BOL

HybPiper was designed for targeted sequence capture, in which DNA sequencing libraries are enriched for gene regions of interest, especially for phylogenetics. HybPiper is a suite of Python scripts that wrap and connect bioinformatics tools in order to extract target sequences from high-throughput DNA sequencing reads.

Targeted bait capture is a technique for sequencing many loci simultaneously based on bait sequences. HybPiper pipeline starts with high-throughput sequencing reads (for example from Illumina MiSeq), and assigns them to target genes using BLASTx or BWA. The reads are distributed to separate directories, where they are assembled separately using SPAdes. The main output is a FASTA file of the (in frame) CDS portion of the sample for each target region, and a separate file with the translated protein sequence.

HybPiper also includes post-processing scripts, run after the main pipeline, to also extract the intronic regions flanking each exon, investigate putative paralogs, and calculate sequencing depth. For more information, please see our wiki.

HybPiper is run separately for each sample (single or paired-end sequence reads). When HybPiper generates sequence files from the reads, it does so in a standardized directory hierarchy. Many of the post-processing scripts rely on this directory hierarchy, so do not modify it after running the initial pipeline. It is a good idea to run the pipeline for each sample from the same directory. You will end up with one directory per run of HybPiper, and some of the later scripts take advantage of this predictable directory structure.