An update on ITSx and HMMER 3.1
An ITSx user yesterday made me aware of an information-problem (thanks Suzanne!) regarding the use of ITSx in combination with the HMMER 3.1 beta. I have not been entirely clear on why you might get the “Error: bad format, binary auxfiles, (…) binary auxfiles are in an outdated HMMER format (3/b); please hmmpress your HMM file again” error message when running ITSx with HMMER 3.1 installed. You might think that following the instructions for Metaxa might do the trick. As you will notice, however, it will not. Instead you will be presented with the following error message: “Error: Failed to open binary auxfiles”. This is because while Metaxa 1.1.2 will re-create the HMM-files if needed, ITSx does not. Instead, ITSx has the option "--reset T" which can be added to the command line to recreate the HMM-files for the current HMMER version installed (regardless of which 3.x version).
Thus, the solution for the “bad format, binary auxfiles” error is to simply add "--reset T" (without quotes) to the ITSx command line and run the software again. You only need to do this once, unless you update HMMER and/or get the same error message again for some other reason. The Metaxa-post has been updated to clarify this as well.
Metaxa and HMMER 3.1b
As you might be aware, a new version of HMMER is out since late May. You might wonder how Metaxa (relying on HMMER3) will work if you update to the new version of HMMER, and I have finally got around to test it! The answer, according to my somewhat limited testing, is that Metaxa 1.1.2 seems to be working fine with HMMER 3.1.
You might need to go into the database directory (“metaxa_db”; should be located in the same directory as the Metaxa binaries), and remove all the files ending with suffixes .h3f .h3i .h3m and .h3p inside the “HMMs” directory. On most installation, this should not be necessary. Myself, I just plugged HMMER 3.1 in and started Metaxa, but if you get error messages complaining that “Error: bad format, binary auxfiles,
binary auxfiles are in an outdated HMMER format (3/b); please hmmpress your HMM file again”, then you should try removing the files and re-running Metaxa. This might especially be a problem on older Metaxa versions. [Update: Note that this fix will likely not work with ITSx!]
Bear in mind that I have not run thorough testing on Metaxa and HMMER 3.1, and probably won’t for the 1.1.2 version, since there’s a 2.0 version waiting just around the corner…
Additionally, if you experience problems with Megraft, you should try the same fix as for Metaxa, but with the Megraft database directory instead. Regarding ITSx, a minor update will be released very soon, which also will address HMMER 3.1b compatibility. [Update: See this post for how to work around HMMER 3.1 problems with ITSx.]
Happy barcoding everyone!