Merging schemes
The Multilocus Sequence Typing Module is designed to make it easy to extend a scheme with your own isolates (see Extending schemes). This is done be adding sequence information to your local copy of a scheme - either one you created yourself from scratch or a scheme downloaded from a database.
When you extend your own copy of a downloaded scheme, you may find yourself in a situation where there has been updates to the scheme at the database including new alleles and/or sequence types, and you now have two schemes that you wish to combine into one. Just downloading and using the new scheme from the database would mean discarding your own contributions to your local copy of the scheme.
For this reason, the Multilocus Sequence Typing Module provides a merge function that makes it easy to combine two schemes:
Multilocus Sequence Typing (
) |
MLST Schemes (
) | Merge MLST
Schemes (
)
This will bring up a dialog where you select the two schemes that you wish to merge. The schemes have to have the same loci definitions in order to be merged (i.e. the same number of loci with identical names).
Clicking Next displays the dialog shown in figure 3.5.
Figure 3.5: This option makes it possible to update all references in isolates previously referring to one of the two old schemes so that they refer to the new scheme.
If you check this option, all the isolates that previously referred to one of the two old schemes in order to determine their sequence type can now be updated to refer to the new scheme instead (see Isolate - scheme dependencies for more information). Checking this option means that all isolates are typed according to the new scheme.
Click Next if you wish to save the new scheme without opening. If not, click Finish, and the new scheme will be opened.
If there are duplicates among the sequence types in the scheme, only one of the types will be included in the new scheme.