1. Quality Trimming and Filtering Your Sequences

Make sure you’ve got the PROJECT location defined, and your data is there:

set -u
printf "\nMy raw data is in $PROJECT/data/, and consists of $(ls -1 ${PROJECT}/data/*.fastq.gz | wc -l) files\n\n"
set +u

Important: If you get an error above or the count of files is wrong... STOP!! Revisit the installation instructions for your compute platform!

Also, be sure you have loaded the right Python packages

source ~/pondenv/bin/activate

Run FastQC on all your files

Note

We can use FastQC to look at the quality of your sequences:

fastqc *.fastq.gz

Find the right Illumina adapters

You’ll need to know which Illumina sequencing adapters were used for your library in order to trim them off. Below, we will use the TruSeq3-PE.fa adapters:

wget https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-med/trimmomatic.git/plain/adapters/TruSeq3-PE.fa

Note

You’ll need to make sure these are the right adapters for your data. If they are the right adapters, you should see that some of the reads are trimmed; if they’re not, you won’t see anything get trimmed.

Adapter trim each pair of files

(From this point on, you may want to be running things inside of screen, so that you can leave it running while you go do something else.)

Run:

rm -f orphans.qc.fq.gz

for filename in *_R1_*.fastq.gz
do
     # first, make the base by removing fastq.gz
     base=$(basename $filename .fastq.gz)
     echo $base

     # now, construct the R2 filename by replacing R1 with R2
     baseR2=${base/_R1_/_R2_}
     echo $baseR2

     # finally, run Trimmomatic
     TrimmomaticPE ${base}.fastq.gz ${baseR2}.fastq.gz \
        ${base}.qc.fq.gz s1_se \
        ${baseR2}.qc.fq.gz s2_se \
        ILLUMINACLIP:TruSeq3-PE.fa:2:40:15 \
        LEADING:2 TRAILING:2 \
        SLIDINGWINDOW:4:2 \
        MINLEN:25

     # save the orphans
     gzip -9c s1_se s2_se >> orphans.qc.fq.gz
     rm -f s1_se s2_se
done

The paired sequences output by this set of commands will be in the files ending in .qc.fq.gz, with any orphaned sequences all together in orphans.qc.fq.gz.

Make these trimmed reads read-only and keep them, as we will reuse them later.

chmod u-w ${PROJECT}/quality/*.qc.fq.gz

Interleave the sequences

Next, we need to take these R1 and R2 sequences and convert them into interleaved form, for the next step. To do this, we’ll use scripts from the khmer package, which we installed above.

Now let’s use a for loop again - you might notice this is only a minor modification of the previous for loop...

for filename in *_R1_*.qc.fq.gz
do
     # first, make the base by removing .extract.fastq.gz
     base=$(basename $filename .qc.fq.gz)
     echo $base

     # now, construct the R2 filename by replacing R1 with R2
     baseR2=${base/_R1/_R2}
     echo $baseR2

     # construct the output filename
     output=${base/_R1/}.pe.qc.fq.gz

     (interleave-reads.py ${base}.qc.fq.gz ${baseR2}.qc.fq.gz | \
         gzip > $output)
done

The final product of this is now a set of files named *.pe.qc.fq.gz that are paired-end / interleaved and quality filtered sequences, together with the file orphans.qc.fq.gz that contains orphaned sequences.

Finishing up

Make the end product files read-only

chmod u-w *.pe.qc.fq.gz orphans.qc.fq.gz

to make sure you don’t accidentally delete them.

Since you linked your original data files into the quality directory, you can now do:

rm *.fastq.gz

to remove them from this location; you don’t need them for any future steps.

Things to think about

Note that the filenames, while ugly, are conveniently structured with the history of what you’ve done to them. This is a good strategy to keep in mind.

Evaluate the quality of your files with FastQC again

Note

We can once again use FastQC to look at the quality of your newly-trimmed sequences:

fastqc *.pe.qc.fq.gz

Next step: 2. Applying Digital Normalization.


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