BWA is a fast light-weighted tool that aligns short sequences to a sequence database, such as the human reference genome. By default, BWA finds an alignment within edit distance 2 to the query sequence, except for disallowing gaps close to the end of the query. It can also be tuned to find a fraction of longer gaps at the cost of speed and of more false alignments.

BWA excels in its speed. Mapping 2 million high-quality 35bp short reads against the human genome can be done in 20 minutes. Usually the speed is gained at the cost of huge memory, disallowing gaps and/or the hard limits on the maximum read length and the maximum mismatches. BWA does not. It is still relatively light-weighted (2.3GB memory for human alignment), performs gapped alignment, and does not set a hard limit on read length or maximum mismatches.

Given a database file in FASTA format, BWA first builds BWT index with the 'index' command. The alignments in suffix array (SA) coordinates are then generated with the 'aln' command. The resulting file contains ALL the alignments found by BWA. The 'samse/sampe' command converts SA coordinates to chromosomal coordinates. For single-end reads, most of computing time is spent on finding the SA coordinates (the aln command). For paired-end reads, half of computing time may be spent on pairing (the sampe command) given 32bp reads. Using longer reads would reduce the fraction of time spent on pairing because each end in a pair would be mapped to fewer places.

References:

• Li H. and Durbin R. (2009) Fast and accurate short read alignment with Burrows-Wheeler Transform. Bioinformatics, 25:1754-60.
• If you use BWA-SW, please cite:
  Li H. and Durbin R. (2010) Fast and accurate long-read alignment with Burrows-Wheeler Transform. Bioinformatics, Epub.

• bwa Main Site
• Type bwa at the prompt
• Type bwa command at the prompt, e.g. bwa index

• Module Name: bwa (see the modules page for more information)
• Multithreaded
• Example files in /fdb/app_testdata/fastq/
• Reference data in:
  • /fdb/bwa/
  • /fdb/igenomes/organism/source/build/Sequence/BWAIndex/, where
    
    • organism is the specific organism of interest (Gallus_gallus, Rattus_norvegicus, etc.)
    • source is the source for the sequence (NCBI, Ensembl, UCSC)
    • build is the specific genome draft of interest (hg19, build37.2, GRCh37)

Allocate an interactive session and run the program. Sample session:

[user@biowulf]$ sinteractive --cpus-per-task=8 --mem=24g
salloc.exe: Pending job allocation 46116226
salloc.exe: job 46116226 queued and waiting for resources
salloc.exe: job 46116226 has been allocated resources
salloc.exe: Granted job allocation 46116226
salloc.exe: Waiting for resource configuration
salloc.exe: Nodes cn3144 are ready for job

[user@cn3144 ~]$ ml bwa
[user@cn3144 ~]$ bwa aln -t 8 /fdb/bwa/indexes/hg19.fa file.fastq > file.sai

[user@cn3144 ~]$ exit
salloc.exe: Relinquishing job allocation 46116226
[user@biowulf ~]$

Create a batch input file (e.g. bwa.sh). For example:

module load bwa
cd /data/$USER/dir
bwa index -a bwtsw file.csfasta
bwa aln -t $SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK file.csfasta file.fastq > file.sai
bwa samse file.csfasta file.sai file.fastq > file.sam

Submit this job using the Slurm sbatch command.

sbatch [--cpus-per-task=#] [--mem=#] bwa.sh

Create a swarmfile (e.g. bwa.swarm). For example:

cd /data/$USER/dir1; bwa aln -t $SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK file.csfasta file.fastq > file.sai
cd /data/$USER/dir2; bwa aln -t $SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK file.csfasta file.fastq > file.sai
cd /data/$USER/dir3; bwa aln -t $SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK file.csfasta file.fastq > file.sai

Submit this job using the swarm command.

swarm -f bwa.swarm [-g #] [-t #] --module bwa