Circular strands?

[ncadpaul]

What is recommended way to represent circular strands in UNF?

Presume having 5’ previous id point to 3’ id, and 3’ next id point to 5’ id.

Perhaps an optional "isCircular" boolean field could be considered.

[davous267]

Thank you for the suggestion. You are correct, circular strands are currently expected to be represented by the 5' and 3' ends pointing at each other. The documentation of the upcoming UNF 0.8.0 [develop branch] was improved to make this more clear.
As for the "isCircular" field, I have been thinking about this option lately. However, I feel like that – in the end – it can be more of a complication for applications implementing UNF as it will make the UNF contain redundant data. For example, a circular strand would need to have the 5'/3' end references correct, as well as the "isCircular" field. Moreover, breaking a circular strand at some particular location would require the application to also update this field, instead of working purely with nucleotide-level data. I feel like this may be a space for errors when processing UNF.
In conclusion, I suggest not including this field at the moment. However, I leave this issue open for further discussion.