluster_epicov_dir.

The flag -n can also be used to skip this step along with step 1 and 4.

If specified in your gisaid_config.ini, followup_command will be run by ssh through hpc-interact. This could be any string, but we recommend setting it to run a script that will begin analyzing the data you just uploaded.