https://github.com/marbl/meryl

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/marbl/merqury

More at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23303509

Address of the bookmark: http://sc932.github.io/ALE/about.html

The "Ifs" of NGS QC and Trimming

1. Ensures Data Integrity
   If you want to minimize errors in downstream analyses, QC and trimming remove low-quality reads and bases, ensuring high-confidence data. This step is essential for reliable variant calling, assembly, and other applications.

2. Removes Contaminants
   If adapter sequences or contaminants are present in the raw reads, trimming can eliminate them. This prevents issues like misalignment or incorrect biological interpretations, ensuring cleaner data for analysis.

3. Improves Mapping and Assembly
   If your goal is better alignment to a reference genome or improved de novo assembly, trimming low-quality bases and adapters is critical. High-quality reads map more efficiently and generate more accurate assemblies.

4. Reduces Computational Load
   If you want to save computational resources, trimming reduces the dataset size, which speeds up processing and analysis. Clean datasets mean less computational time spent on processing low-quality data.

5. Prepares for Standardized Analyses
   If your project involves multiple datasets, QC and trimming ensure uniformity across them. This standardization makes comparisons valid and reproducible, particularly in large collaborative studies.

The "Buts" of NGS QC and Trimming

1. Risk of Over-Trimming
   But excessive trimming can lead to the loss of informative sequences, reducing read depth and potentially discarding biologically relevant data. This is especially critical in studies with limited sequencing depth.

2. Bias Introduction
   But trimming algorithms might introduce biases, especially if they inadvertently remove sequences with specific biological patterns. This can skew results and compromise biological insights.

3. Loss of Context in Paired-End Reads
   But trimming one read in a pair more than the other can lead to loss of pairing information. This complicates downstream analyses that rely on paired-end data, such as structural variant detection.

4. Time and Resource Intensive
   But running QC and trimming for large datasets can be computationally expensive and time-consuming. As sequencing depth increases, preprocessing becomes a bottleneck in the analysis pipeline.

5. Variable Standards
   But the criteria for trimming (e.g., quality threshold, minimum read length) can vary between tools and datasets. This variability may affect reproducibility and comparability of results across studies.

Balancing the "Ifs" and "Buts"

To maximize the benefits of QC and trimming while mitigating the challenges, consider the following best practices:

• Use QC Tools Wisely: Start with tools like FastQC to identify quality issues in your raw data. Visualizing quality metrics helps tailor your trimming parameters.

• Choose Reliable Trimming Tools: Tools like Trimmomatic, Cutadapt, and BBduk offer adaptive and customizable trimming options. Select one that aligns with your dataset and project goals.

• Set Reasonable Parameters: Avoid over-trimming by setting quality thresholds and minimum read lengths that balance data retention and quality improvement.

• Test Downstream Effects: Validate the impact of QC and trimming on downstream analyses, such as alignment efficiency, variant calling accuracy, or assembly quality.

• Document Your Workflow: Maintain detailed records of the parameters and tools used for QC and trimming. This ensures reproducibility and enables better troubleshooting.

Conclusion

NGS quality control and trimming are essential steps to ensure reliable and accurate data for analysis. While the "ifs" highlight the clear benefits of these steps, the "buts" remind us of the potential pitfalls. By adopting best practices and carefully balancing these considerations, you can optimize your preprocessing workflow and unlock the full potential of your sequencing data.

 UPARSE >
OTU clustering for 16S and other marker genes. Highly accurate OTU sequences and improved diversity measures. UCHIME >
Chimeric sequence detection. PILER >
De novo genome repeat finder. PILER-CR >
Detection of CRISPR repeats in bacterial genomes. QSCORE >
Compare two multiple alignments for benchmarking. PALS >
Whole-genome alignment. PREFAB >
Protein Reference Alignment Database. MSA benchmark collection >
Selected multiple alignment benchmarks in a standardized FASTA format.

Address of the bookmark: http://drive5.com/software.html

MEGAN6 is a comprehensive toolbox for interactively analyzing microbiome data. All the interactive tools you need in one application.

• Taxonomic analysis using the NCBI taxonomy or a customized taxonomy such as SILVA
• Functional analysis using InterPro2GO, SEED, eggNOG or KEGG
• Bar charts, word clouds, Voronoi tree maps and many other charts
• PCoA, clustering and networks
• Supports metadata
• MEGAN parses many different types of input

Why use MEGAN6?

Address of the bookmark: https://ab.inf.uni-tuebingen.de/software/megan6

Cutadapt helps with these trimming tasks by finding the adapter or primer sequences in an error-tolerant way. It can also modify and filter reads in various ways. Adapter sequences can contain IUPAC wildcard characters. Also, paired-end reads and even colorspace data is supported. If you want, you can also just demultiplex your input data, without removing adapter sequences at all.

Cutadapt comes with an extensive suite of automated tests and is available under the terms of the MIT license.

If you use cutadapt, please cite DOI:10.14806/ej.17.1.200 .

More at https://github.com/marcelm/cutadapt

Address of the bookmark: http://cutadapt.readthedocs.io/en/stable/guide.html

Progressive Cactus is a whole-genome alignment package.

Requirements

• git
• gcc 4.2 or newer
• python 2.7
• wget
• 64bit processor and build environment
• 150GB+ of memory on at least one machine when aligning mammal-sized genomes; less memory is needed for smaller genomes.
• Parasol or SGE for cluster support.
• 750M disk space

Instructions

IMPORTANT NOTE: Progressive Cactus does not presently support installation into paths that contain spaces. Until this is resolved, you can use a softlink as a workaround: ln -s "path with spaces" "installation path without spaces"

In the parent directory of where you want Progressive Cactus installed:

git clone git://github.com/glennhickey/progressiveCactus.git
cd progressiveCactus
git pull
git submodule update --init
make

It is also convenient to add the location of progressiveCactus/bin to your PATH environment variable. In order to run the included tools (ex hal2maf) in the submodules/ directory structure, first source progressiveCactus/environment to load the installed environment.

If any errors occur during the build process, you are unlikely to be able to use the tool. Please submit a GitHub issue so we can help out: not only will you help yourself, but others who wish to use the tool as well.

Note that all dependencies are also built and included in the submodules/ directory. This increases the size and build time but greatly simplifies installation and version management. The installation does not create or modify any files outside the progressiveCactus/ directory.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/glennhickey/progressiveCactus

bedtools is developed in the Quinlan laboratory at the University of Utah and benefits from fantastic contributions made by scientists worldwide.

Address of the bookmark: http://bedtools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

Using the reference sequence dictionary (*.dict), it also creates some empty BAM files if no sam record was found for a chromosome. A pair of 'mock' SAM-Records can also be added to those empty BAMs to avoid some tools (like samtools) to crash.

Usage

java -jar splitbam.jar -p OUT/__CHROM__/__CHROM__.bam -R ref.fasta (bam|sam|stdin)

Options

• -h help; This screen.
• -R (indexed reference file) REQUIRED.
• -u (unmapped chromosome name): default:Unmapped
• -e | --empty : generate EMPTY bams for chromosome having no read mapped
• -m | --mock : if option '-e', add a mock pair of sam records to the empty bam
• -p (output file/bam pattern) REQUIRED. MUST contain __CHROM__ and end with .bam
• -s assume input is sorted.
• -x | --index create index.
• -t | --tmp (dir) tmp file directory
• -G (file) chrom-group file (see below)

Address of the bookmark: https://code.google.com/archive/p/jvarkit/wikis/SplitBam.wiki

Address of the bookmark: http://www.vicbioinformatics.com/software.prokka.shtml