Flexbar preprocesses high-throughput sequencing data efficiently. It demultiplexes barcoded runs and removes adapter sequences. Moreover, trimming and filtering features are provided. Flexbar increases read mapping rates and improves genome and transcriptome assemblies. It supports next-generation sequencing data in fasta and fastq format, e.g. from Illumina and the Roche 454 platform.
To prepare your environment for using Flexbar, enter the following:
[user@biowulf]$ sinteractive 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 ~]$ module load flexbar
The command flexbar will now be available to you. To learn more use the help arguments like so:
[user@cn3144 ~]$ flexbar -h
To copy the Flexbar test data set, use the following commands:
[user@cn3144 ~]$ cp -r /usr/local/apps/flexbar/test /data/$USER/flexbar_test_data [user@cn3144 ~]$ cd /data/$USER/flexbar_test_data
You can now test commands with this example data set like so:
[user@cn3144 ~]$ flexbar --reads test.fasta --target my_result --adapters adapters.fasta
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Flexbar - flexible barcode and adapter removal, version 2.5
Local time: Tue Dec 15 11:18:48 2015
Target name: my_result
File type: fasta
Reads file: test.fasta
Adapter file: adapters.fasta
threads: 1
max-uncalled: 0
min-read-length: 18
adapter-trim-end: RIGHT
adapter-min-overlap: 3
adapter-threshold: 3
adapter-match: 1
adapter-mismatch: -1
adapter-gap: -6
Adapter: Sequence:
ad1 CGTCTT
Processing reads ...done.
Computation time: < 1 sec
Adapter removal statistics
==========================
Adapter: Overlap removal: Full length:
ad1 10 9
Min, max, mean and median adapter overlap: 5 / 6 / 5 / 6
Output file statistics
======================
Read file: my_result.fasta
written reads 7
skipped short reads 6
Filtering statistics
====================
Processed reads 13
skipped due to uncalled bases 0
short prior adapter removal 2
finally skipped short reads 6
Discarded reads overall 6
Remaining reads 7 (53% of input)
Processed bases: 422
Remaining bases: 196 (46% of input)
Flexbar completed adapter removal.
As with any sequence of commands, the last example could be written into a script and submitted to SLURM with the sbatch command. The script may look something like the following:
#!/bin/bash # this file is called myjob.bat module load flexbar cd /data/$USER/flexbar_test_data flexbar --reads test.fasta --target my_result --adapters adapters.fasta
Submit the job to SLURM with:
[user@biowulf ~]$ sbatch --mem=2g --walltime=00:00:10 myjob.bat
Note that larger jobs may need more memory and longer walltime, and that flexbar has a -n argument that controls the number of threads the program attempts to use. If you use this argument you must ensure that your sbatch call requests a matching number of cpus.
If necessary, a swarm of Flexbar jobs could be started by writing a swarm file and calling swarm with the file as input. A swarm file would look something like so:
flexbar --reads 1.fasta --target result1 --adapters adapter1.fasta flexbar --reads 2.fasta --target result2 --adapters adapter2.fasta flexbar --reads 3.fasta --target result3 --adapters adapter3.fasta ... flexbar --reads N.fasta --target resultN --adapters adapterN.fasta
Assuming this file was called myjobs.swarm, it would then be submitted to the batch system through the swarm command like so:
[user@biowulf ~]$ swarm -f myjobs.swarm --module flexbar -g 2 --time 00:01:00
Note that the jobs may need more memory or walltime depending on their computational demands. See the swarm webpage for more information, or contact the Biowulf staff at staff@hpc.nih.gov