Short read quality and trimming

Start up an instance with ami-05384865 and 500 GB of local storage (Start an Amazon Web Services computer:). You should also configure your firewall (Configure your instance firewall) to pass through TCP ports 8000-8888.

Then, Log into your computer.

You should now be logged into your Amazon computer! You should see something like this:

ubuntu@ip-172-30-1-252:~$

this is the command prompt.

Prepping the computer

Before we do anything else, we need to set up a place to work and install a few things.

First, let’s set up a place to work. Here, we’ll make /mnt writeable:

sudo chmod a+rwxt /mnt

Note

/mnt is the location we’re going to use on Amazon computers, but if you’re working on a local cluster, it will have a different location. Talk to your local sysadmin and ask them where they recommend putting lots of short-term working files, i.e. the “scratch” space.


Installing some software

Run:

sudo apt-get -y update && \
sudo apt-get -y install trimmomatic fastqc python-pip \
   samtools zlib1g-dev ncurses-dev python-dev

Install anaconda:

curl -O https://repo.continuum.io/archive/Anaconda3-4.2.0-Linux-x86_64.sh
bash Anaconda3-4.2.0-Linux-x86_64.sh

Then update your environment and install khmer:

source ~/.bashrc

cd
git clone https://github.com/dib-lab/khmer.git
cd khmer
sudo python2 setup.py install

Running Jupyter Notebook

Let’s also run a Jupyter Notebook in /mnt. First, configure it a teensy bit more securely, and also have it run in the background:

jupyter notebook --generate-config

cat >>/home/ubuntu/.jupyter/jupyter_notebook_config.py <<EOF
c = get_config()
c.NotebookApp.ip = '*'
c.NotebookApp.open_browser = False
c.NotebookApp.password = u'sha1:5d813e5d59a7:b4e430cf6dbd1aad04838c6e9cf684f4d76e245c'
c.NotebookApp.port = 8000

EOF

Now, run!

cd /mnt
jupyter notebook &

You should be able to visit port 8000 on your AWS computer and see the Jupyter console. (The password is ‘davis’.)

Data source

We’re going to be using a subset of data from Hu et al., 2016. This paper from the Banfield lab samples some relatively low diversity environments and finds a bunch of nearly complete genomes.

(See DATA.md for a list of the data sets we’re using in this tutorial.)

1. Copying in some data to work with.

We’ve loaded subsets of the data onto an Amazon location for you, to make everything faster for today’s work. We’re going to put the files on your computer locally under the directory /mnt/data:

mkdir /mnt/data

Next, let’s grab part of the data set:

cd /mnt/data
curl -O -L https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/dib-training.ucdavis.edu/metagenomics-scripps-2016-10-12/SRR1976948_1.fastq.gz
curl -O -L https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/dib-training.ucdavis.edu/metagenomics-scripps-2016-10-12/SRR1976948_2.fastq.gz

Now if you type:

ls -l

you should see something like:

total 346936
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 169620631 Oct 11 23:37 SRR1976948_1.fastq.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 185636992 Oct 11 23:38 SRR1976948_2.fastq.gz

These are 1m read subsets of the original data, taken from the beginning of the file.

One problem with these files is that they are writeable - by default, UNIX makes things writeable by the file owner. Let’s fix that before we go on any further:

chmod u-w *

We’ll talk about what these files are below.

1. Copying data into a working location

First, make a working directory; this will be a place where you can futz around with a copy of the data without messing up your primary data:

mkdir /mnt/work
cd /mnt/work

Now, make a “virtual copy” of the data in your working directory by linking it in –

ln -fs /mnt/data/* .

These are FASTQ files – let’s take a look at them:

less SRR1976948_1.fastq.gz

(use the spacebar to scroll down, and type ‘q’ to exit ‘less’)

Question:

  • where does the filename come from?
  • why are there 1 and 2 in the file names?

Links:

2. FastQC

We’re going to use FastQC to summarize the data. We already installed ‘fastqc’ on our computer for you.

Now, run FastQC on two files:

fastqc SRR1976948_1.fastq.gz
fastqc SRR1976948_2.fastq.gz

Now type ‘ls’:

ls -d *fastqc*

to list the files, and you should see:

SRR1976948_1_fastqc.html
SRR1976948_1_fastqc.zip
SRR1976948_2_fastqc.html
SRR1976948_2_fastqc.zip

You can download these files using your Jupyter Notebook console, if you like; or you can look at these copies of them:

Questions:

  • What should you pay attention to in the FastQC report?
  • Which is “better”, file 1 or file 2? And why?

Links:

3. Trimmomatic

Now we’re going to do some trimming! We’ll be using Trimmomatic, which (as with fastqc) we’ve already installed via apt-get.

The first thing we’ll need are the adapters to trim off:

curl -O -L http://dib-training.ucdavis.edu.s3.amazonaws.com/mRNAseq-semi-2015-03-04/TruSeq2-PE.fa

Now, to run Trimmomatic:

TrimmomaticPE SRR1976948_1.fastq.gz \
              SRR1976948_2.fastq.gz \
     SRR1976948_1.qc.fq.gz s1_se \
     SRR1976948_2.qc.fq.gz s2_se \
     ILLUMINACLIP:TruSeq2-PE.fa:2:40:15 \
     LEADING:2 TRAILING:2 \
     SLIDINGWINDOW:4:2 \
     MINLEN:25

You should see output that looks like this:

...
Input Read Pairs: 1000000 Both Surviving: 885734 (88.57%) Forward Only Surviving: 114262 (11.43%) Reverse Only Surviving: 4 (0.00%) Dropped: 0 (0.00%)
TrimmomaticPE: Completed successfully

Questions:

  • How do you figure out what the parameters mean?
  • How do you figure out what parameters to use?
  • What adapters do you use?
  • What version of Trimmomatic are we using here? (And FastQC?)
  • Do you think parameters are different for RNAseq and genomic data sets?
  • What’s with these annoyingly long and complicated filenames?
  • why are we running R1 and R2 together?

For a discussion of optimal trimming strategies, see MacManes, 2014 – it’s about RNAseq but similar arguments should apply to metagenome assembly.

Links:

4. FastQC again

Run FastQC again on the trimmed files:

fastqc SRR1976948_1.qc.fq.gz
fastqc SRR1976948_2.qc.fq.gz

And now view my copies of these files:

Let’s take a look at the output files:

less SRR1976948_1.qc.fq.gz

(again, use spacebar to scroll, ‘q’ to exit less).

Questions:

  • is the quality trimmed data “better” than before?
  • Does it matter that you still have adapters!?

Optional: K-mer Spectral Error Trimming

Next: Run the MEGAHIT assembler


LICENSE: This documentation and all textual/graphic site content is licensed under the Creative Commons - 0 License (CC0) -- fork @ github. Presentations (PPT/PDF) and PDFs are the property of their respective owners and are under the terms indicated within the presentation.